Job Discussion

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Red Mage

Role: Front line combatant with minor support and heal options
Theme: "Rule #1 of combat: When all else fails, just make something up"

Design: Enspells as seen in FFXI along with Magic Sword (no need to introduce Mystic Knight if his only noteworthy gimmick can be fused into one of the classic classes), and perhaps borrowing from Tactics Advance 2's Spellblade when it comes to enfeebling. If you really want to go crazy, toss in something like Runic to further play on the fact a Red Mage needs his weapon to function properly.

Access or bonus to heals would be limited (wouldn't want people abusing game mechanics to force them into healing again), and most Red Mage buffs would be self-cast with a 30-minute duration. No refresh castable on others, instead they have a strike-type ability with a similar effect to Damnation. I can compromise on this point and make it a reduced affect on the whole party but with a stronger effect on the Red Mage himself.

Their version of Fast cast would affect only nukes if you want to tie nukes in without giving them Magic Sword, but reduces cast range of nukes to 5 yalms (forcing them to be in melee range). Cures take longer to cast at the baseline but could have a proc system that allows for an instant cast cure when the proc is up. Again, back-up curing is situational, and not something you can force the class to do all the time.

Seeing the split between stats for physical damage and stats for nukes, Red Mage could probably benefit from stat conversions (melee accuracy => Magic accuracy at the most), though we have yet to see how they rebalance stats and scaling in-game.

TL;DR - I did my time as a cure/haste/refresh bot in FFXI. Give me my magic fencer.

Note: For those wondering why I lean towards magic fencer over generalist, this is because in the decade that I've played MMOs, generalist simply don't work. They get stuck with heals and support, and as a big fan of the sword&magic archetypes, I don't want to have to see that again here.