How Many Would Have Rather Seen RDM than SMN

[Levian]

Like:
-Poor Merit Selection, and under powered merit spells.
-RDMs "niche" in enfeebling lacks any real exclusive spells outside of Gravity II and poor merit spells.
-Enfeebles were often straight resisted by anything worth a damn.
-Had a ridiculous amount of 3 minute single target and self-buff spells, so even if RDM had good offensive capabilities it was severely hindered by constant casting/recasting.
-There were no weapons that gave the benefits of the Elemental staff affinities, you essentially were married to staves.
-No physically offensive traits.
-Only one physically offensive Job ability.
-Role was often based solely on subjob.
-No powerful weaponskills form Swords.
-No powerful Daggers outside of Mandau (till recently mind you).
-2h update completely obliterated 1h capacity to melee.
-Damage from 1h and 2h weapons continues to grow wider apart.
-RDM Enhancing spells scaled poorly.
-T2 Enspells are flat out broken.

And the Big one...

-Magic and Physical aspects were kept completely separate from one another.

In terms of sheer meelee capacity a lot of this can be scrapped. Anything regarding enfeebling would be moot anyway, like you said anything important resists it all. But you want to be swinging your sword not casting anyway. That brings us to the buffs it had. Aside from refresh, someone else should be taking care of those if you're in a meelee slot. Elemental staff affinities: Probably shouldn't be relevant either if they were to bend the rules of their system for rdm's combat spells. Far as the 2H update, I don't recall them changing 1 handers, correct me there if I'm wrong. Even if they did, until Abyssea it wasn't that big a spread. I'll admit that I don't know the state of the game now. I haven't played since about 6 months after WotG's release.

As for things relevant to meelee, we'll start with skill cap. B grade, 250 for dagger & Sword. Most other 1h cap at A-, or 269. That's 19 points of accuracy, and if I remember the ratio properly, 57 points of attack you won't have. Merits won't close that gap, because the people you'd compete with will have those too. Same for gear & food (Even if the gear were available). That to me was always the largest hurdle the job faced. Everything else is a matter of adding some gear and tweaking some mechanics.

You could introduce WS that are worthwhile and RDM only. The enhancing spells could make up for the weaker weapons the job is afforded. You can even circumvent the magic-physical relationship by making RDM's meelee enhancing spells dole out a static number that can't be resisted, but can do extra damage to a mob with an elemental weakness, so you don't have to sacrifice Meelee power to buff up your enhancing spells.

Throw in a couple of tiers and maybe some merits for the enhancement spells and your scaling issue is fixed. If there's room for it, toss RDM a meritable magic based strike that can't be resisted (or is resisted less frequently) and deals the same type of elemental damage as your current Enh spell and you're giving Blu a run for it's money.

The first step to making it viable though, would be to close the 19 point skill gap and put it on a level plain with the competition.