New Red Mage Spells

[Luvbunny]

I feel sorry for Okipuit, seems like she has to deliver EVERY SINGLE bad news from the developers. Please let these so called developers to man up, grow a pair of balls, and face the costumers, the players who pay their monthly salary, and play their game, and actually know more about the jobs and how these so called jobs utilized in the game. Let them know to get off their high horse and actually play the game, and perhaps other more successful games out there and try to incorporate those nifty game play. Evolve or die. Learn from Yoshi P that lead FF14, that is a person who truly has visions and understand what it means to have an open communication with their costumers.

[Ophannus]

I like how DoT is also SCH's forte. Apparently so is healing, nuking, enfeebling and enhancing since they do all these equal or better than RDM. Only thing RDM has is Refresh II and our merit spells. Sucks that our merit spells are what defines a class when no other job is as dependent on merit spells to be unique or useful. Most of RDM's spells are obsolete at 99 except their merit ones whereas BLM learns new nukes, WHM gets new cures, RDM get no new enfeebles except Addle(which whm gets too) and Gravity II(which is never used because everything resists it and the effect isn't noticable).

[Ophannus]

Okipuit, there are spells we know exist in the .dat files which have been unused for over 6 years and are taking up valuable spell capacity. These spells include:

Tractor II
Curse (Used by NMs, so this is fine)
Reflect
Might
Faith
Bar-element II
Bar-status II
Bar-elementga II
Bar-statusga II
Poison IV
Poison V
Poisonaga III-V
Bio IV
Dia IV
Dia V
Diaga IV/V
Bio V
Aer(Will probably be GEO's Aera)
Baraer
Baraera
Ignis(Will probably be GEO's Fira)
Barignis
Barignisra
Terra(Will probably be GEO's Stonera)
Barterra
Barterraga
Aqua(Will probably be GEO's Watera)
Baraqua
Baraquara
Toad
Confuse
Berserk
Virus
Invisra
Sneakra
Deodoriza

That's over 60+ unused spells that are jamming up the spell capacity. Oh did I forget there are over 50-70 more unused BLU spells?

Gastric Bomb
Sandvacuum
Intimidate
Buble Shower
Airy Shield
Spider Web
TP Drainkiss
Secretion
Rage
Shakeshroom
Great Whirlwind
Aerial Wheel
Photosynthesis
Ink Jet
Sweep
Shell Guard
etc...
If the capacity for new spells is unavailable, could the dev team either:
1) Introduce these spells for their respective class and balance their effects, they've been in the unused data files since 2006.
2) Delete these spells from the spell registry and replace them with brand new spells that can be implemented immediately.

By deleting these unused spells, you'd free up well over 100 spaces for new spells.

[saevel]

HAHAHAHA

SE at it again.

I can't even take them seriously anymore. I used to think they just misunderstood the RDM's, now I'm positive they hate us and wish us to go play BLU or SCH.

Seriously ... did they just give the fact that Dia III / Bio III are merits spell to say they shouldn't remove them from the merit list....

Just wow....

[ManaKing]

How about some new job traits or job abilities, or are we almost full on those too?

[Muras]

Pre-emptive tl;dr: Deleting spell effects from the hard drive won't help.

By deleting these unused spells, you'd free up well over 100 spaces for new spells.

I'm positive that those spell "effects" do not strain the game. The only time they're loaded into memory RAM (Which is the cause of the PS2 limitations) is when the spell itself actually goes off. After the pretty animation completes, the information used for displaying the spell animation is then freed from memory.

I'm not super knowledgeable when it comes to programming as I'm still learning, so I can only make assumptions as to how spells work in the game. But there're obvious things, like how each spell has an ID number, recast timer, and other information such as a boolean that tells the client if the spell is even usable. In computer science, there are a variety of ways to store information, and each number stored in the RAM can be a different type. (For the long explaination, see Integer (computer science) on wikipedia).

The PS2 is 128 bit, so it can have integers up to 128 bit, but that doesn't mean everything is a 128 bit integer. In order to conserve RAM (The PS2 only has 32 MBs of it) you use lower bit integers to store more insignificant data. A single 8 bit integer is 1 byte, 16 bit is 2 bytes, 32 bit is 4 bytes, and so on.

8 bit integers can only go as low as -128 and as high as 127, or when they're "unsigned" they can go from 0 to 255. Does the number sound familiar? If anyone has been paying attention, this is why people thought an expansion was impossible... Zone IDs were stored as 8 bit unsigned integers. There are a number of ways to fix this problem, and obviously SE did, but it's not as simple as just changing it into a 16 bit integer. Depending on how FF11 is coded, changing core information like this can be a real hassle.

So anyways, my point is the only stuff in memory is only the spell information itself. Spell ID, spell name, recast timer, and so on. I dunno what the exact limitation is but I'm guessing a player currently can only have so many spells learned at once (Assuming all that information is loaded at all times), otherwise the game might break because of a lack of RAM for other stuff.

So obviously there's ways to fix this, but it's not as simple as just deleting the spell effects from the hard drive which is why Okipuit is saying it'll take time since they gotta go through the code and mess with crap. If they really are loading all information up and keeping it in the RAM at all times, I imagine they're gonna change it to just loading information up when it's only needed, and only storing recasts as they happen. I mean, we don't exactly need all 440 recasts kept in the RAM at all times since we'll never be able to cast that many spells at once within 255 seconds, let alone even have the capability of it due to never having full access to all spells at all times (Although maybe GMs do?). They're pretty much "re-inventing the wheel" when it comes to spells, basically. Again, all this information is just speculation since I'm going off my limited knowledge.

At any rate, I sure wish SE was more open about the development process of the game. I study game design and whatnot so I'd love to learn about it, heh.

[Kristal]

Plague effect enfeebling magic spell:
Since there are already abilities that add a plague effect, we don’t really feel a necessity to add it to red mage’s arsenal. Also, since DoT-related magic spells are scholars forte, this wouldn't be something that is unique to red mage.

"Unique to Red Mage" is an oxymoron...

Stronger version of Dia/Bio:
Red mages already have Dia 3 and Bio 3 from merit points which are considerably powerful version of these spells.

If that's a joke, it's a bad one... I didn't even have Dia III/Bio III until it was made mandatory by Voidwatch weaknesses, and even then I only put 1 rank into them for a negligable debuff that fades in 30 seconds... They are not powerfull, they are merely a pain in the ass.

As mentioned previously, the Development Team is looking into adding new spells that will be quite different from the current list available.

That would be nice. Just make sure other jobs get them as well, at a lower level, cheaper and/or stronger. It is, after all, a fine RDM tradition.

[Demon6324236]

That would be nice. Just make sure other jobs get them as well, at a lower level, cheaper and/or stronger. It is, after all, a fine RDM tradition.

I know your not serious but I wouldn't say it still, just asking for it ><;

[Kristal]

I know your not serious but I wouldn't say it still, just asking for it ><;

The harder we hit rock bottom, the higher we bounce back up! Burn it all, break it down. They did it before, they can do it again. Make us stronger, make us better. Exit Red Mage, enter Phoenix Mage!

[cidbahamut]

The harder we hit rock bottom, the higher we bounce back up! Burn it all, break it down. They did it before, they can do it again. Make us stronger, make us better. Exit Red Mage, enter Phoenix Mage!

Have you not been paying attention? When we hit rock bottom we break out the shovels and start digging.

I see no hope for my favorite job. It's making it harder and harder to stay invested in this game.