Quote Originally Posted by niwaar View Post
Red Mage's in XI fit into the Support Role. They were the "equals" of Bard's and Corsairs (and sometimes Summoners) in their ability to buff a group and keep it going over long periods.
That's not something you can build a job around. If you want a niche per job, sure, at the risk of having that job become useless once the player trends set in.
YoshiP has come out and admitted that the dual Job from one class was an experiment and in his mind, was not a success.
Might wanna point me to this since I've never seen it mentioned in any of the recent interviews.
What we have left is a choice. Do we make Red Mage into a DPS or a Healer? The obvious fit for the game is to make Red Mage into a healer. The game desperately needs a third healer job.
Chemist and Green Mage. There, you have two jobs that can actually work as healers instead of shoehorning RDM into that role. Again.
If you go with the DPS role, what exactly do you turn a Red Mage into as a DPS? Typically a Red Mage would be a nuker not unlike a Black Mage, just not as powerful. How do you deal with that imbalance in a game where all DPS are supposed to be made "balanced"?
Procs and limitations on what the job can do in ranged. That can be achieved by either removing all options of ranged spells from the job when outside of procs/combos or making said ranged spells cost a lot more resources and/or become cumbersome to use outside of procs/combos.
This would more fit into the XIV job system, but would everyone be happy with it? No!
Here's the thing: from a concept standpoint the Red Mage doesn't work in the environment of an MMORPG. There's too many things that don't work. This in itself is fine because something would have to be changed for it to work within that framework. If you liked spamming debuffs or spamming refresh you could ask for a job such as Oracle, Geomancer or even Calculator. In concept such framework would work for those jobs whereas for RDM it's, for lack of better words, a slap to the face.
So, While we will get Red Mage (more than likely sooner than later), not everyone will be happy with the Job. The only way to make everyone be happy would to be to redesign the Job/Role/Party paradigm for 3.0 and beyond.
This is false. If people would wrap their brains around the fact that certain single-player FF concepts do not work in an MMORPG the issue sort of goes away, because you know concessions and changes have to be made in order for certain jobs to work. Geomancer had to be changed into an aura-focused job to be inserted into FFXI. Summoners became a pet class with DoTs in FFXIV to actually function and prevent the idiocy of FFXI's summoner. Red Mage would be no different because the combat mechanics for the job would have to be different for it to exist in FFXIV.