Quote Originally Posted by Rychu View Post
Honestly Valence, despite all of my shitting on the current balance around my main's DPS, I actually would not be opposed to Red Mage being more support oriented. The problem is that they want their cake and eat it too. If I am a support caster then give me support skills worth having low dps for.

IDK if anyone else saw that one post about what could be changed about all of Red Mages kit where they proposed a dance partner-like skill called white pledge and black pledge. You attached white pledge to a healer and a black pledge to a dps and you automatically boost their healing/dps in a way that also generates mana for the RDM. That would be cool as fuck.

I will always love Red Mage, but I switched to Summoner this Savage tier because even the fight designs dont care about Red Mages. There were more than one instance in p12s where the 2 minute burst came up during mechanics that keeps the caster away from the boss, and my damage does not warrant having a pf group readjust just for me. I fucking hate it here.
Agree with this.

I'm not certain by any stretch, but I'd guess that the vast majority of RDM players (including all the casuals in this as well as the raiders) like the support elements and would really hate to lose them. Casual players seem to love Vercure, and everyone knows of runs where they Verraised over a dozen times to drag a party through to the victory, and everyone knows its value in prog raid pushes. Likewise, Magick Barrier is a debatably better Addle, as it doesn't require the boss to be targetable, still has a massive radius (and doubles as your Frazzle button in PvP!), and most raidwides are magic. So it's useful utility...though the CD on it is kind of extreme. Would it REALLY hurt to be 60 sec instead of 120? Well, okay, it would hurt people on the healer side of the fence, but it wouldn't really be OP considering RDM's damage.

In any case, I think a lot of RDM players really do appreciate RDM's non-damage buttons.

The problem is that RDM either needs to fully embrace #SupportLife, or it needs to get a damage boost given the support it has now, while useful, is also situational.