Red Mage Development Thread

[Ilium]

Why? 'Fast mage' has been a role of the Red Mage throughout multiple Final Fantasy installments. Also, adding the spellsword role adds to the jack of all trades role in itself, where the class is both adequately capable of magick and physical attacks.

[Tendehka]

They have a slightly higher speed growth, but that does not make them known as the 'fast mage'. Nor are they ever known for melee prowess - they're known for knowing every family of spells in the game up to maaaaybe the second rank, and being able to cast lots and lots of things.

Doublecast falls into the speed mage thing. Actually going fast or hitting things with swords does not say Red Mage to me.

[Ilium]

Chainspell and Doublecast are traditional skills of the Red Mage, which as you said can be categorized as speed mage spells. Also, yes, having higher speed/speed growth in many ways makes them the 'fast mage', especially in the earlier, simpler FF game mechanics. And I understand their traditional role has been to know the first tier of each other mage, I'm just saying I am having a hard time making that role work specifically for the Red Mage's skill set in this game, when the Master/Secondary/Alternative electives already fill that niche well. I would love to here your suggestions on how to handle that issue. /notsarcasticsorryitsoundsthatway

[Tendehka]

Honestly, with the skill system you have set up here, I don't think you can properly do a Red Mage. Axe them and have Rune Knights or Spellswords or whatever. Those are closer to what you want.

[kablizzy]

Elaborate on that thought, because we can change gears and directions as often / as ferociously as we want. This is all pre-alpha - Nothing's set in stone, and I'm working with the entire game in-mind, rather than just "Build a class," and then "Build another class."

[Tendehka]

The skill system being "Eight or so iconic skills" doesn't mesh well with "This class gets a spell from every other casting class in the game, but only the bad ones." I don't know how to get the spirit of the class into so few abilities.

[kablizzy]

This is a big issue that I have with the current setup as well, and it's one that I dislike pretty heavily. Boiling every class down into the exact same number of skills for the exact same JP costs and no more / no less is painful, but I'm also trying to ponder ways to do it differently. I'd love to hear suggestions as to the contrary, though!

[Ilium]

I had the idea of implementing JP caps early on to classes, however it was not exactly the way it has turned out so far. When we first started discussing class balancing, I didn't care how many abilities each job had. What I cared about was that each class was within a 6000-8000 JP limit, with 6000 JP being the required amount for Mastery. Whether it took a certain class only 8 skills or as much as 13 or whatever, as long as they stayed within the six to eight thousand parameter everything was fine.

Basically, the idea there is so that we don't end up with completely unbalanced jobs in terms of JP allotments. As in, I don't want our Archer only having 5000 JP worth of skills to offer at the same time Black Mage has 13,000 JP worth of skills. Somewhere along the line this has evolved into a 10 skill set 6000 JP cap limit. Honestly I went along with this because I don't have too many problems with it, other than how it is restrictive in what certain jobs can do. However I think my original concept is better suited for what we want to do.

[Ilium]

I think we would be remiss if we excluded Red Mage from the base job list. It is one of the main iconic classes of Final Fantasy with obviously one of the wider popularity bases. Throughout its iterations in the franchise the Red Mage has occupied multiple roles, all of which have basically been described here already. Between speed mage type abilities, spellsword type abilities, and some unique abilities for the Red Mage on its own, I think we can come up with a balanced and attractive class offering. We don't need to be so specific and tied down to absolute canon skill sets or the most common role of the class in FF, especially if it doesn't fit within our mechanics. Our classes right now are all very malleable, and can be changed and adjusted to suit whatever need.

[kablizzy]

I dunno what happened to my post last night, but I am not quite 100% on how classes are developing either, so if you have input, please by all means, throw it in. This is why I invited you here to provide input. Give me your ideas, I'd love to hear them.

Edit: Oh, there it is. Wow, like, six posts disappeared on me.

Anyway, I'm on-board with that concept too. Especially considering that the Nine-ten skillset ruins Black Mage and White Mage and kills the thought of Cura, Curaga, etc, I  think we should consider another way. Yes, this means that we'll have to revisit every class, but as I said to Talon yesterday, I'm okay with revamping this until we've got it right. v1 was launched early without full development, v2 was launched early without full development, version 2.5 seemed to be launched early without full development, and regardless of whether we're going with the HoI name or the ffSim name, there'll need to be some definites. I'll put up a topic here shortly.

We should also revisit the classes that we're going to be including, as I've been fiddling with the list, and it doesn't quite seem where I want it to be. I'll put up a topic here for this as well.