The Problem with Red Mage . . .

[Neisan_Quetz]

Any place where an Almace would be competitive, you should probably put away your sword and act like a mage.

In small skirmishes like:
Dynamis
Salvage
Assault
Limbus
general farming
(presumably) Meeble Burrows

The AM will not outweigh the 5% x2.5 damage and 10% additional affect.


In events like VW and Legion, you should play like a mage and actually help your party do things like proc or disable NMs, which does not require a sword. If you want to DD in those situations, I would strongly urge you to pick up a job that uses a 2H weapon and do work.

When Afania made a statement about Legion a couple pages back, she was dead on.

So, if you'll kindly realize that Excalibur > Almace for RDM, then you can realize that you can get better total stats off an Ephemeron Build than a Shikagar build, because you are wasting slots on Haste Equipment that you could use better if you had an extra 3% Haste.

I was not ever suggesting that you should offhand an Excalibur. That would be a total waste, since it wouldn't be in your main hand.

If you don't know that you can have your cake and eat it to with enspell 2s so that you can get both the additional affect from Excalibur and Ephemeron, CAKE IS SERVED.

No, Ephemeron is still not a good offhand, get over it

You would have to not have AM up at all for Excal to win by a large amount. Almace is still in the top 3 swords for Rdm.

Please post these slots being 'wasted' on haste, because Zelus/Kudzu > Kthonois/Shedir in the very events you're proposing for melee Rdm.