And as long as you willingly think that way, of course nothing will change for the better. You wanna bitch about persecution? I'm looking at a poster child of closed-minded zealotry. You, as an individual, are not better because you're a "mage only" RDM. Numbers and mechanics behind them simply favor the style at present. That's it. Those can be changed. Those changes, in turn, can affect community perception no matter how much you want to meme or pretend you're a higher intellectual wielding MS Paint.

People fear change. People fear being wrong. I can understand a fear of having to relearn a job and, in turn, need to take time to bring it back up to speed. What I can't understand is the conscious desire to hold back or even cripple growth at this point for any reason other than to be antagonistic and juvenile. Playing should not be about compromises or backbones, it should be about people getting together and getting shit done. How that happens with 20 jobs out there is never set in stone. Are there overlaps and jobs in greater need? Sure. But I'm here to talk about Red Mage. I'm not here to nerf it. I'm not here to prevent its magical arsenal from growing. I apparently have a greater collective interest in its abilities on the whole, and with that, can understand why a negative response may, in turn, be perceived as holding the job back. But I also understand there's a point of no return. That's where my own fears of Pink Magery and the like lie. FFXI could be a very lonely game if I just upped and decided to tell everyone to fuck off when I felt like playing RDM. Unfortunately, this reality also exists when faced with universal underpeformance and I believe that's the reality some are more keenly aware of at the moment, if only because their preferred style happens to fall under that broad umbrella.

Love me, hate me, or practice indifference, but there's a difference between a job that is played and a job that you want to play. From the outside looking in, we can only hope an individual is playing a job because they want to over simply needing to. A job's abilities will nonetheless influence that need. Some are willing to sacrifice aspects of that need for higher enjoyment, or even the other way around, but I petition that needn't be the case for RDM. I want everyone to play the way they want to when they want to in whatever activity they enter, but I can't, in good conscience, believe that is possible when strengths are lop-sided. And it's not because they should be, but because they'd been poorly designed and left to stagnate.