But it's a sword.

[Yorumi]

I'd love to understand this hostility against people pointing out that the feel is that sword is an afterthought, and could be replaced with regular spells and it would be indistinguishable from a machine-gun blackmage.

Because despite saying it you clearly don't understand what cosmetic means. What's the point of SAM? You replace the katana with a spear and you have a drg. Sch? Replace shields with high cure potency and you have a whm. Your argument is self defeating. You're basically saying "what if rdm didn't have melee" yeah well it does. The cosmetic nuances are the only thing that separates one class from another in this or any other FF game. Blue magic is indistinguishable from black or white magic other than it's graphical effect. A drg, sam, mnk, nin, war and other melees are only distinguished by the weapons they wield. Your argument boils down to "if I alter a class to look like another they become indistinguishable." No kidding. That's silly and asinine.

The main reason the rdm complaints are getting so much hostility is because ff14's rdm is a very faithful presentation of the job and it's abilities historically. On top of that the complaints are not based on sound logic or evidence but take a form of "I didn't personally design it so I don't like it."

[Venjamin]

Snip

See, I think we're dancing around a central point. If you left the mechanics the same but gave SAM a spear, they'd still functionally be a samurai - a melee class with extreme personal burst, a sen / kenki system, etc. They don't have juggling mechanics like DRG.

Blue magic is distinguished from black / white magic in effect - you're stealing abilities from enemies to be able to use that are almost entirely different than what a blm/whm are capable of.

The other melees all have their own systems. RDM doesn't -really- have its own system aside from the occasional melee combo. That's why I say "if you replaced the melee with a graphics-only change, no one would notice." The gameplay would be no different, and -that's- why it's weird. I'm not suggesting like others to do different things. But if you change the graphics of another melee class to anything else, you will still ultimately have their own systems to back them up. RDM would have dualcast, but nothing else to separate it from BLM in playstyle.

Again, I am -not- anti-RDM. I don't think it sucks / is boring. It's definitely my main DPS, and I enjoy it. Wanting to see a little more swordplay isn't saying "THIS RDM ITERATION BLOWS" just that the sword mechanic they integrated feels token, nothing else. I'm not insinuating that other people enjoying it are wrong or anything else. The title of my thread says my only point: It's a sword. I'd like to see more sword-y things.

Saito_S, If MCH used a magic wand, they would still have the MCH mechanics to back it up. Even if the potencies were the same, the MCH mechanics are different from BLM mechanics, and they feel different. That's why I hated Gauss Barrel - I was having a blast with the mobility of MCH, and when I had to sit still and throw 'spell bullets' instead of 'running and gunning,' it felt slow and clunky, so I stopped playing it, because it -felt- mechanically indistinguishable from any caster class. I just got bullets instead of booms.

When I say the RDM melee combo feels token, it's because it's pretty much the only way to use the sword aside from Moulinet, which is generally going to be sub-optimal until you get a reasonable number of enemies in a cone, a la Fire II. Even then, Moulinet doesn't -stay- effective, because once you've used it 3 times, you have to back away and go back to shatter spam. If we had one or two other ways to use the sword, or there were decisions involved in getting close vs staying far other than "is my burst ready, time to be close" then it'd be neat.

Again: I still love RDM overall. It's the most mobile magic user, and that alone makes me a happier camper - I can't stand being BLM and just standing in my lines as much as possible. I'd just like it -more- if the sword played a slightly bigger part in its kit. I said it earlier - I'm happy with chocolate ice cream. I'd be happier with mint chocolate chip. That's not to say that anyone who's favorite is chocolate is wrong, or that I'm unhappy with what I was given, but that for me, personally, I'd prefer it.

That's why I'm not trying to be hostile in kind, and why the hostility from the 'opposition' confused me.

