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.

[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?