FFXI Job Direction?? Dev Team, Please Respond.

[Eeek]

So it gets to continue being a heal bot, buff bot and mezzer instead of a Red Mage. How sad.

It's not SE's fault that you, and most other RDMs on the RDM forum, are incapable of recognizing and utilizing RDM's strengths. To boil RDM down to a cure/buff bot is an insultingly facile strawman argument that insults the intelligence of most competent players and subsequently reduces any credibility you may or may not have had among rational posters.

On that note, I don't hear much, if any, complaining from RDMs with the drive and willingness to go out and properly equip their RDM for meleeing. You can rightly point out that it's difficult to properly gear a RDM for meleeing, but anyone with well-geared DD jobs will just scoff at that idea. It takes time to properly gear a melee? Nowai!

Get back to me when you have (and can prove it) a 90Almace with a proper offhand (OA2-4 sword? Joyeuse? I don't know RDM's best offhand weapon), a capped haste TP set, a Ceremonial Dagger TP set, multiple WS sets, PDT gear, MDT gear, gearsets for defensive buffs and utsusemi casts, and gearsets to fulfill RDM's more magey duties. Oh, and don't forget top-of-the-line DD Atma, but that's not the hard part (although important nonetheless).

I'd have no problem with that guy/gal meleeing. They're doinitrite, and most importantly, likely have the common sense to differentiate between the time to melee and the time to mage.

I want to hear complains from well-geared melee RDMs, not the scrubs who think a sword and and maybe a few pieces of melee gear make a melee RDM. No, Enspells do not close that gap. But 99% of the time, it's the woefully ignorant who slap on a Joyeuse and engage in full mage gear.

Sadly, these are the RDMs that everyone sees trying to DD. It's why DD RDM has such bad rap.

See also: THF, DNC, BLU, PUP, BST, PLD.

[Duelle]

It's not SE's fault that you, and most other RDMs on the RDM forum, are incapable of recognizing and utilizing RDM's strengths. To boil RDM down to a cure/buff bot is an insultingly facile strawman argument that insults the intelligence of most competent players and subsequently reduces any credibility you may or may not have had among rational posters.

Because that's not been the general way our job has been looked at since people started needing refresh and became desperate for heals, right?

And if you want to talk about insulting, selling the class as a magic swordsman only to find yourself buff and heal-botting in the content that matters is much more insulting, and even borders on bait-and-switch. Where're our combat proficiencies, which are part of the Red Mage concept? Oh right, they took the back burner in design when they decided to give us enfeebles and refresh. And when enfeebles stopped mattering, what took over? That's right, cure-botting, hasting and spamming refresh. Why? Because the DPS generated by RDM is a far cry from what is expected in the front lines (even moreso in a world where WS spam is king and sword happens to have weaker WS selection, further aggravated by the native lack of Vorpal Blade), and our "utility' never has and never will be a selling point or justification for that in front line context. It's been tried before, and it has failed.

On that note, I don't hear much, if any, complaining from RDMs with the drive and willingness to go out and properly equip their RDM for meleeing. You can rightly point out that it's difficult to properly gear a RDM for meleeing, but anyone with well-geared DD jobs will just scoff at that idea.

False. An AH DRK, SAM, WAR, THF, BLU and NIN will blow an AH RDM out of the water. Where there are gear options for those jobs, we have to go to much greater lengths to actually get gear that starts making up for our lacking melee. And I say that as a guy who has played DRK and SAM. Made even worse by the easy to obtain gear that was tossed around like candy that lacked RDM in the list of jobs that could use it.

Get back to me when you have (and can prove it) a 90Almace with a proper offhand (OA2-4 sword? Joyeuse? I don't know RDM's best offhand weapon), a capped haste TP set, a Ceremonial Dagger TP set, multiple WS sets, PDT gear, MDT gear, gearsets for defensive buffs and utsusemi casts, and gearsets to fulfill RDM's more magey duties. Oh, and don't forget top-of-the-line DD Atma, but that's not the hard part (although important nonetheless).

Which has to do exactly with what? Almace is a fix through gear, and thus null and void in the context of melee. And not having it doesn't disqualify me from critiquing the job's lacking design, since unlike you I keep concept and practice in mind, not just practice for the sake of efficacy.

If you want to see why I say what I say, go do some reading on this class (skip down to endgame expectations if you don't feel like reading the lore and the other bits on it). Try to not be biased and limited to "i h8tz tiz gam3" and "tiz iz diffrnt!1one!!", because all it does is prove you to be even more close-minded than I originally thought. That class has gone through the same hoops RDM is currently going through. All of it, from the lolmelee crap to the arguments between the front line and back line camps, and even including little self-important trolls like you looking down on the melee camp. Despite being designed with the exact same openness and utility of RDM, that class can front line, tank and heal based on what the player wants to do because the developers eventually pulled their heads out of their collective rears and made it happen.

I don't care how the devs accomplish it (since I do know certain aspects of XI are very limited due to the engine), but those kind of options are what I want to see open up to Red Mage. Not Magic Burst bonuses that are several years too late, not fixes through gear, not troll-face-implemented Shield Mastery, and certainly no purely healer-oriented traits. The option to front-line and be viable, the option to back-line heal and maybe even just focus on nukes, with all being acceptable in group content. Not your worth in a party being measured entirely from buff cycles and cures.

I'll even encourage anyone who feels their job is pigeon-holed to speak up as well, since I do feel for the NINs that don't like tanking and SMNs who have been all-around terrible for a good number of years.