New Class Speculations

[aeoncs]

When people wanted Dark Knight, they looked at how it was traditionally and thought "it sacrifices health to do extra damage, so of course it'll be a dps". When Dark Knight came out as a tank instead, that simply proved that job concepts can be more or less bent toward roles not expected by the playerbase.

This is why I said that Red Mage could be pinned to any role: it has far more flexibility than Dark Knight in that regard.

Not really a good comparison. The Dark Knight, whether as a DPS or Tank, is a very straight-forward job and thus only the most basic trait had to be tweaked/changed for it to work as a Tank; so that instead of sacrificing health to do damage, they absorb health depending on the amount of damage they deal, which was already a thing in previous FFs through the use of Blood Equipment.

To make Red Mage work as a tank or healer, you'd have to completely change the whole concept of the job, which is them being versatile allrounders who are adept in many forms of combat and magic but not excelling in any of them. How can you tank with mediocre (at best) defensive abilities and lackluster base stats, or be a committed healer when you're not able to use the higher levels of White Magic? It just doesn't work.
As a Hybrid DPS they would however be able to make use of their versatility, utilizing both melee combat and offensive magic while buffing themselves and their party members with offensive and defensive utility spells.

So, imo, there's no way to sell RDM as a tank or healer without completely redesigning the whole job.

[Kazrah]

So, imo, there's no way to sell RDM as a tank or healer without completely redesigning the whole job.

The job has been redesigned before, going from all-arounder to spellblade and back. There really isn't as much as you'd think stopping them from reworking something like Red Mage into a role you'd never expect.

If Red Mage was made into a tank, it would still retain that hybrid aspect: it's in melee, it'd still have some sort of spells and have back-up healing ability in case that healer has a worse attention span than I do healing. Either the tank stance or some starting trait could modify defenses to match those of other tanks while their unique mechanic could be a partial MP-shield where part of the damage they take is reduced and most of that reduced damage gets converted into MP burn while having some attacks and cooldowns (more than Dark Knight has) to restore MP to compensate.

If it was announced that Red Mage would be a healer, that would only confirm my suspicions that Red Mage wouldn't get the "black and white magic" concept, but rather mock versions of those spells. It would still have offensive spells, melee attacks would probably be an MP generator, and Doublecast could either be a cooldown or a Darkside-type buff that would either allow double healing strength, healing while doing damage like an AoE version of Bloodbath, or working in a more similar fashion to Synastry but possibly at a greater extent for a greater MP cost.

I do applaud your point of view as well since it also provides the possibility of the story for Red Mage: with many views and preconceived notions on what Red Mage is or what it should be, the story could very well be the search for what it is meant to be.

[Beckett]

snip

Classic RDM is Melee Damage/Magic Damage/Healing in equal measures. Let's take a look at what we would get with RDM in each of the roles in FFXIV:

RDM Healer
Melee Damage - Non-existent
Magic Damage - Low
Healing - High

RDM DPS
Melee Damage - High
Magic Damage - High
Healing - Low

RDM Tank
Melee Damage - Low
Magic Damage - Low
Healing - Low

It might not be exciting, but a Tank RDM is the only balanced RDM.