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.