Why take a Red Mage?

[Black Mage FF1]

Fire 3 O_O ooh, Cure 2 O_O ooh , shall I continue?

Sure.... If you want......

The problem with redmage is....

they have ok abilities but can only use 1 at a time. This means you have to make sure they are doing the right job at the right time

If you have a good party then you are not going to need to heal/use black magic/attack all at the same time. If you dont have a Wm/Bm then that is 2 extra spots for better characters. Replace those to spots with 2 Red Mages then the problem is solved. Have one red mage heal and another cast spells. Or Take a red mage and a Fighter. The more fighters you have the less you will need to heal. Which is why a Fi/Fi/Fi/Rm > Fi/?/Wm/Bm. With a Fi/Fi/Fi/Rm you can easily kill any enemy and you dont need healing that much.

You talk about being....ok...in many areas as being a strongpoint. you dont NEED a multirole charicter because you can only do 1 thing a turn and you want that thing your doing to be effective, not some half arsed spell or limp wristed slash. Besides, Red mages are REALY expensive and cant even learn the best spells!

Red Mages are not that expensive. A Wm/Bm are A LOT more expensive.
Cant learn the best spells? The only spells he misses out on that are worth getting is NUKE and LIFE2. WOW! He doesnt get to cast NUKE or LIFE2 1 or 2 times! If you didnt have weak characters like the Wm/Bm there wouldnt be any use for LIFE2. And NUKE is easily replaced with ICE3.

Redmage < Thief

The redmage isn't as usefull as a thief. The thief can run from scary things and is realy cheap to buy for.

WOW! The Thief can run! That sure is going to help in boss fights! The Red Mage is stronger then the thief, has more magic, has more spells, better defense and more hp. But I guess being able to run from imps or wolves is more important....
Like I said earlier, I rarely have any 4 person party fail to run on my first try.

After class change the NINJA has a little better defense. But the Red Mage still has more hp and defense really isnt a big problem.