Quote Originally Posted by Duelle View Post
RDM was a poorly-designed generalist. Team Tanaka decided to invent the refresh niche because they couldn't be bothered to fix RDM nor make BRD more attractive to play. Players forced RDM into healing because FFXI had a horrible distribution of roles. Summoner was also a victim of this, sadly.
Player-created role that would have been nerfed within a week of being discovered under any normal, rational developer team that could take scope of what that would do to encounter design and overall class balance.
I wouldn't be so bothered by it had it been someone that actually had a history of being a support class. Like oracle or maybe scholar (which was eventually introduced much later). Instead it inexplicably fell on the guy with a sword in hand that happens to be able to cast magic. I'm just here to comment in hopes that crap does not repeat itself.

I also know what led certain classes down that road, and wish to avoid the mistakes of the past.
I can see that you have bad feelings about misbalance of some of FFXI classes, but linking it to exp chains is far fetched