Quote Originally Posted by Valence View Post
You have a manaward, and the rest should sit on the shoulders of the team mitigating and shielding enough to protect the weakest members. Healers are also left in the same position with the same defense stats as well after all. If anything it's RDM that's left in the dust with nothing.

I like that kind of differences between roles and jobs actually. I'm not thrilled with the idea to make everyone the same when it comes to it and perhaps magical raid wides should hit non casters harder than they do (casters have more magical defense but less HP which ends up in similar results across all roles). The problem is that the current battle content doesn't take advantage of it.
I do love my Manaward and I wish RDM had something similar since Magick Barrier is nearly useless against physical raidwides, regardless many of the melee DPS not only have a personal & party mitigation tools but they also have Bloodbath and Second Wind.. Now clearing savage content in a static with consistent players can make this a non issue, but if you have cleared in PFs then you will experience inconsistency in both healing or mits. A lot of the strats also involve ranged DPS moving further out or not being in range of at least one of the healers(out spreads on m2s as a potential example), and I have straight up died on the phase transition Impact/Cannonbolt in m4s as a PCT because one of the healers were down.. and this was with Tempera Coat + Addle, mind you I was the only one that died from that raidwide while being at full HP.

The differences between roles and jobs should be rooted in how they play, what their rotation is like and ideally having some kind of player agency.. I just don't agree that having the fundamentals balanced across the board would somehow get in the way of that. Let's look at melee DPS for example, MNK and NIN have pretty close rDPS yet MNK has a follow up heal to their personal mitigation(Earth's Reply) and they also have Mantra; not only that, they can make better use of Bloodbath since a lot of NIN damage is unaspected or elemental. An even more egregious example would be to compare DRK to WAR or PLD, Dark Mind and Dark Missionary are not exciting differences between the other tanks, they are either useful or useless.