Anyone else wish RDM was a PURE support class?

[Duelle]

As I've always said, give DRK its signature ability, which is to spend HP to deal more damage (the definition of a tank), not the drains, and keep it a tank. Let's see how tanky DRK has always been.

That and DRKs generally have paper-thin defense to compensate for their better attack scaling. You could make a case for Cecil, but he has plot armor on top of being the protagonist, and he eventually turns into a paladin. Gafgarion makes a slightly better case, but stats are a bit weird in FF Tactics (since HP mostly scaled with armor class and Gafgarion traded superior attack scaling for drains that let him live forever). I recall FFX-2 DRKs having lower defenses in exchange for drains and higher damage. And of course we have FFXI's DRK, which would get two-shot for pulling hate; Souleater simply made it a LOT easier to die in those situations.

If, however, I were forced to choose between pure nuking and pure support roles for RDM, I'd think I'd find the support option much more interesting.

To me, support has never fit the job's aesthetic. A guy in medium armor with a sword in hand that is able to cast spells is not what you picture when you think of support. That guy is better suited in the front lines, mixing sword swings and quickly-cast spells to do their thing. He's not going to stand back and let others do the work. I get that console FFs allowed for this sort of thing with your RDMs in FF1 existing only to cast Temper on your knight and ninja, but turn-based RPGs sort of require you to use character turns as efficiently as possible.

I mean, this is pretty much the essence of it, isn't it. I'm not sure myself and the producer have the same ideas of what RDM's "essential roots" are. Why bother introducing RDM into XIV if it's a "new type of Red Mage", i.e. not Red Mage? I don't want to spend too much time wearing my tin foil hat, but it does feel a bit like they're using really popular job imagery to sell something completely different that people might not otherwise be interested in. I know a lot of people who are excited about it just because it has the Red Mage name and the pimp hat - would they be so interested in the expansion if it was just another generic nuker in both name and execution?

I think people would feel gipped at that point. I'm currently on the fence, and which side I land on hinges on what the devs have exactly done to RDM. Trying to sell mobility as a gimmick is setting off alarms. The keynotes set off additional alarms. It's not fun to sit around with a gut feeling that they've messed up but you're not going to find out for real until June.

Pure support jobs are just DD jobs that deal damage by proxy. They just need someone there for them to support, at which point they're (pretty much by definition) perfectly capable of pulling their own weight. If they can't pull their own weight, then they've been designed incorrectly! I mean, an AST giving someone The Balance is responsible for the extra damage dealt - that's theirs, just by proxy. Is there any real reason why a job couldn't be entirely constructed around that concept?

Considering how Balance is seen as OP because of what it does to DPS output, I think if anything it proves that you can't have a buff oriented class because it becomes a mainstay for progression, and that trickles down to the people doing Sastasha for the first time. I'm sure your resident DRG/MNK/SAM/BLM would hate to get benched in favor of whatever buffbot ends up getting implemented. And that's not taking into account the potential for drama (see: princess BRDs and princess RDMs in FFXI).