Quote Originally Posted by JTSpender View Post
For all the folks who are super-adamant about RDM being a melee/white/black hybrid because that is what it was in various other Final Fantasy games... it's also worth keeping in mind that in most cases Red Mage also ended up being terrible mid/late game in a bunch of those games.
This is true, but it's true of a bunch of other jobs. Red Mage never became totally useless, it just didn't excel as much in any one area. Which is nice, which is sort of what I personally want. That said, there's obviously a difficulty with this in an MMO setting, which is why I think a degrading stance system would be a nice way to make Red Mage the jack of all trades that it ought to be.

Cycle through melee, nuking/debuffing and healing/buffing stances, and the longer you stay in one stance, the less effective skills of that type become. Encouraging the player to plug the gaps in a group and then switch to the next task.