On Red Mage melee...

[Duelle]

Duelle: "No, it's not sentimental. People have an attachment to the archetypes."

Not attachment. Call it logical and reasonable expectations. Try to open your eyes and accept actual precedent, which by the way has always held weight in fantasy settings since the days of Tolkien. Nice of you to try to misrepresent something I said, though.

Who cares what the archetype is? Who cares what the class is called?

I care, for one. For two, if you're actually denouncing the archetypes, why are you playing a fantasy-based game? Fantasy games are the most known dependents on the archetypes.

Let's call it SpankWustler. Now, I see that SpankWustler is already an incredibly potent magical job with an immense amount of freedom granted it by its gear access and the game's ability to switch gear sets on the fly.

If SpankWustler comes with a sword in one hand and magic in the other, guess what archetype he falls under. Could be an axe or a spear or anything for that matter. I'd call Spanky a hybrid and would expect him to have options as a proper hybrid should. Not spam Restorative Spank in party over and over again while bringing little else of value to a group.

Seriously, I don't know how the parsing and spreadsheet obsessed have gotten to such a point to suggest that imagery doesn't matter in a video game. My only reasonable guess is it's just a hysterical attempt at making a play style preference seem like a principle.

This a thousand times over. Mechanics, inter-class dynamics and image all need to mesh and come together.

What Hyrist said.

This too.

You're right. I forgot. The Devs just have a magic switch somewhere in their office that allows them to make Red Mage Melee good. They just never turned it on.

This made me laugh. I think everyone here knows making melee viable is no small task. It isn't a switch that you flip and suddenly everything is pink with rainbows and floating unicorns. It'll require work, number crunching, actual brainstorming on how to make the class work and a bunch of other things (like addition and removal of mechanics if necessary).

That being said, I used to joke about the possibility of there being somewhere in the recesses of the offices at Square Enix a flash drive with a melee update for RDM kept under lock and key (a sad, more pathetic version of the Sword of A Thousand Truths bit), sealed away from the world out of fear of what it would do to the hierarchies within the game if unleashed upon Vana'diel.

[Greatguardian]

As much of a complete and utter geek as I am, there is a massive difference between players who look at a job's name/archetype and demand that whatever it happens to be now conform to that preconception, and players who look at what a job actually is and think about how to make it better at what it does.

Funny, one group is almost always more successful than the other, both in-game and in the idea market. I wonder why that is.

[Seriha]

And in the real world you sell milk as milk, not apple juice.

[Greatguardian]

Funny, I was under the impression that there was some sort of Administration that handled the distribution of Food and Drugs that ensured that consumers were not suffering from legitimate physical and medical consequences by ingesting products that were not what they described.

I bet that totally applies to concepts in an intellectual property distributed over a video game medium.

Oh right.

It doesn't.

Elvaan are stronger than Humes. I demand that all Elvaan be changed to be lanky tree-huggers with powerful magics and absolutely zero physical prowess. Why? Because creative license is a travesty. Anything that differs from Dungeons and Dragons, Tolkein, and FF1 character archetypes must be wrong.

[Neisan_Quetz]

I must of missed melee Rdm's high time in lore since the only incarnation I can see that was a decent melee is 1's Red Wizard, and that's the upgrade to Rdm. All of them that were actually listed as Rdm (and not a character with Rdm-like characteristics) also typically had weaker stats as well.

[cidbahamut]

This made me laugh. I think everyone here knows making melee viable is no small task. It isn't a switch that you flip and suddenly everything is pink with rainbows and floating unicorns. It'll require work, number crunching, actual brainstorming on how to make the class work and a bunch of other things (like addition and removal of mechanics if necessary).

Do you not understand why this has the potential to be an absolutely terrible thing? Do you realize who would be in charge of implementing such changes and what their track record is?

Why do you hate SpankWustler so much?

[Seriha]

Funny, I was under the impression that there was some sort of Administration that handled the distribution of Food and Drugs that ensured that consumers were not suffering from legitimate physical and medical consequences by ingesting products that were not what they described.

SE's our FDA. I present our box. Its contents? Seemingly lacking some kind of fighter aspect. By your logic, though, we should be embracing this revolutionary apple juice-flavored milk because if that's how it is, gee golly, we should like it.

[Greatguardian]

Holy crap, guys. The 9 year old game has changed and grown dynamically over time, allowing certain trends to become obsolete while others surface as the context of the game changes?

Blown. My. Mind.

Edit: There also is no FDA for creative license. Fiction can be whatever the hell the writer wants it to be, broski. That was the point. Your analogy is terrible because Zombie Tolkein writing a book where Orks are bright purple and pink and represent the epitome of law and order is well within his rights.

[Seriha]

Point missed. Again.

[Greatguardian]

Oh I see your point and you're reaching. It's not false advertising. That doesn't exist in works of fiction. They can change Samurai into a main healer if they want. Those character blurbs haven't changed for over 10 years. Somehow, I think the Job Vision Manifesto they released all of a week ago is a better gauge of how the current Development team feels about SpankWustler than a 10+ year old blurb on out-of-date instruction manuals and the game's ancient, nigh-never-updated official webpage.