ATTN: Community Reps/Dev Team: PUPs of Vanadiel DEMAND a response on Automaton A.I.!

[Duelle]

In terms of melee RDM, they have worked in some things to allow for melee potential, but you can't just add more and more melee ability without taking balance into account. Enspell tier 2, Composure, and buffs they already have hand make them pretty useful to melee and even take hits.

Enspell 2's are of questionable design. Composure is nice but not enough to say "this Red Mage in melee gear, with a melee sub and using Composure belongs in the front lines". As far as buffs...what buffs? Refresh (can be spammed from the back and basically needs to be cycled)? Haste (same deal as Refresh)? Gain spells are self-only (thank God), and we're still short Gain DEX and Gain STR. And please refrain from bringing up utility, because utility never justifies lacking damage and/or performance in the front lines.

I think RDM's need to realize they are a strong job and they already have the capability to melee, but they shoudln't expect to have the same melee potency as a DD it would just be imbalanced.

Not without the proper balancing mechanics in place. If you don't perform up to par, you don't get invited for that role and are never in consideration for that role. That's the start and the end of it.

Unless you don't mind a JA that suppresses all of your enfeebling spells like gravity/para in order to improve your melee capabilities.

I'd be fine with that, provided you have melee-exclusive enfeebles that are relevant to front liners (not just those of us who would be melee'ing on RDM, but also the WARs, SAMs, DRGs, DRKs and so on who are also in the front lines), with a buff to personal damage so that damage from another "real" DD doesn't easily outweigh your offered utility when front-lining. I'd also make healing outside of procs or other in-melee gimmicks very inconvenient to help solidify the front-line presence.

To change a job's definition because people want it to melee better just makes no sense when you already have a wide range of melee jobs, if you really want to melee more just pick a DD job since it's the same thing.

Less about changing a job's definition and more about correcting something that should have never happened to Red Mage in the first place. Also, tell that to all the DRKs. I already answered in the DRK manifesto thread why some of us are so bent on seeing our classes fixed rather than just throw in the towel and play something else.

If Camate is reading this, I also second Seriha's request to have more than just PUP and DRK get some sort of reaction or response. The RDM forums have been having melee discussions since the forums opened and the manifesto the developers released was far off the mark given all the discussions. At one point I even suspected we were a faction exclusive to the NA region, only to discover the JP players also have a RDM melee camp (or as they call it, naguri aka madoushi). We were conveniently ignored before the forums opened, none of the web pages or sites mentions us during interviews. It's easy to feel ignored under those conditions.

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Personally, puppet AI doesn't look like it would be easy to fix. I personally feel the healer automaton should just be more open to direct orders from the PUP. You can get away with the recasts and so on while nuking and just AI while having it hit things or use ranged attacks, but healing unfortunately requires being a little more direct. It's more the spell list than anything else, otherwise it would probably play similar to a healer wyvern.

[Supersun]

And please refrain from bringing up utility, because utility never justifies lacking damage and/or performance in the front lines.

Please, you can't think of SOME utility that could make up crap damage on the front line?

[Duelle]

It's been tried and failed. Want me to go into specifics (though I wouldn't want to derail the thread)?

[Supersun]

***, I would PM you but...

I'll try to make this quick then.

Imagine if there was a buff that reduced your melee to one damage per swing, but in return your melee strikes inflicted a debuff that gave the monster +1,000,000% Damage Taken. Would you invite someone for that debuff?

"But such a thing is broke...""
No *** sherlock, but if you reverse the situation to where the debuff now only gives +.0000001% Damage taken would you still invite the job?

Somewhere in the middle there lies a happy medium where the concept is balanced (the point where economically the +DT outweighs the damage reduction from the debuff, the risk of the job being at the front, and it being the best option to increase the parties damage at that point). A concept by itself cannot be broken. Only when it's implemented poorly is it overpowered or underpowered.

If such a concept has been tried and failed then the concept simply hasn't been implemented properly in the past (and if you want I could argue that such a concept actually has been successful in the past)

[Duelle]

***, I would PM you but...

You read my mind, buddy. I started thinking about the Enable PM Already thread.

Somewhere in the middle there lies a happy medium where the concept is balanced (the point where economically the +DT outweighs the damage reduction from the debuff, the risk of the job being at the front, and it being the best option to increase the parties damage at that point). A concept by itself cannot be broken. Only when it's implemented poorly is it overpowered or underpowered.

If such a concept has been tried and failed then the concept simply hasn't been implemented properly in the past (and if you want I could argue that such a concept actually has been successful in the past)

I am genuinely interested to see how it worked in other settings, because personal experience has shown me how it miserably fails.

I'll white out and hide the rest so that anyone who cares can highlight and read, while the rest of the thread can continue with the PUP discussion.

The reason I say it fails is based entirely on my experiences as a Retribution Paladin during WoW's Burning Crusade expansion. Ret was designed and limited around the idea that you deal less damage than Warriors and Rogues because the utility and buffs (heals, out-of-combat Resurrection, stuff like Blessing of Protection, Divine Intervention and so on) were supposed to justify them being in melee range instead of the then-"traditional" and "expected" role of paladins, which was heal groups/raids and spam buffs.

Let me explain the design so that I may continue. When you specced Ret, you basically used a two-handed weapon and dealt less damage than a Warrior or Rogue, in exchange for an aura that increased the damage dealt by everyone in the raid. You used an ability called Judgment of the Crusader to give a mob a debuff to increase all damage taken. You had buffs to increase offensive power and mana regeneration abilities of the your group. Your utility also included Crusader Strike, which renewed the duration of all Judgment effects on a mob (which was there to encourage having multiple paladins in a group to put up different Judgments, and thus, various debuffs that could be renewed by a Ret Paladin to last indefinitely). Of course, Paladins also have healing spells baseline, so you had Holy Light and Flash of Light for use on others, not to mention the ability to cleanse most status ailments from group members (the only thing pallys couldn't remove was curses).

