Red Mage Abilities

[Mhaeric]

Going by the two videos we have of their gameplay so far, here's my take on what SE means when they say red magic is a white and black magic hybrid. I suspect it just means that instead of being limited to the division of elements used like White Mages (only earth, air, water) and Black Mages (only fire, ice, lightning) are, Red Mages will have access to all element types. There's a bit of speculation here, but we do have enough visual evidence to at least partially support this theory:

In the lead up to the melee attack in both trailers they appear to be using some basic elemental casts. In the red mage preview, it looks like a lightning and then either a water or ice spell. In the benchmark they use a lightning and an air spell. A case could also be made that the tether ability that pulls them to their target is an earth spell since it fits the look of what an earth spell might be, but that's less clear. Regardless of the tether and ice/water uncertainty, however, at the very least they're using both a lightning and an air spell, which are normally on opposite sides of the BLM/WHM spectrum.

Here's the videos for reference starting at the rdm combat sequences:
Red mage preview: https://youtu.be/SKuIOtF41dI?t=26s
Stormblood benchmark: https://youtu.be/3_JxY2pRHn4?t=1m54s

This says nothing about healing abilities of course, but I doubt they'll have any. At least not anything that's more powerful than a cross-role Cure already is. If RDM gets any native healing related abilities I suspect it would be along the lines of minor damage mitigation (e.g. a small party-wide phalanx effect on long cooldown), healing potency increase (e.g. a mantra-like effect), or minor resource management (e.g. something more like mp-goad rather than mage's ballad.) Unlike with the elemental speculation above, however, there's no evidence at all for any type of support ability so far, so support ability talk is much more speculative and may very well not even be related to the phrase 'hybrid'.