Roles for Samurai, Red Mage, Dancer

[Shippuu]

Is pulling back on a bow, aiming and firing a "cast?" Many pen and paper games allow quick casts, free casts, etc. and I don't really feel there should be a minium casting time on what counts as a spell. Even look at the barspells in 11 with full Fast Cast gear, that's hardly a casting time if you have gear to back it.

I mean if you have to bring in examples from games that have entirely different fundamental mechanics to make the point is it really that solid of a point? FFXIV isn't a pen and paper turn based RPG. FFXI was an asburdly slow and now dated combat system that allowed the freedom for casting to be more viable in different ways.

It doesn't change the fact that to make such a class work it needs lots of special exceptions/permissions and some of those include destroying the identity of an MMORPG caster to the point that it's not even what one might call a caster, but just a tank/melee/whatever that has a few spells not unlike 2 of our current 3 tanks.

I see your point here but a few things: 1)Even the tanks don't share gear all of the time. They seem to be getting better about this, but you can't wear esoteric PLD gear on WAR for instance so they break that cycle themselves on occassion. I don't think keeping the gear like that is so much intentional to keep people playing tanks as it is keeping it to 1 model instead of 3, but that might just be me seeing the glass half empty. 2)A little horizontal progression would allow people to gear more than one set of jobs a patch cycle and allow people not only to gear that tank and that dps, it might spur people to level tanks knowing they'd have a chance to gear it to be relevant that patch cycle. One of the main draws to this and FFXI was the ability to level everything on one character, and I feel it's sorely underutilized here with the lockouts. Many people don't play tanks because they don't like the playstyle, mechanics, etc of the current jobs and having one out of left field might do wonders for the tank population.

The thing is, there's generally only 3 sets of gear that aren't shared with tanks. (This is counting PvE gear, as there were 2 sets of PvP gear that are tank specific.) The AF, the Mythology gear, and later the Esoteric gear. That makes those the exception rather than the rule, as all raiding gear, dungeon gear, the vast majority of tomestone gear, crafted gear, is all universal for tanks. The Mythology gear was re-skins of AF armor from 1.0 and thus required little development time, and Esoteric gear was likely to recreat the feel of 2.0's pattern as well as used for promotional reasons to advertise more than anything. In 4.0 we will likely see the first set be job specific once again but shared after that.

Tanks sharing gear has many benefits, from development time on not having to create a bunch of sets, to my prior mention of offering tank players flexibility in playing multiple tanks simultaneously without needing to gear multiple jobs. It wasn't just one of these reasons that made them decide to do such a thing but a combination of them.

As for horizontal progression, that's a whole other can of worms that's pretty irrelevant to the topic. The game already offers many ways to gear secondary jobs and horizontal gear may or may not help people do that. Horizontal gear may also not work in this day and age as an appropriate carrot on a stick for this generation of MMO players.
It's risky and to be frank they can't afford to take too many risks, the game already failed once and people seem to forget that.

As for contesting gear I don't really think that's much of an issue. Not only do you have ways to avoid quequing with people that might take your gear DPS can and do contest gear with every DPS. Full BRD/MCH parties happen, maybe you think it's a big deal because you are now the tank and are used to fighting one person for drops at best but we've been doing fine fighting up to 3 others. Should I just drop parties with multiples of my job/role? Will you gear up a bit slower than a traditional tank? But if you had more varied content and more horizontal progression you can do solo content every so often for decent gear, tome gear, 4 man parties and still get there. And this could go the other way as well, releasing DPS/healer jobs that use the tank gear would stop just the up to two tanks from having free reign on gear.

Contesting gear for tanks with dps is indeed an issue, and while it's easy to say tank players are entitled or privileged that they don't have to compete with DPS for gear it's still eliminating a perk to playing a tank. The key to increasing or at least keeping your tanking population healthy is certainly not removing benefits/perks to playing that role. If anything there needs to be more incentive applied to play those roles. Is it fair? Not necessarily, but it's something that usually needs to be done.

By saying something like " releasing DPS/healer jobs that use the tank gear would stop just the up to two tanks from having free reign on gear." definitely shows your mindset on this that you want to see that perk removed from tank players and unfortunately that's just not healthy for this game's longevity and a bad design and business decision. You want to encourage people to play tanks, not discourage them.

It absolutely does take time, but they have to try. Tome #567345384 capped at 450/week across all jobs and two dungeons doesn't really do much to address things. And I'm not saying they should do this for patch 3.5 or whatever, but expansions are the place to fix the big stuff and they could attempt it there. However I do kinda feel like this is a bit off topic, unless you feel RDM is a full caster.

In a perfect world they'd have the time to do all the cool things, but unfortunately they just don't. It was also a game that failed and got an unheard of full remake and re-release pretty much and as such is likely limited in the choice of trying experimental things. They are unfortunately forced to play fairly conservatively as a result, even if slowly over time that runs the game into the ground again. They are more likely to continue with the pattern and slowly sink, then to keep trying to reinvent the wheel and blowing up their boat.

As for RDM, I don't feel it'd work best as a full caster and could definitely see it as a tank if not for the itemization problem as I've mentioned above on tanks sharing gear etc. From that standpoint it makes more sense to have Samurai be the Tank and RDM some form of DPS (or perhaps healer).