Moving will be made to interrupt spellcasting at a point in time...

[Monsalvato]

Concerning Yoshi-P's post about mages (he only talks about BLM tho.. what about supporter mages and healer mages?) I have a few comments to make.

I don't particularly dislike the style of solo-play BLMs have in FFXI, which clearly is the example Yoshi refers to, but it has to be considered this style of play which sounds so obvious to all of us who played FFXI, wasn't originally planned by the game designers of the game, it was rather a style that the gamers themselves developed to overcome the game's limits.
Also I still am not particularly fond of the approach "let's merge debuffs into damage spells". It's good to a certain degree, but relying ONLY on damaging spells to debuff enemies is a bit silly. I still hope they'll change things in 2.0 having more spells without debuffs, and more debuff-only spells which deal no damage but provide a very accurate and powerful debuff instead. And I'm on the same boat when it comes to debuff healing. Having too many like in FFXI maybe is unnecessarily complicated, but having a single one to cure everything sounds like the other way around. How about a more reasonable compromise between these two extremes?

My main concern now is in the appearent incoherence I see in Yoshi-P's posts, but maybe I'm just missing something so I would apreciate if anybody could let me know what's wrong in my reasonings.

First Yoshi-P talks about how he would like to make fights much more dynamic compared to the static-ness of FFXI (I REALLY like static combat, but I can agree it's a bit anachronistic in 2012 so not many will probably think the same), and when he said that he made the example of the Ifrit fight, saying that was just the beginning and that after 2.0 fights would have been much more dynamic requiring a lot of movement, dynamism, quick actions etc.
Ok, fine with that.
But then he comes here and say that casters are supposed not to move by a single inch while they spend a lot of time casting powerful spells on their foes.
How exactely does this fit with the "dynamic" picture Yoshi-P talked about?
I'm not saying I dislike this, I like both solutions (dynamism, and static casting), I'm just saying I don't see how these could fit together.
Maybe he changed his mind on dynamism?
Otherwise he should have picked up a different "model of play" for mages, instead of re-iterating the FFXI one.
Some silly examples would have been that of having a specific button to cancel actions, and still allow movement (but at a much reduced speed) during casting, or other things like that.

Surely he doesn't expect mages to be "unwanted" in fights like Ifrit in the future because they can't "move", making so only other classes will be accepted in pick up groups?
And surely he doesn't expect to "balance" this possible issue with the forementioned instacast spells? Because as much as we can't judge on them 'til we try them, he surely didn't introduce them as the most interesting of things (low potency, low damage, low accuracy, high recast, low numbers etc)

Because I don't think it's possible to rely on those to "balance" things, unless the dynamism he's thinking of is not particularly strong but very mild dynamism that will only occur on certain boss fights and only for brief moments... if that's the picture he has in mind then sure, instant spells would be perfect and I would have nothing to complain about. But still, such a picture would be VERY different from what he mentioned in the past talking about "dynamic fights", right?
And supposing he wants to make "really dynamic" fights, then no way the thing can be balanced out for mages thanks to Instant Cast Spells. You would have to give them A LOT of these spells (to counterbalance the high recast), and they would need to be really effective, not "lowacc, lowdamage, loweverything", otherwise on those fights you would basically be a shit DD and nobody would want you.
BUT if he makes instant cast too powerful, then people would only use them even in non-dynamic fights. I mean why bother with casting spells when you can use instant ones that are almost as powerful? We all know that the playerbase would go that way.
So yeah, I don't see how he can think to balance dynamic fights for mages just with instacast spells unless the dynamism he's thinking of is not "real" dynamism but a very mild form of it as I described above (and I personally wouldn't mind at all! I'm just saying...)