Quote Originally Posted by Patrik View Post
yea i'll admit to that being... annoying. of course i've had more parties than i can remember of spamming refresh and haste for hours. i guess what just mainly bothered me was the fact that SE gave us a direction they wanted to push us towards, and now its like they just gave up/don't care about what they said anymore. though i care about having real debuffs more than anything...

SE never gave us a "direction" for single target buff cycles, that was 100% purely the player community. It's an old story that not may newer players know about.

Back in 2002 prior to Zilart and the NA release. RDM didn't have refresh, gravity, phalanx or dispel. Dia was also divine magic, this is why we have divine magic skill yet no spells. RDM was pretty much WAR + WHM with a sprinkling of BLM tossed in. The JP players really thought the job sucked and no one knew what to do with it. SE eventually steped in and changed Dia to Enfeebling magic, raise RDM's enfeebling from B to A+, created Dispel / Gravity, added Phalanx and then added Refresh. They were wanting to make RDM a self buffing enfeebling specialist. The player community looked at it sideways but then say that refresh was 3mp/tick. Back then parties lived on MP, ~EVERYTHING~ was about how long your MP supply could last. So RDM getting a 3mp/tick MP buff meant they could keep the healer's MP and Black mages MP going longer and thus RDM competed with the BRD for the "refresher" slot. This was before we discovered the awesomeness of Haste and TP spam. Then Zilart happened with NA's being introduced to the game (the JP's were pissed) and the rest is history. RDM's were invited to cast refresh on the healer and black mage, and maybe even the paladin or second black mage. This earned RDM's the "refresh whore" nickname, and refresh spell became known as "mage crack". This continued until shortly before ToAU when "Spampage" parties started becoming more common and Haste was discovered to scale exponentially, and so RDM went from "Refresh whore" to "Haste whore". If the melee's all had /NIN and we had a BRD for additional refresh, it was found that a single RDM could get enough refresh that they could spam Cure IV on the four WAR's (later four melees) and not run out of MP. And thus is born the dreaded "support role" of RDM.

It was purely created from the player base finding out how to best abuse a RDM's unique combination of buffs and healing magic coupled with Convert. It never had anything to do with enfeebles, nor some special RDM magic. Only brute spamming of cures on a bunch of WAR/NIN's as they killed deco's in sky. And later on a bunch of melee's against little pink birds in ToAU.

Frankly I ~NEVER~ want to go back to that time. I pretty much gave up on RDM and went back to my first love (SAM) back then, as did every other RDM I knew of. What you ended up with was a bunch of people who leveled RDM for the sole purpose of getting merits and "end game" gear.