Quote Originally Posted by Eremor View Post
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.