A new version update has landed on the peaks! (05/14/2014)Follow

Yeah, if someone's gonna be a princess, picking a job that enables such never hurts.

Generally speaking, I don't think I've ever left a party where the composition was at least sensible. I have left, however, when coordination simply seemed non-existent for whatever reason, sometimes simply due to over-hunting.

Still kind of dumb to be "punishing" RDM for crap from a decade ago that was generally blown out of proportion as it was and many never even partook in despite the occasional aspiration and adoration. Pointing such out back then certainly succeeded in getting me... fans. Either way, as Ruisu put it, if something wasn't mean to be soloable, you target the mob and not the class.

Actually, a good rdm could kill almost anything quite quickly. At 75, zipacna took me about 6 minutes, without chainspell, faust about 10, sirrocco maybe 10 as well, etc. Even something like rapido with 10k needles could be safely killed in under 10 minutes, if you made sure to never get hit, so you could nuke more. The only practical solo i can think of that took more than maybe 20 mins was charby, which took me maybe 30-40 minutes. Pretty much anything that took longer was stuff that served basically no purpose to do solo, and was just for fun stuff that some people enjoyed doing, like suzaku, seiryu, both taking 1-2 hours, etc.


Not the way rdm could. Anyone can run in circles and cast bio for 3 hours, but rdm could do much more than that. It could nuke, and kill things in less than 3 hours, as well as not die if they got hit. In fact, they could kill things that couldn't be kited at all due to high movement speed, or limited room to move due to adds, which no other job could do even 10% as well as rdm.

People also didn't believe RDM could do the things that it could do until someone did it. The reality is, the Final Fantasy population lives in a cookie-cutter bubble. The current fad dictates how people play, e.g., IT ++ onry, arrow burn, mana burn, TP burn, etc. or how certain battles MUST be done with a certain set up.

BLMs could not only nuke, but had more mp with better and stronger nukes. I would also argue that a well geared WHM could probably out-Holy/Banish a RDM depending on the mob. You're also negating range attack, which is (or at least was, so I think) the most damaging type of attack in the game. In other words, there is more than one way to skin a cat, people just stuck with the known as opposed to exploring different options, because that's the mentality of the player base.

People being parrots or even things going on behind the scenes that never got publicized don't really matter at this point. RDM was labeled powerful because of these niche activities and held back in the future because of it. Realistically, it's no different than SMNs being pigeonholed into playing healer and never really getting the fixes it needed to be more of a Summoner prior to having all the endgame gear and such to nix perp costs or just simply have some good damaging BPs. The job still got played, so everything must be okay, right...? Still, you had RDMs that didn't want to be healers or soloists. For a job that is supposed to be flexible, the required traits were lacking. Yes, we understand SE is more prone to take than give, but I think the long-term snub is that anything "new" the job got was compulsory like the level cap increases or more incidental with one fix meant for another job also affecting us, like Enspells maintaining damage/accuracy from on-cast because a SCH AoEing them resulted in crap damage for party members prior.

Or we could just say RDM ate Tanaka's HNM babies.

Generally speaking, you're right, but I distinctly remembering comparing the two while leveling them pre-Abyssea. Depending on the mob (which I stated), the damage from a RDM nuke resist would be less than the MP used and would sometimes be too frequent to be worthwhile. On the other hand, I've experienced less resists with Divine magic.

It doesn't really depend on the mob at all. I can land nukes consistently (less than 20% resist rate) on seiryu at level 75. I can't think of anything that is more resistant that is even remotely possible to solo. Using huton to lower ice resist also works brilliantly.

No, you're arguing that other jobs were even remotely competent solo jobs compared to rdm. That simply isn't true. Rdm was used so much because it was 100 times better than anything else for soloing anything reasonably difficult. There are tons of nms rdm could solo at 75 that no other job could even come close to soloing. Rdm wasn't used because it was a fad, it was used because it was literally the only job that could do it.

Which is why I'm amazed that ARR is successful considering they just shoveled together every MMO released in the past 5 years with FF textures. (And not even a good job with some of it.)



Nope, because even Sega admits it and works on correcting things and we know the reputation they have with their online games. And let's be real, singling out it being a "JP culture thing" conversely states that Western developers are saints and superior at game design and always get 100% of their game design perfect. So it would be more accurate to say "game developer thing", because both sides have proven to or not to do this.



