Your attempts to justify the class' state by naming a bunch of solos (that should and would have been nerfed under any rational developer team) and lowman attempts simply show how clouded RDM's image is to some. The class is a hybrid with multiple roles available to them. Except that in the party-based game that was FFXI, this meant nothing because people needed heals and the class was further boned by Refresh being on its spell list because no one had an inherent way of regenerating MP. Instead of changing RDM to better fit a chosen role within a party (a RDM choosing to play like a melee DD in a party and being beneficial, a RDM choosing to heal and being beneficial, a RDM choosing to nuke and being beneficial), SE decided to trash the RDM concept and turned it into a enfeebler whose real value was Cure, Haste and Refresh in party play, AKA the play style that the game was built upon.
The solos don't and have never mattered, because the game was built from the groun up on partying. Yes, there are individuals who talk about the devs' own innaction to oversights in design as if it were a feature of the class when in reality it simply perpetuates a problem and creates more the further we go along. And as long as RDM is still a cure/refresh/haste bot in party play, my point will continue to stand.
HNM somehow made it alright that you could do nothing to level SMN short of playing as /WHM (not even SMN/WHM) for 70 levels until you got the lv70 blood pacts? And the fact that scaling for Blood Pacts was horrible until they actually decided to help those scale with Summoning Magic Skill? Broken ways of skilling, the still-broken spirits, not to mention how long it took them to realize how asinine it was to have a universal timer on Blood Pacts, leading to the split of Rage and Ward? The job was a joke below 70 except under the effect of Astral Flow. That doesn't say "proper design" to me. The more I look at it, the more I realize that this job got boned by player dynamics because of how it was designed and now close to a decade after the game was released it is finally starting to look like it should have right out of the box on launch day.We can speak about SMN.
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There's an actual psychological take to why I say what I say. People are less prone to be in a hurry when there's no visual cues to cause them to hurry along. The chain timer nagging at you constantly is what in part created that "go go go-!" mentality, and this is not helped by the fact that if wearing your underwear on your head out in public gave you a 5% bonus to exp certain players would do it just for efficiency's sake. I'd rather exp per hour be affected entirely by how players pace themselves over focing everyone to set themselves to the exact same metronome mark just because it gets them more exp/hour due to chain multipliers. The sense of urgency in gaining exp is not really necessary (and in my case, completely unwelcomed).Take exping most payers do not like it hence they want to do it as fast as possible and get to the content where ever it resides, mid game/end game. So in exp pt's most parties were fairly open to getting any job once they filled certain roles tank/heal/buff/nuke pre ToAU, post TOAU there was fast DOT melee, healer, buff was what players looked for to get maximum exp in minnimum time.
Even in XIV everything is fast and less grindy over all compared to xi, but to bring back systems that made the monotony of grinding a little more fun is not a bad thing. Also in XIV there is much less strategy, much stronger pc's, and weaker mobs making sp'ing very easy and worth doing between resets. But why bother when we are still waiting until the meaty content comes? right now unless you really want to you don't need strategy to kill stuff fast and efficiently while using resource management.
Read my signature. Oh well. I can only hope they come up with something better than the system in XI. I liked people not being complete efficiency mongers for once.rdm anything and you'll see rdm was not a poorly developed job