What is RDM all about?

[Arcon]

That last statement was just plain ignorant. It very much is the eleventh final fantasy which derives its elements from the others.

This statement is completely ignorant of the actual problem that's being addressed here. It's about which elements are being derived from previous Final Fantasy games. Are the games all the same, just because most of them have Shiva, Ifrit, Chocobos, Airships and Cid? Those elements are all added for nostalgia's sake, as a nod to previous titles (as indicated by the fact that they look/behave differently every time). Same goes for job names. But those are not gameplay elements, SE needed six different classes, so they took one of the few FF games that actually had classes to borrow their names from, that's all there is to it. Again, even they behave differently, which they had to, because online games have inherently different mechanics to implement than offline games. Sure there are still similarities, but that's coincidental. Are you saying DNC is based on WoW priests, because both have the ability to heal a player? There are certain mechanics they just have to implement, if a coincidental similarity arises you can't go around and start making up relations where there are none.

And the funny thing is, even if there were similarities at some point during the design, it's still not the same. You can't make all offline content work in this environment. SE knew that too, they still know it and make the jobs with massively multiplayer content in mind (even when they screw up), not with the roots of their jobs. Do you think any ability at all makes the devs wonder "How was this used in some old game?" instead of "How could this be used now?"? If you do, you're insulting SE by accusing them of shitty game design.

FFXI wouldn't be called "Final Fantasy" without the job system from FFI / III / V / Tactics and sorta-kinda X-2.

Yes, it would. And it doesn't have the job system from any of those. What other "similarities" did you find? That you can increase your character's strengths from getting experience by defeating monsters? Guess it's been stealing from every other RPG in existance then? You do realize that Final Fantasy games strive to be as different as they can from previous games? SE takes this principle to all extremes, even removing good features in upcoming games, just because they want something different (see the Auction House in XIV). Honestly, I'm thinking they're running out of ideas. They even wanted something different than "levels", so they removed them in X and had a different system in place. For XIV, they tried "two different kinds of levels" and hence the physical level was born. SE's compulsive obsession with inventing new gameplay elements should be a major clue that any game mechanic resembling older games in the series is purely coincidental, disregarding the nods to older lore content, as I mentioned before.

[saevel]

The way I've always heard it was that the engine for Spirits Within cost them a fortune and when the movie tanked they came dangerously close to bankruptcy. If you've got some reading material to the contrary I'd be glad to take a look.

Tanked? SE has tons of cash on hand. Square Pictures made the movie, SP was a wholly earned subsidiary of Squaresoft, basically a company specifically made to produce this movie. When the movie lost money (137 mil cost, 85 mil return on investment) Square-soft decided that going into movies on their own was a bad idea and canned the subsidiary company. Square themselves were no where near financial trouble, they could of just made another CT or Xenogears and made money. The cost overruns were due to rendering technology at that time not being advanced enough to actually make this movie. Square had been used to making short FMV's for games and underestimated the amount of CPU work required to render a full production movie. They had all of zero experience doing actual movies and made mistakes. Modern render farms are powerful enough to produce full length movies using Squaresoft's photo-realistic technology, hence FFVII AC took less time then SWI.

[saevel]

This statement is completely ignorant of the actual problem that's being addressed here. It's about which elements are being derived from previous Final Fantasy games. Are the games all the same, just because most of them have Shiva, Ifrit, Chocobos, Airships and Cid? Those elements are all added for nostalgia's sake, as a nod to previous titles (as indicated by the fact that they look/behave differently every time). Same goes for job names. But those are not gameplay elements, SE needed six different classes, so they took one of the few FF games that actually had classes to borrow their names from, that's all there is to it. Again, even they behave differently, which they had to, because online games have inherently different mechanics to implement than offline games. Sure there are still similarities, but that's coincidental. Are you saying DNC is based on WoW priests, because both have the ability to heal a player? There are certain mechanics they just have to implement, if a coincidental similarity arises you can't go around and start making up relations where there are none.

And the funny thing is, even if there were similarities at some point during the design, it's still not the same. You can't make all offline content work in this environment. SE knew that too, they still know it and make the jobs with massively multiplayer content in mind (even when they screw up), not with the roots of their jobs. Do you think any ability at all makes the devs wonder "How was this used in some old game?" instead of "How could this be used now?"? If you do, you're insulting SE by accusing them of shitty game design.



Yes, it would. And it doesn't have the job system from any of those. What other "similarities" did you find? That you can increase your character's strengths from getting experience by defeating monsters? Guess it's been stealing from every other RPG in existance then? You do realize that Final Fantasy games strive to be as different as they can from previous games? SE takes this principle to all extremes, even removing good features in upcoming games, just because they want something different (see the Auction House in XIV). Honestly, I'm thinking they're running out of ideas. They even wanted something different than "levels", so they removed them in X and had a different system in place. For XIV, they tried "two different kinds of levels" and hence the physical level was born. SE's compulsive obsession with inventing new gameplay elements should be a major clue that any game mechanic resembling older games in the series is purely coincidental, disregarding the nods to older lore content, as I mentioned before.

Depends on the Final Fantasy. FF I / III / V / Tactics / X-2 (if we can call that a FF) / Tactics Advanced / Tactics A-2 / FFXI all pull from the same Job system. The names and core concepts of these jobs are pretty much the same from each game to the next.