This is really a preference thing though when you think about it. When I started RDM we had access to not only Marksmanship skill but we had access to Cure V. Throughout the series, when has RDM ever been on par with WHM or BLM? Sure some times they went up to Level 4 in spells but were they ever used for their raw nuking or curing potential? They were mostly used because they could chain spells together (thus getting off some of the more unique spells multiple times per turn) and melee just as strong as the melee jobs. (With what being slapped on some of the best swords in x game.) So outside of Chain/Dual/X Cast/Etc when was RDM ever used in place of BLM or WHM for the appropriate roles?

So I don't think them "falling behind" on spell tiers is really a mechanical issue with RDM at all since when you look at the gear as of 2014, if you don't take abilities into consideration, why would you want a WHM or BLM or even SCH if a RDM can do everything they can and more?



For a long time it was until monsters started gaining innate 100% resistance to stuff or brushed off magic (which let's be real came about to combat manaburns back in the day), much like WHM's thing is healing, BLM's is nuking and SAM's is DD in general, RDM's main appeal was it can enfeeble at a much higher accuracy than the other mages, since it's obvious you're taking the WHOLE history of XI into account.



Blue Mage had access to debuffs (that could be landed even without ES) that other mages didn't have immediate access to, like a straight cut to defense/attack/evasion/plague/terrorize (though rarely worked if at all on most NM/None HNM) and so on. Blue Mage's main appeal though was that it could self SC for quite a lot of damage, only Samurai could for the longest then eventually Dancer came about which could or set up Self-SC for others, so seeing BLU for details, they were actually quite OP in comparison for awhile mechanically, which other class could self SC and MB all in one go, something that usually needed 2-3+ others to accomplish? Or the fact they could instant cast spells that were as strong if not stronger than many weaponskills at low levels..even spam them? Remember how BLU were simply called 'Bludgeon" because that spell was simply OP for most low-mid levels?



You forgot to mention this also came about when players were having fun with exploits and coding problems (as in, stuff that SHOULDN'T have happened in the first place) SE nerfed it.

"Hey I was having fun using Cure on Undead for 9,999 - 99,999 damage, why did you remove it SE?!"

So yes the meme wasn't just relevant to game design, people loved to use and abuse issues that made the game "fun" then when SE took it away they ******** let's not ignore it referred to that, as well. All in all every job needs to be looked at and SE does if they're in an extremely bad place, even PUP wasn't that terrible (just extremely terrible PUPs) but it was obvious it needed to be looked at to catch it up since low H2H skills for example already gimped it on a bit of end-game content in terms of master and not having a true nuke/healing part made it less useful to your party in the long run, but is RDM as broken as SCH was, for example? People only used SCH as a last resort, people always wanted RDMs. So whether you like or hate where RDM resides currently, it's far less broken than the actual jobs that were consider broken. Hell even with Geomancer's unresisted debuffs people still didn't want them because they didn't do x in low man (the key issue people seem to bring up when "Jobs are broken"), so no matter what the game is only part of the equation, players still make the final call in the long run.


Edited, May 21st 2014 10:06am by Theonehio

Yeah, I wasn't trying to say western devs are better at all, as they also make their own dippy moves (Herro Jay Wilson helmed Diablo III~). But my jab at Tanaka and the loyalty quip pretty much ties into the 1.0 XIV he blessed us with. It was basically a worse case scenario of letting players have little to no say in the design process while proving the devs themselves aren't infallible with their vision. "Vote with your wallet!" isn't really enough in the end. They won't know what we want without telling them and the language barrier certainly didn't help. Can we occasionally get cool things we never asked for? Sure. And those surprises are indeed awesome. Though, as Ruisu implied, XI had more than is fair share of stinker content.

Enlighten us about what Geomancer got, and how it's not received any nerfs.

I'll start you off. Geo received a base Enfeebling Magic skill and access to Sleep and Sleep II in the first update or two after SoA's launch. Fast forward from then to this last update (1 year+), and their Loupans were buffed from -30% DT to -50% DT. Unless you're counting merits and AF/relic as adjustments, you're sorely mistaken on them receiving way more buffs.

They actually received a rather massive nerf shortly after Delve was released. Early on, Torpor (-eva) and Precision (+acc) were % based. This made them exceedingly powerful in allowing alliances to switch to meat, sing less Madrigals in favor of Minuets/Marches, Hunters Roll to a more beneficial Roll, or whatever your alliance decided to do. This was nerfed down to a flat +/- 40 acc/evasion, augmentable by gear/merits to (I think?) the current cap of +/- 46.

Outside of that, it's great fun being a better Rdm than Rdms. ^_~

I'm amazed anyone still remembers this

Seriha's Law simply states that any FFXI discussion will inevitably derail to being about RDM, not that you in particular cause it to be.

Some people are just ridiculously bitter and spiteful.