Why are we advertized as fighter-mages when White Mages can out-do us?

[Greatguardian]

Red Mage solo'ing relied on nuke spamming. Red Mage was the strongest nuker in the game for a few months in between Visions and Scars of Abyssea releases. What the hell is this about Red Mage nukes being an afterthought or useless?

[Supersun]

Red Mage solo'ing relied on nuke spamming. Red Mage was the strongest nuker in the game for a few months in between Visions and Scars of Abyssea releases. What the hell is this about Red Mage nukes being an afterthought or useless?

Red Mage soloing used to rely in Bind + DoTs and dumping whatever you had left between convert cycles into nuking.

It was pretty bad in the time between TouA where everything was bred to resist manaburns and /sch where we could actually get a respectable nuking skill.

[Greatguardian]

DoTs were nice, but the majority of my damage when solo'ing always came from nukes. Bind, Gravity, Nuke nuke nuke, throw DoTs as they wear off. Run out of MP? Recast Utsu/SS, Rest, Nuke more till Convert was back up. Was resting impractical on some solos? Definitely. But I found that many Rdm soloers were simply overly cautious and took significantly longer because of it.

[Supersun]

DoTs were nice, but the majority of my damage when solo'ing always came from nukes. Bind, Gravity, Nuke nuke nuke, throw DoTs as they wear off. Run out of MP? Recast Utsu/SS, Rest, Nuke more till Convert was back up. Was resting impractical on some solos? Definitely. But I found that many Rdm soloers were simply overly cautious and took significantly longer because of it.

Gravity is pretty dangerous to rely on. The resistance a mob builds to it can quickly screw you over if you aren't careful. I mean sure now days you can easily kill plenty of things before that resistance will come back to bite you but back then where your nukes had a relatively high chance of getting resisted.

I mean sure, if your bind timer is up and the mob is still bound and you have MP to spare go right ahead, but I'd be surprised if nukes out damaged your DoTs.

Nukes become a lot harder to use when you are trying to use gravity as a safety net as opposed to the primary method for stopping the mob.

[Greatguardian]

Gravity as a safety net? Safety net?

I think you're misinterpreting. Think about it a minute. What would happen if I cast bind, and then started nuking?

Right. And even then, Red Mage is very much capable of straight tanking monsters if it means throwing out more damage. You're talking about safety nets, I'm talking about Red Mage being sturdier than most Rdms think and not requiring all those safety nets. Edit: Qualifier, assuming the RDM has a PDT set that doesn't suck and a FC/Haste set for Utsu, knows how to use Aquaveil, etc. Bonus points for Rdms rocking 104% SIR sets pre-Veil Update.

As for nukes versus DoT on total damage dealt? That's not even a contest. Nukes are going to destroy DoTs in overall damage. That doesn't mean DoTs are bad, they're an addition to the arsenal and they're cheap. But you're either overestimating the power of DoTs, or underestimating the power of nukes. I'm not sure which.

[Supersun]

Gravity as a safety net? Safety net?

I think you're misinterpreting. Think about it a minute. What would happen if I cast bind, and then started nuking?

Right. And even then, Red Mage is very much capable of straight tanking monsters if it means throwing out more damage. You're talking about safety nets, I'm talking about Red Mage being sturdier than most Rdms think and not requiring all those safety nets. Edit: Qualifier, assuming the RDM has a PDT set that doesn't suck and a FC/Haste set for Utsu, knows how to use Aquaveil, etc. Bonus points for Rdms rocking 104% SIR sets pre-Veil Update.

As for nukes versus DoT on total damage dealt? That's not even a contest. Nukes are going to destroy DoTs in overall damage. That doesn't mean DoTs are bad, they're an addition to the arsenal and they're cheap. But you're either overestimating the power of DoTs, or underestimating the power of nukes. I'm not sure which.

It's not like all of those things were fully known at the beginning of TouA. Haste sets were relatively lacking until the turban was discovered (and remember information tended to spread quite a bit slower back then), 104% SIR certainly wasn't as well know about back then. It really depends on the time you are talking about. The farther we got into TouA and the more stuff we learned about it and the game in general the better Red Mage got at soloing and the more viable nukes became.

[Greatguardian]

Why are we talking about the beginning of ToAU now? Your stated timeframe was ToAU release to Visions of Abyssea release. Was everything fully known by everybody? No. Is that even the case now? Hell no. Does that mean it was less true? Absolutely not.

104% SIR was extremely common before Visions of Abyssea and the Aquaveil changes among well geared players. Nukes didn't become more viable as time went on. People just became less stupid. Regardless, they were never "More of a toy than melee was". Comparing RDM's nuking capacity, where they were even the best nuker in the game for a few months, to their melee capacity which has always been crap-tier is absolutely ridiculous.

[Supersun]

I said TouA - /sch aka WotG.

[Greatguardian]

Nuh uh. 0912345

Oh please, nuking was even more of a solo toy post TouA - pre abyssea then melee was.

Edit: I see what you're talking about. But no, /SCH didn't change anything because all of the real difficult solos were attempted /NIN anyways. You're not getting Dark Arts that way =/.

[Supersun]

It was pretty bad in the time between TouA where everything was bred to resist manaburns and /sch where we could actually get a respectable nuking skill.

I thought we were talking about this?

Even still, pre abyssea in general nuking was a terrible source of DoT because of the lack of MP regeneration and MP efficiency.

As long as the mob wasn't some craptastically difficult mob where only samurais would be attacking it anyway I'm pretty sure Rdm melee would beat it's nuking game back then. Hell, it still probably beats it even now outside of abyssea and that's saying something