Red Mage: I am not a Back line class

[Nekirr]

There was nothing wrong with RDM in ffxi, well until later on when WHM overtook their job in most situations. Hell RDM/NIN was on par with or more superior to NIN/DRK and PLD tanking until they messed with the enmity on spells. There was a place where RDM's stay back, and when they could go up and melee.

[Jinko]

There was nothing wrong with RDM in ffxi, well until later on when WHM overtook their job in most situations.

LOL the irony.

It was RDM that took the role from WHM to begin with, WHM just took back what was theirs :P

[Nekirr]

LOL the irony.

It was RDM that took the role from WHM to begin with, WHM just took back what was theirs :P

WHM took more than just their role back. There was barely any originality in RDM over WHM besides Refresh II at 99, and at 99 Mp regeneration became so easy sometimes refresh was unnecessary.

[Wevlum]

LOL the irony.

It was RDM that took the role from WHM to begin with, WHM just took back what was theirs :P

Yeah but neither were SCH. You can't compete with p.q levels of sophistication.

[Klive]

Only FFXI has red mages as enfeebler. Last I heard, the arcanist was going to be our mage enfeelber. Anyways, Red Mages are known, in all except FFXI, as melee versatile casters that use weak black and white mage. They get abilities that give them quicker casting and double casting to compensate for their weaker spells.

I pulled this description from here http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Red_Mage

Red Mages typically cast both Black and White Magic and can also wield swords and equip armor that normal Black and White Mages cannot. They are, in essence, among the more versatile characters of the series. However, their versatility comes at a high price: their stats are usually low, and they cannot cast higher level spells or use stronger equipment. They can learn many spells, but not the strongest, and equip some heavy armor, but not all of it. Thus, the Red Mage is a jack-of-all-trades, but a master of none. However, in certain games, Red Mages have a special ability such as Dualcast which boosts their spell casting efficiency.

I'm not saying the Red Mage shouldn't be an enfeebler mage/melee, I'm saying FF14 probably isn't going to copy FFXI.Our BLM and WHM copy more from FFIII than anything else; hence WHM having stone and wind magic. I would guess they are more likely to use that as a template over FFXI Red Mage.

EDIT:
FFXI is still going and people are still playing it. Probably wouldn't be in SE interests to copy an entire class/job from an MMO they still have going. Variety is probably a better direction between the two games.

[Elexia]

I'm not saying the Red Mage shouldn't be an enfeebler mage/melee, I'm saying FF14 probably isn't going to copy FFXI.Our BLM and WHM copy more from FFIII than anything else; hence WHM having stone and wind magic. I would guess they are more likely to use that as a template over FFXI Red Mage.

Irony of this is FFXI was designed as "what they always wanted to do with FFIII but never could" so it's essentially another version of FFIII and the WHM "with stone and wind magic" for example was later turned into SCH, which the DS version had, but not original.

So it wouldn't be an exact copy, but RDM is no longer the weak blm/whm with a sword it used to be, it's a lot more versatile now, to the point it can outlive pretty much every job in the game (XI), so they have yet another style to build from.

Which was the point of even mentioning their last MMO.

[Eremor]

I'm seeing quite a bit of overlap with the builds posted here, which is a good thing. It means we all have something in common in what we want to see from Red Mage in XIV. One point of contention I noticed is the difference between people wanting RDM to be either a dedicated enfeebler or a generalist mage, so we should discuss that further.

Personally I prefer the dedicated enfeebler for several reasons:

First, the game presently does not have any dedicated enfeebler and RDM could potentially fill that role.

Second, it seems to me that the current class/job mechanics lean toward a system where none of the abilities or spells are copied exactly between one class/job and another. Making RDM a generalist mage would practically require that this trend would have to be broken to accommodate it.

Third and most importantly, being a generalist mage in XI is exactly what got RDM shafted in party roles. Hell RDM didn't even originally have the Refresh spell, which had to be added to even give RDM any kind of position in a party at all, and which ended up being it's only role for a large part of the game. So basically I fear a repetition of this in XIV if we attempt to recreate a generalist type of Red Mage. A debuffing specialist would be less likely to be forced out of the role it was designed to fill. Don't get me wrong, I really like the idea of RDM as a versatile generalist mage, but it runs the risk of being forced into a specific role that it was not designed for and all that versatility just goes to waste and the job becomes very unpleasant to play.

[SwordCoheir]

Third and most importantly, being a generalist mage in XI is exactly what got RDM shafted in party roles. Hell RDM didn't even originally have the Refresh spell, which had to be added to even give RDM any kind of position in a party at all, and which ended up being it's only role for a large part of the game. So basically I fear a repetition of this in XIV if we attempt to recreate a generalist type of Red Mage. A debuffing specialist would be less likely to be forced out of the role it was designed to fill. Don't get me wrong, I really like the idea of RDM as a versatile generalist mage, but it runs the risk of being forced into a specific role that it was not designed for and all that versatility just goes to waste and the job becomes very unpleasant to play.

Agreed, fortunately FFXIV's game mechanics will likely prevent what happened in FFXI from happening here, if it's designed around the fact that Fencer / RDM can't have everything like in previous games. Considering jobs like WHM and BLM don't have everything either, it's almost guaranteed we won't see a hodgepodge of every elemental enspell, gain-stat, or nukes taking up every slot in the action bar especially when you throw in a few combos for the melee side.

If you look at the patch notes for 1.20 at the different jobs level progression / abilities gained, you can actually see SE followed a specific pattern for all the jobs when they rebuilt them, so I wouldn't expect Fencer / RDM to diverge from it.

BTW: SE already pointed out RDM would be an enfeebler / melee class in the 3rd players pool, doesn't mean it still won't borrow from white and black magic with melee on the side however. Thought I'd bring that up sense alot of people have been kinda torn about it.

[Jinko]

^ They already implied that arcanist would be the enfeebler.

[Elexia]

^ They already implied that arcanist would be the enfeebler.

They also implied it would be trap style, not necessarily magic. We have LNC/DRG/MRD/WAR/PGL/MNK that does melee style damage, where was it written there can only be 1 style of enfeeblist?