[Saito_S]

Yorumi is doing a good job encapsulating how I feel. To be honest, after posting twice in this thread (or was it, once in this thread and once in another? I can't recall - the fact that there are multiple "RDM SUCKS AND IS BORING" threads that, for the last several days, have been hovering around the first page of the DPS forum might have something to do with the "hostility", by the way. Then again, have all new classes gotten this kind of reception at first? I wouldn't know), I didn't come back to post again, despite being replied to, because I find it hard to articulate arguments against what I disagree with.

RDM has a melee combo. It's integral, because it's one of your best sources of damage. I find the argument "but if you replaced it with magic nukes, what difference would it make??" to be... almost alien. Like, what? "If you made the melee not melee, then it wouldn't even be melee!" Um sure I guess.

What if MCH used a magic wand? What if EVERYTHING they did were bursts of magic? The story is changed so that instead of firearms, what the guild has unlocked is a way to cast offensive magics similar to a BLM, but instead of long cast times for big booms, it's short or no cast times for a lot of smaller booms in succession. Every MCH skill has the exact same potency as it does in the actual game, the exact same effects and mechanics. But instead of a gun, it's a wand. Instead of shooty visuals and sounds FX, it's sparkly magic visuals and sound FX.

You could do that. You could swap MCH out like that, ENTIRELY. Even with the changes - the heat gauge could be a "buildup" gauge - one disadvantage to casting fast spells like this is it causes your aether to build up, and if you let it get too high, it causes problems. Absolutely nothing about the gameplay would change, not one thing. Just the visuals/sounds/animations, and the idea behind the class, would change. Well... ONE gameplay thing would change. You'd use MP rather than TP. But that's such a tiny change. The difference between which resource pool you draw from would certainly be FAR less impactful than "am I at long-range or melee-range to the enemy", something which changes every time RDM uses their melee skills and gap-closer/back-step, and which has been dismissed countless times by the anti-RDM folks as "nothing". Which, by the way, in and of itself, I don't get - positioning seems fairly important to me. I know that, after playing NIN (always in close unless dodging an AOE) to 60, then leveling BLM (the exact opposite) to 54, the difference in where I am in relation to the enemy was one of the biggest changes. How anyone can view positional changes between melee range and max spell range as "it makes no difference" is beyond me.

You see what I'm getting at? You guys are arguing from a premise that RMD's melee is tacked on and "ornamental", in a way that OTHER classes abilities apparently aren't. A LOT of the "anti-RDM" sentiment I've seen in all these threads has basically proceeded from that premise as if it were pre-understood by all parties. "Since RDM's melee is, as a matter of factual record, uninspired and tacked-on, please explain to us how you find the class good despite this."

The problem, then, is the fact that for a lot of us, we don't buy the premise in the first place. Until I came to the DPS sub-forum and read these threads, the idea that anyone could feel that RDM's melee is some tacked-on cheap trick that you could just take away and it wouldn't matter (and, importantly, that it's a tacked-on cheap trick, yet most other XIV classes abilities aren't tacked-on cheap tricks) would never in a million years have crossed my mind.

So it feels difficult for some of us (don't want to speak for anyone, but I suspect I'm not alone in this) to articulate our opposition, because the starting premise just feels like "wait... what??" I think that's the cause of some of the frustration between the "sides" in these threads.

[Volatile]

Maybe it would help if people stopped looking at Red Mages weapon as a sword. Its used as a staff most of the time. So its a staff we stab with occasionally, and I'm cool with that. If people really want to play with swords there are samurai, paladin, and dark knight jobs.

[TheCurls]

Y'all need to calm down. Red Mage is fantastic. As someone who has it level 70 and i309 already, I find it incredibly engaging and entertaining. Amd the melee burst phase comes up pretty fast between Acceleration, Manafication, and Verflare/Verholy. I am getting between 2-3 melee phases between each use of Embolden, a 2 minute cooldown.

Red Mage is fine, people. And incredibly fun.

[Gravton]

Lol. Welcome to the last three years of pld. We have swords too, but they were dull for some reason. I don't know why ppl thought rdm was going to be this op class that dominates in 2 types of dps.