But it's a sword.

[Hyrist]

Duelle, every time you try to talk about 'turn based limitations' you lose all possible hope for credibility. Just save yourself the typing time and go find a better argument. It's been debunked by several people now.

[Kling-Klang]

Yeah, the current RDM is nothing short of a mockery. Hell, I'm pretty sure WHM and MNK got more love than RDM... the dev team spent too much time on "How can we make it flashy" and completely forgot to make it FUN.

But... it is fun?

[Venjamin]

Again, I'm really confused by people interpreting "Hey, I wish the melee was a little more integrated and a little less ornamental" as "STAB ALL THE THINGS ALL THE TIME." Again, it's just that all the melee burst is is a melee burst. It doesn't influence or affect anything else, and when used in non-burst-format it's kind of scrawny and pointless. There are no options to use it, and there's no bonus to using it. Comparing it to Blizzard phase is funny enough - casting blizzard as a BLM is sub-optimal ( by a lot ) but at least serves a purpose with the overall kit, not just being sub-optimal and nothing else.

No one is asking for it to be major-supreme-stabber from the Stablands, but I'd really wish that there were more melee options. I mean... give me a melee attack that I can use and it inflicts a status effect based on the last spell cast. Maybe make the non-empowered attacks do something else in its place to make them semi-useful, or even situationally useful. Give me something that eats white or black mana on use to better show the 'balance' mechanic as anything more than builder / consumer resource gameplay.

[Yorumi]

Again, I'm really confused by people interpreting "Hey, I wish the melee was a little more integrated and a little less ornamental" as "STAB ALL THE THINGS ALL THE TIME." Again, it's just that all the melee burst is is a melee burst. It doesn't influence or affect anything else, and when used in non-burst-format it's kind of scrawny and pointless. There are no options to use it, and there's no bonus to using it. Comparing it to Blizzard phase is funny enough - casting blizzard as a BLM is sub-optimal ( by a lot ) but at least serves a purpose with the overall kit, not just being sub-optimal and nothing else.

This isn't even remotely sound logic at all. The melee combo is optimal when enchanted, it's part of the core of the class, and leads to the rdm's best skills. If a rdm never did melee damage it would be massively sub-optimal. Calling it cosmetic, or ornamental is asinine. The way this game works is press button, damage number appears(or heal). In all RPGs cosmetics is all that separates the way classes deal damage or heal.

If character data wasn't available I'd feel like those who don't like rdm havn't even played this game for more than a day. Everything in this game is cosmetic, nearly every class has a heavily fixed rotation with little deviation. Yet rdm comes along and all we hear is something along the lines of "oh god they screwed up so bad. The melee is just cosmetic and part of it's fixed rotation. WTF were they thinking." It's built like every other class in the game with it's own cosmetic unique flare. What honestly did you expect?

[Venjamin]

Expect? A hybrid. -Shrug- Something with a little more choice in the execution. I mean, yeah, you're not wrong - everything in the game is cosmetic. It's all nothing but numbers, graphics, and words. Pardon me for wanting a thing with slight modifications to what we have now?

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.

[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."

[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.

[RyouAkizuki]

Except that at this point pets have been abandoned in favor of trances. You're leaving a system that is obsolete in terms of gameplay because...reasons?

The Summoner's Level 70 ability is literally called "Summon Bahamut" in which you call out a Bahamut pet.

By casting spells through swords (in V, as I never played Bravely Default). If you limited RDM to sword-casting, removed all ranged options and removed white magic as a whole, then you can start comparing it to Mystic Knight.

Mystic Knight also casts White Magic. And ranged options are in no way tied to being able to cast magic.

As I've said elsewhere, having an easier time dodging telegraphs does not negate the fact that you're a turret. The same was true for BRD when Wanderer's Minuet turned the job into Bow Mage.

And just because you use words incorrectly doesn't mean your point has any meaning.

Red Mage is not a turret, neither was Bard, just because you're wrongly saying they are doesn't make reality agree with you.

I'll point to Enspells and the logical conclusion that idea reaches. I can list some mechanics that tie both melee and magic to help illustrate where that idea leads, if you'd like.

FFXI is the only Final Fantasy game to give Red Mage "En-spell." This is, again, the Job in one game getting the ability from a different job (Mystic Knight). It is not a core part of the Job's identity.

Again, console FF limitations. By design the facets of the job were segregated because turn-based combat could do nothing to tie them together in a way to help the job stand out. Also why the player ends up choosing to use the job in a way they get the most bang for their buck (read: casting spells).

Final Fantasy XII is not turn based. It has Red Mage in it. You're still better off just casting spell most of the time unless you have, like, no MP. In fact, the best weapon for it was the Zeus Mace, because it boosted their unique Darkness elemental spells.

It's designs have nothing to do with design limiations because the fact that jobs like the Mystic Knight exist in turn based games mean that they do have methods of making Melee/Magic hyrbids in turn based games. It's a deliberate choice to make Red Mage primarily a mage.

Moving past your use of the "this is how it was in older FFs" argument, I'm going to have to ask if you have played MMOs that had hybrid classes before. Not the ones with bullshit like "this class is a hybrid but you're a mezzer/healer/buffbot at endgame", but classes with actual mechanics that tied different aspects of the class together. Because that's what I expected out of RDM, instead of what we got.

Except "How it was done in older FFs" absolutely DOES matter because Final Fantasy XIV is a Final Fantasy game.

And no, I haven't played any MMOs other than FFXIV, so I don't give a crap about them. FFXIV is a Final Fantasy game, so it will follow the fomrulas established in the series. FFXIV uses the "Trinity" format and every Job has to thus be interpreted in that format. One could have fit Red Mage into any of the three roles with thought, but the developers chose DPS. Thus they use the balance meter to build up to strong melee burst as a way to interpret it using both schools of magic and having melee attacks.

[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.