Red Mage - Quick Magic

[Duelle]

If you've played FFVI, it negates the spell completely. Now the downside in that game is that Celes draws cure spells her way as well and negates them. The 10 minutes is for balance because, as you said, it's instantly recovering 1 spell's worth of MP and negating that spell. I guess 5 minutes won't hurt the balance much though.

Given the dev's tendency to give nerfed versions of such things, I would say 3 mins would be acceptable, provided the ability halved spell damage received and allowed the user to absorb half of the MP cost of the spell. Otherwise I can see spells that are meant to kill a player cheesed through Runic Blade. Still a nice idea and would love the un-nerfed version, though.

[ManaKing]

I like Duelle's idea, because it involves some level of risk. Knowing when to use your abilities is important and makes for interesting game play.

Example, using Runic Blade against a -Ga spell might instantly kill a RDM. But, if you already had Stone skin, Shell, and Phalanx up, you might survive and it would be a great way to provide damage mitigation for your party. As an added bonus, Shadow users and Pet users would love you.

We already get magic defense bonus to help with this. I wouldn't mind elemental or magic reduction shields being made more important for RDMs job as they would aid in our role as a magic tank.

A personal twist would be that you wouldn't gain MP back from the spell cast. Instead you would get a proportionate magic attack bonus for a set duration.