You look at this and may think "that's pretty nice design without allowing that ret to step on the toes of the 'real' heroes--I mean, 'real' DPS". The reason it failed was because, like it or not, if you're hitting things, you need to perform as well as the front liners you're not inviting, or at least so close that only a real number cruncher would be able to see the difference. This is what allowed people to quickly figure out that for all their utility, ret paladins were still lol-worthy because the damage was still lacking and there were plenty of ways to circumvent having one in a group or raid (the most common one being "invite a rogue or warrior to fill that slot"), and the lolRet stigma remained alive and well. We tried to argue that our utility justified our being there, and I had a flashback to the old RDM arguments of 2003 when the response was "good groups don't run into this, so lawlshutupandhealme".

Sole Concession: The stigma suffered a tiny dent when the very last raid instance in the expansion (Sunwell Plateau) came out. And that was because all the major guilds in the world could not get past the gear-check, coordination-check, skill-check, brick-wall-of-a-boss known as Brutallus with the same mindset that allowed them to get through Karazhan, Gruul's Lair, Serpentshrine Cavern, Tempest Keep, CoT: Mount Hyjal and Black Temple. Because Brutallus was so finely-tuned that you needed the extra damage taken from Judgement of the Crusader and the damage bonuses from Sanctity Aura to actually beat him. It didn't help enough, though, as it went from "lolRet" to "go heal me in my raids for most of the raiding content in the game and maybe I'll let one and only one of you melee for that boss in Sunwell".

A lot of this is eerily similar to how RDM plays. Utility out of the box, baseline access to heals, a limited selection of buffs and debuffs that are supposed to go in hand with the class' design. The only things paladins were missing at that point in time was sleep (which changed when Repentance was changed from a short-duration stun that only worked on undead to an incapacitate that affected most mobs in the game) and some sort of nuke (which also changed when Exorcism was changed from a nuke that only affected undead to a nuke that affected all targets but had bonus damage and crit chance on undead).

Unsurprisingly, Rets faced the exact same resistance to their style of play that the melee RDMs are so familiar with. Even the lead developer at the time pissed off a whole lot of paladins when he said "ret is a spec for leveling, holy (the healing spec) is your spec for groups/raiding". The only real difference as of now is that one had their problems fixed (granted, Ret wasn't really fixed until Wrath of the Lich King hit) and the other has had their problems ignored and been trolled by the developers over it on several occasions.

To those who want to bash this for mentioning WoW, I'll reiterate: Red Mage's problems are not exclusive to FFXI; Paladin is effectively Red Mage's soulmate based on both having the same problems and dealing with the same problems on a mechanics level and the myriad of "people problems" that come with it. Now, Supersun, let me hear your tale.

[Byrth]

Repeat after me: Next time, I will look for an answer myself before asking.

http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Building_Flourish has exactly what you're looking for.

Err... yeah. So, that's uncited and unquantified information that is probably incorrect. It would be a gigantic pain in the arse to test and find the distribution that the main page claims, and a lot of Dancer information added to the wiki when the job was implemented was straight up wrong. I've corrected a lot of it, but this is one piece that's entrenched in the lore.

The Origin, as far as I can tell:
It was added on January 12th, 2008 without a citation by a guy who made 122 edits total. Many of those are adding in the MP cost of white and black magic with Light/Dark Arts up and changing drop rates to 100%. So there's no way to know where the information came from, because very few things added to ffxiclopedia get testing cited, and it seems unlikely that it's legit. There was an update in November that added Dancer, and another in March, so the information added on January 12th probably wasn't from either of those updates (and neither of their descriptions mention it). I don't have any idea where the information came from, and it looks suspiciously precise. I'd love to find out it's correct and get some numbers attached to it.

[Mercilessturtle]

Guys seriously, go make your own threads and stop trashing this one. Which part of "we read everything, chill out" did you think meant "spam offtopic crap anywhere I post"?

[Alhanelem]

Camate, I think part of the problem here is that the development team has said in interviews in the past "Use light maneuver with the damage gauge to prioritize cures", when the problem is in fact that light manuvers prioritize both HP cures and status effect cures, with the latter taking priority if the player has a status effect.

Is this just a miscommunication between us and the dev team? We don't want to force automatons to just cure cure cure, we want to be able to prioritize HP curing and status curing seperately.

TL;DR: We know how to make our automatons cure. The problem is that it is impossible to make them do it when we are afflicted with any curable status effect because status cures ALWAYS have a higher priority (Even with the damage gauge).

[Seriha]

Guys seriously, go make your own threads and stop trashing this one. Which part of "we read everything, chill out" did you think meant "spam offtopic crap anywhere I post"?

Do me a favor and just skim all the job forums for threads with the little crown icon. Just looking at 4 of the 20 jobs myself, there's a good 20 pages of topics or so where, while reading may have been done, we don't know much else. This isn't to say every thread is worth responding to, but if you have one that breaks 1000 replies? Some kind of nod is in order.

I don't think it's fair to pin it all on Camate, but the translation game inevitably creates a bottleneck where I can only assume it has to go through him before it gets to us... or the devs. This is also where I say some more routine Q&A can come in handy, even if it's just a weekly thing where one time they're asking about Campaign, the next Chocobo Raising, and after that Corsair. Not everyone will be equally interested, no, but simple silent reading is not much different than the old days where we could only hope our concerns were being heard.

[Malamasala]

***, I would PM you but...

Yea, it is funny that it doesn't exist. You become all "Do I really need to make a "Attention Insert Name here" thread"?