This is by far the most uninspired, asinine and archaic concept for mage combat I have ever seen. It is this kind of ridiculous glass cannon design that leads to offensive mages being forced out of party combat. This is also the mentality that leads to Mages being repeatedly nerfed because they can sleep-nuke their way through anything. This is also the same archaic idea that lead to Black Mages and Summoners in FFXI having to party only in groups of nothing but their own class. By forcing mages to stand still at all times, battle will have to be less involved and require significantly fewer tactical movements. Fights like Ifrit will have to be reworked from the ground up just to account for the fact that healing and nuking will become next to impossible.

There is no Excuse for sacrificing good gameplay in 90% of a games content just to satiate people who Like PvP. There are plenty of other way of getting around mages range advantage than forcing them to stand still all the time. What this actually does in PvP is make Mages even larger targets than they already were. Easy kills because they can no longer fight back. There is nothing fun about only being able to cheap shot people who dont see you coming.

How about Archers? If Mages aren't aloud to move because they have to much of a range advantage, how are you gonna stop Archers from simply run and gunning everyone they see? Do they intend to double the animation lock times? Or is it only mage's who aren't aloud to have tactical combat?

If you are concerned about mages having a run and gun advantage, dont stop them from moving. Let the players stop them from moving. Ranged Weapons with Heavy or Stun ought to do the trick. How about trap skills or magic nullifying abilities?

If you are concerned about mages never being interrupted, make hitting them cause interruption or cause induction setback. Don't make it so everyone in the party has to stop moving so the healer can drop a cure. How are you supposed to run Darkhold? It was the devs own awful design to make it so you had to run through the whole place instead of fight. What are we supposed to do now? Walk through?

This may well be the crown jewel of the awful design decisions that have been undermining every good concept this dev team has incorporated. It's like constantly moving one step forward, one step back. This dev team needs to start recognizing when things are fixed and stop trying to fix things that were never broken. Right now, the combat is perfectly well balanced between nearly every class. Most of the high level content is at just the right level of difficulty(despite the awful drop rates). This change is completely unnecessary and a giant step backwards for Mages everywhere. Yoshida needs to get it out of his head that Mages need to be back line, watch the fight, glass cannon jobs. Mages should play as active a role as any other class in the game. Forcing them to stand still makes that impossible.