Quote Originally Posted by Kosmos992k View Post
That's not what was being said in my post at all. So much anger over nothing.
You brought up something that has nothing to do with the discussion (theorycrafting had nothing to do with what I was talking about). Or if your comment was not made at me, separating that into a new paragraph would have been more than enough. Wording it differently would have helped, because I read that as "it doesn't matter how it plays because it's called <inset class name> and that's good enough for me".
Quote Originally Posted by Saito_S View Post
The point she IS making is that it's sometimes a bit much how people get caught up in specific details.
This isn't so much about specific things (skills, spell lists, mechanics), and more the fact that the job has been turned into a back row caster with token use of a sword.
I mean, they're not making a new game and designing it around RDM, they have to fit the class into the existing FFXIV framework. This is its own game. It has a set of rules that all classes must abide by.
I'm not contesting that, as the devs can do whatever they want. By the same token, I reserve the right to criticize them when they do things I don't agree with (even if avenues for feedback are limited).
Expecting Red Mage or any class to play a specific way based on previous games in the series is just setting yourself up for disappointment, and as I said, it disallows the devs from taking the IDEA of an old class, putting it in the game, and putting a new spin on it.
Who's saying anything about other games in the FF series? Nearly every other representation of the job has been purposely designed to be mediocre, and that's something I know would not fly at all in an MMO setting. As such, I would never even dream of pointing to any of the console FFs as anything more than a minor point of reference. XI's was a disservice to anyone that liked the job (again, love child of a Time Mage and Oracle), so we can't look there either.
The particulars of HOW it accomplishes all of that don't matter, as long as they are fun to play.
That's where we differ. Gameplay and the mechanics of the job outweigh pretty much everything else to me. How they interact with the concept also matters a lot to me. The console FFs had the excuse of turn-based combat not working with hybrids without forcing the player the waste turns combined with a lack of procs and other mechanics to support hybrids. FFXI had the excuse of "well, someone has to be the refresh bot, and we gave the good mechanics to BLU and SCH".

Considering that FFXIV looked at modern MMOs for inspiration (which have developed ways to make hybrids work without needing to bait and switch the player), there's almost no excuse for the direction the job was taken. Even the white/black mana systems reek of being designed for a class that is a caster. Hence why I said that you could remove the token sword use, replace it with a big nuke (Ultima, perhaps?), and you'd see little to no difference in the gameplay. Instead of using your sword to dump white/black mana, you'd use it to make the mob go kaboom.
Now, I'm not saying you HAVE to like it. You're free to not agree, you can dislike the look of RDM, but your posts have an air of condescension suggesting that SE somehow got Red Mage "wrong" and that people shouldn't enjoy it, or that they should see exactly what you see in the class from its section of the Job Actions video.
People are free to play what they want, and I'm not here to order others to like or dislike what we've been shown. That being said, I am free to voice my displeasure over what the devs do. And after the numerous discussions and suggestion threads (the 1.0 "Red Mage: I'm not a back row class" thread and several more during ARR's beta) on this, it's reasonable for me to be annoyed at how this has turned out.