Fighter / Warrior -> Use's various weapons to physically attack monsters and protect their friends (Guard / Provoke)
Knight / Paladin -> Fighter who can use Holy magic, Knight Swords and heavy armor.
Thief -> evasion and fast fighter who use's knifes and short swords, can steal items from the enemies
Monk -> fighter that fights with their bare fists, has high attack but low defense and lacks in equipment
White Mage -> Caster who specializes in casting white magic which is restorative and defensive in nature
Black Mage -> Caster who specializes in casting black magic which is destructive and offensive in nature
Red Mage -> Fighter / Caster who has no specialization, can cast both black and white magic and can wield swords, daggers and wear medium armor. Doesn't get access to the most powerful magic nor weapons and armor.

Then later,
Summoner -> Calls forth summons to fight for them.
Bard -> sings songs that benefit party members and hinder the opponents.
Blue Mage -> Fighter / Caster who learns magic from monsters and wields swords and medium armor.

And these are from I / III / V. You have many others, time mage, samuria, ninja, dragoon, berserker, geomancer, dancer, mystic knight, dark knight, then green mage, fencer, and all those GBA/A2 tactics jobs. Not all games had the same jobs but common reoccurring themes could be found, specifically in the first six jobs (Fighter / Thief / Monk / White Mage / Black Mage / Red Mage). Seeing as Red Mage happens to be one of the first six jobs ever made, has largely remained untouched throughout the series and this being a Red Mage forum, it's very relevant to discuss the job's origins and design. Now if we were talking Scholar, a job that has never existed before XI (Sage doesn't count), then it would be pointless referencing past games as it didn't exist.

[Moonracer]

Now if we were talking Scholar, a job that has never existed before XI (Sage doesn't count), then it would be pointless referencing past games as it didn't exist.

Actually....the closest to Scholar i have seen is Arithmetic. Thinking on the purposes of both being tacticians, this would seem to make the most sense. they just changed the way it works from the original tactics.

[Neisan_Quetz]

Sch tentatively has roots with Geomancer, but I would say that very loosely with how their weather spells work.

[Moonracer]

Sch tentatively has roots with Geomancer, but I would say that very loosely with how their weather spells work.

Lol true, I had completely forgotten about Geomancer. Perhaps SE just made SCH an amalgamation of several other jobs.

[tyrantsyn]

RDM in the past was simply defines as a war/whm/blm with very little difference in spells and abilities between the 3, Along comes FFXI, and RDM starts out with a basic spell list base off this idea. Down the line SE decided to give RDM a little of it's own originality and started adding in different spells and abilities to give RDM it's own place in the lines of the party. Making it incredibly enjoyable to play and rewarding.

Problem is the player base figure out how to use the job to conquer tasks suited for party's and alliances. And due to this the job was consider unbalanced and over powered. This situation wasn't help when the player base also discovered that they could actual tank large groups of mobs, or even more dangerous nm with little to no support. Due to this kind of thing when level cap increase came along, the player base was told that RDM was all ready pretty powerful and that SE was going to be mindful of what they did next with them.

So now were up to almost the last level increase. And the player base is divided all over the place about how they feel there favorite job has been handle. Some of our best qualities have seen increase "enfeebling and enhancing" and there has been some strides in our melee half as well. Problem is the utility of our job has diminish. Our enfeebles don't land on higher end VNMs, NMs even when they supposedly weak to the base element. And we've seen very little of transfer~able enhancing magic to other players. On top if that, several types of gear that normally RDM would have access to due to it's type "scale, doublet, Jerkin" RDM has been left completely off of. And has left some of the player base going wtf?

Now i'm not the type of guy who complains about something before it's finished. Even when I eat, I wait until I've finish my whole meal before I tell some one what I thought of it. And that's kind of the approach I've taken with this job class since the first update. It's hard to say whether or not the job will ever live up to the player base expectations. For those that have them. Perhaps when the new merits categories come along the player base will be please. But honestly I just don't see that.

There's been a lot of great ideas thrown around the RDM forums. New spell's, adjusted spell ideas, JA, JT, and gear directions. Sadly we've seen little to none unique enfeebles "addle & break" And some decent to good enhancing magic that we pretty much have to keep to ourselves. We've seen no new tiers to our better enfeebles, and only a upgraded refresh II to speak of for enhancing magic. It's kind of sad in the end, there's so many direction you could go with the enfeebling magic, and yet it feels so untapped and nerfed these days. And if most of these new enhancing spells RDM pick up where accession~able, the jobs viability would feel a lot stronger. I'm not quite sure what to think when the player base gets a spell like temper and yet we can't do anything but cast it on ourselves. And we aren't even that viable on the front line due to gear. It's just perplexing.

Dev team please, gives us some kind of idea where RDM is going.

[Daniel_Hatcher]

I'm not quite sure what to think when the player base gets a spell like temper and yet we can't do anything but cast it on ourselves. And we aren't even that viable on the front line due to gear. It's just perplexing.

They're holding out for:

Scroll of Temperga
WHM 99
Grants the ability to occasionally attack twice to all party members within an area of effect.

[tyrantsyn]

They're holding out for:

Scroll of Temperga
WHM 99
Grants the ability to occasionally attack twice to all party members within an area of effect.

lol, awesome.

[Crimson_Slasher]

As a note, scholar existed in ff3, it was crap, and it was used primarily for the Hein fight in the desert to dispel his elemental barrier.