[dev1102] So what is the Ultimate Spell for RDM?

[Duelle]

Unfortunately as long as FFXI retains its current magic system, then this won't really ever change. RDM was never invited for debuffs, even when they made a difference (XP vs IT).

Well, debuffs work as a tertiary trait or part of a class, not as the main purpose of a class. The only real place where it sort of worked was everquest, but that was because of party and raid sizes. Secondly, stat stacking should have never been part of enfeebling. One because it plays into the mess created by gear swaps, secondly because it is such a minor facet that it should scale off one of the blanket stats for magic, or perhaps just scale with enfeebling skill (no MND or INT or any of that, and perhaps even no variances in potency short of enfeebling skill).

The dev's short sightedness and refusal to admit when their wrong has lead to the complete destruction of the first type (Tank). Rampant AOE's make "tanking" worthless, what use is it holding the monsters hate on one person when everyone else within 15 feet will die anyway. The coupe de grace was the enmity system vastly favoring damage over anything else, so even the monster doesn't immediately kill everyone around the tank, the tank won't be holding hate and thus not tanking.

The only reason damage has gotten so out of control is basically that complete avoidance has been allowed to run rampant instead of fixed when it got started. Yes, I'm once again pointing the finger to Utsusemi. If you want to keep things balanced, then yes the possibility of avoiding damage entirely leads to having to create mobs that deal a ton of damage in order to challenge and tax the healers as well as put survivability on the line.

Adding to this mess is the fact that enmity has a cap instead of constantly fluctuating. I don't know if the devs thought we would never hit the caps when they designed the basic enmity system (considering they never counted on people swapping gear mid-combat...), but that part of the game is in dire need of changes, along with role assignments for tanking. The latter would be difficult to implement, but goes hand-in-hand with what tanking is all about.

So now we're down to 20 jobs fighting over two types of slots, (DD) and (Support) and since a hybrid like RDM isn't the best DD we're then shuffled into the support role. We're not very good at support, but support doesn't need to be very good to be useful. This is why there are those who want to see the return of "pink mage", a RDM who can support, even if at an inferior level, can still be made into something useful in super elite content.

I can admit that at the time the RDM revamp took place, the shangrilla of "hybrids can choose their role if we give them mechanics for each role" had not been discovered. The changes were made back when the ideology was pretty much "just give them some heals and something parties will want, so that they'll be forced to invite the class, so we can continue playing Magic The Gathering instead of spending time/resources fixing said class".

SE needs to radically redo game mechanics to fix the class diversity issue.

I think the core of the problem is what jobs gain due to the subjob system. Even if you individually can fix each job, you still have that balancing nightmare looming over you.

What's really sad is that these sort of problems are easier to pinpoint if you play one of the "lesser" jobs. THF and SMN also suffer from several problems because of how basic class design was handled in this game. RDM just happens to be part of that club as well.