Quote Originally Posted by Devrom View Post
lets be honest with ourselves. most of us didnt even care that much about our DD potential pre-abyssea and recent major updates.
Wrong. Discussion on melee has gone on for years. Yes, you had the bandwagon jumpers who were happy for the fast invites, but the melee camp has always existed and trying to push for melee adjustments. The benefit of having these forums is that at least our complains and discussions are taking place right at their doorstep, whereas before it was just the fansites where the community reps could conveniently ignore our discussion threads.
for all these years, SE has been modifying the jobs according to the intentions of the player base, like how they thought of war as a main tank, pld and nin as support jobs etc at first. just look at those jobs now (inb4 lolpld).
Admitedly, it would have taken more work to redesign WAR or nerf all the things players were abusing at the time (Utsusemi amongst them) that screwed with party dynamics. Not much of an excuse, though.
outside abyssea, rdm is simply far more useful than any other caster in most situations no matter how you look at it and you can't say it didn't make you happy that everyone used to look for a rdm before anything else.
It never made me happy because it was not the magic swordsman I had signed up to play more than 7 years ago. Also, everyone needed RDM because you only have two (three witrh COR) ways to regenerate MP before all that +refresh gear comes into play. BRD happened to be stupidly rare, so people always went for the next best thing.
if they make rdm a better DD, they would nerf the mage aspects and then people would bitch about that. you can never make everyone happy with the changes.
Stances could very easily fix this and make both camps happy.
abyssea shouldnt be the norm to decide if rdm needs to be a better DD since that thing is simply broken.
What abyssea did is bring to light all the shortcomings of RDM as a class. Yes, it was meant to be FFXI's last hurrah, but it did that as well. And instead of fixing things so that RDM can finally be a true working class (not a replacement for a WHM or a BRD), we seem to be going back to more of the same.
rdm is not even that bad of a DD in itself solo.
Repeat after me: Solo is irrelevant in a game built from the ground up on partying.