Red Mages 6.5 Job Adjustment feels Insulting

[Valence]

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.

What kind of support do you want anyway? Look at us rPhys, it's the best support of all DPS roles, but what does it exactly bring us? Nothing. Lower skilled players don't use them well or at all where it could actually help them, and higher skilled parties just laugh at how useless they are. As I said, support roles (healers/tanks) already have way enough to keep parties alive. Healing and mitigation is a joke. MP support is not even needed anymore.

So, in the current battle system, again, what support do you exactly want? ( I'd love to get a lot more support, provided the battle system actually made it RELEVANT, which is not the case right now, healing is just in a pitiful state, there is nothing to heal, just big damage occasionally that you solve by popping OGCDs, that you have aplenty for )

Now then, I like that pledge idea, and it's actually a cool design, but the only thing that matters is the black one, because that's where the party damage lies. Nobody cares about healing or mitigation, it's just the icing on the cake. In fact, fights aren't even designed with this in mind because in your idea RDM would be the only caster providing it, which means fights would have to be balanced around having a caster or more not having access to it. And then we would also go back to the crux of the matter with the devs telling red mages "sorry your overall party damage has to be lacklustre because you have that white pledge support option".

As long as the battle system remains as it is, and people continue to consider that support has to be balanced with party dps contribution, then we'll always have a fundamental problem, because non damage support is not competitive at all with party damage support, not even in the slightest, and yes, it's sad, but it's the current battle system we get since shb.

I'm sorry if this feels cynical, but I guess I've been there for 2 expansions now already, and it feels like a shit sandwich.