Quote Originally Posted by Duelle View Post
No disrespect meant, but you wanted to spam spells from range and sometimes swing a sword? You could remove the sword and replace it with a bigger nuke that consumes Black/White mana and you'd have a job that has a cohesive concept and a solid spot on the battlefield. Bonus being that at least then they'd have to call that job something else.

Someone on reddit compared it to one of the renditions of WoW's balance druid, and I am inclined to agree. And that's not really a good thing; not when we're talking about the original melee mage of the Final Fantasy series.
I have to agree here. The animations and the overall style are looking good, and it seems to warrant at least a pretty interesting faction in XIV's own lore, but it doesn't appear to be a melee, front-line, or otherwise especially versatile mage, nor even all that duality-concerned. Enspell and other weapon-oriented skills also seem to have taken a back seat, if at all available. That's not to say I'd have been okay with simply applying a self-buff and then AAing the day away—far from it, but I would have hoped that there'd be more reason to swap in and out of melee range, and for the blade to play a larger part in determining cast rotation, rather than just being, essentially, an alternate appearance for spenders that, as a side-effect, trades range for mobility.