New Red Mage Spells

[Dreamx]

Is RDM ever going to be useful again?

-In before "It's useful as a paperweight".


That's my only question.

[Quetzacoatl]

Goddamn it SE, why do you hate RDM so much and why must you make me want to take it off life support?!

Red mages are now on par with Puppetmasters in terms of uselessness at this point.

[Sunrider]

The problem with RDM's "usefulness" is that there simply aren't events that cater to multipurpose utility. If it isn't high octane healing, damage, or buffing, there's simply not enough room for it.

Campaign and Besieged are examples of events that reward multi-talented classes. The jobs that capably buff (both self and others), heal, nuke, enfeeble, and melee were the ones that received the greatest points, specialization only limited your gains.

Walk of Echoes had potential as a larger-scale Campaign-like event, but the devs couldn't decide whether they wanted to promote party play or individualistic rewards, and so it ended up largely a system where some players sacrificed for the group's victory while others reaped the benefits of that victory from a point system that favored their role.

Events like Voidwatch simply will not favor jobs like RDM without either expanding it's Weapon Skill selection, or turning it into a clone of WHM or SCH. What we need is more differentiation between the magical classes, not less.

Events like Nyzul and perhaps even Einherjar hold potential for facilitation of hybrid classes, Einherjar particularly if the devs can get over this need for monsters powerful enough to require specialized DDs. Creating something like a high-level Garrison (or more refined WoE), and peppering it with loot comparable to current popular events, would be the key to giving RDM (and other hybridized jobs) a place to shine.

[Muras]

As we are approaching max capacity for adding magic we are in a situation where it is difficult to add new spells on a short-term basis, and this is not only limited to red mage. To clarify, this doesn’t mean we cannot add new magic, it just means we first need to address the expansion of the magic spell capacity, so this will take a bit of time.

Really makes me curious what the exact limitations are. From what I can see, there's currently a total of 440 spells in the game that players can use (Including Impact from Twilight Cloak). I'm just really curious... What is the maximum? 512 perhaps...?

[*]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 the devs aren't already aware, there is ongoing contention at the very nature of merited spells and abilities. There are a myriad of reasons, not the least of which being that placing spells under merits artificially blocks the potential for any higher tiers. So long as Dia and Bio 3 remain merits, there's little hope of seeing Dia and Bio 4 under anything but future merits.

There is also major discontent with the limited point allocation for merit spells, which forces an illusory specialization on a class billed for it's diversity.

I really agree with this. The merited spells and abilities made sense when the game was capped at 75, and was thought to be capped at 75 until the end of time. Since the cap increase however, some spells have been completely held back because of their merited counterparts. Protect V was one of the spells that were really messed up because of this, but at least that was fixed. However, the spell effects for Bio IV to VI (Or at least V) are already in the game, but we'll never see them because they're being held back because RDM has Bio III as a merited spell (You can find the effects on YouTube).

And they're not "considerably powerful"... They're just Bio III/Dia III. The DoT isn't significantly higher than the tier II spells (And I hear a DRK's Bio II DoT does as much, if not more than a RDM's Bio III because of their higher Dark Magic), and neither is their attack/defence down. This is expected though... It's just one tier higher than the last. I imagine Bio V would be powerful though.

Here's just a thought to pass onto the dev team... Why not just completely revamp RDM's catagory 2, and add stuff that RDM might actually like while adding the current catagory 2 spells as scrolls? Yes, I understand that this might mean some RDMs losing merits put into the spells but... Merits are easy to get now so it's not that big of a deal. And if RDMs get better abilities and spells, I think it'd be worth it. Especially since it'd mean WHM/BLM/RDM/DRK can get higher tiers of Bio and Dia.

Also, SCH's may "claim" to be the best in DoT magic, but are not. Helix's are unreliable, and doesn't have any other DoT's, not including Kaustra, that POP out as being the best. RDM has access to Dia 3 and Bio 3, where no other job does. Not to mention that BLM has more of a corner on DoT's then SCH with their elemental DoT's and access to the other DoT's, except Dia, without the use of a support job.

This is not true. I don't know why you think the helix spells are unreliable but... They're pretty darn amazing when you do the math. A helix spell lasts 2 minutes and 48 seconds, or a total of 18 ticks (Every 9 seconds instead of 3 like Bio). Even if a helix spell does as little as 60 damage on the initial cast, it'll inflict a total of 1080 damage. And that's a ridiculously weak helix. Normally a helix will land for 300-500 damage and do 5,400 to 9,000 damage over it's duration.

We can pretend Bio III does 18 per tick and is fully merited, which lasts 2.5 minutes/150 seconds. This is 50 ticks or 900 damage. This just shows that this spell isn't exactly "considerably powerful", especially at Lv99, which is why BLM/RDM/DRK should have higher tiers.

The Regen spells are also a part of SCH's "DoT" arsenal, although they obviously don't do damage. I think when Okipuit talks about SCH, he's saying that if they added Plague SCH would get it as well. Or only SCH would get it, I dunno. They did mention a while back they were planning on giving SCH an enfeeb spell that'd effect TP, although honestly I hope it's something more unique so it stacks with Plague rather than being Plague itself.

When I look at SCH and RDM, I see SCH as an enhancer/enfeebler of "Endurance" while RDM is/should be an enhancer/enfeebler of "performance". When you think of it like that, it may be easier to come up with ideas better suited for RDM. For example, they could create a spell that reduces the target's DMG rating. Not all mobs carry weapons, but they still have DMG ratings none the less. Likewise, they could give RDM a spell that boosts PT members DMG as well. +10-20 DMG to any weapon would rock.

[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.

[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.

[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?