On Red Mage melee...

[Aleste]

Actually, my major quip with ANY mage meleeing is mostly down to efficiency sake. It's just not VIABLE as it currently stands to put any soft-armoured job up close to a NM, moreso one that provides such a useful boon to the party. Heavy strength enfeebles, useful buffs and additional healing is nothing that should be laughed at.

This isn't partly due to people thinking redmages can't DD. It's more to do with mob design. They could change RDM into an awesome DD, but the vast majority of people will always go back to the most efficient method of doing things.. and unfortunately, that'll put you back into the backline.

For scrub mobs or experience point parties, it seems perfectly fine to melee on. They're normally not a huge threat, and are pretty incapable of dealing any sort of considerable damage or debuffs.

However, that's not the type of mobs we're talking about is it? You're looking to melee on mobs that actually matter. Most of them come with various 600+ damage physical or magical AOEs and/or assorted debuffs and ailments. Recently we've seen a surge in NMs with aura-esque effects which are even worse than the standard mobs as you've pretty much got to ride it out (para/slow/silence/terror being the worst ones), and those, as any mage will tell you, can easily mess you and your entire parties day up.

I'll admit to being exceedingly annoyed whenever I stroll into melee range to cast some sort of AOE enhancing magic only to get clipped by terror, or paralysis (magic/TP move, or aura).... and then I stand, often completely helpless whilst some teammate gets beaten up. You would be mad to stand toe-to-toe 100% of the time and melee on the vast majority of mobs. Actual MELEE jobs don't like meleeing some mobs.

Hell, I get annoyed at some whitemages who stand inside melee range only to see 'XYZ is paralysed.' over and over again. We all know who gets the blame the second someone dies... and if your RDM is meleeing, and gets paralysed and someone dies, I BET someone will stop and go 'hey, why were you in range in the first place?'.

Your current job identity is back line and it's where people expect you to be.

While yes, there are some assorted NM's that it's more beneficial/efficient to put a mage close to, whether it be to AOE-adloquim/stoneskin/enspells or to utilise esuna more; but those mob are few and far between.

Someone suggested that you should use either /NIN to help reduce damage taken, although most of the damage you would be taking would be from AOE's, which unfortunately wipe shadows whilst still dealing damage... and that's not even considering the loss of your normal /subjob spells/abilities/traits. It'll up your melee DOT sure, but at what a price?

/DNC whilst more useful than /NIN isn't compatible with your enspells, and the only thing going for it is that you gain the ability to instantly cure people (often for low amounts) and remove minor ailments (although, for arguments sake the only useful one you'd remove is silence) from yourself.

And to end.... Sleepga. /SCH offers the most protection, but sublimation doesn't stack with refresh, and offers absolutely nothing to your melee abilities.

tl;dr.

Yes, it's fun to melee; it has a time and a place, but it's few and far between.

The potential gain of having a RDM melee (assuming of course that they're capable of keeping up their debuff/haste/refresh cycle, in addition to cures) comes at an enormous cost.

If the solution to having a rdm melee is to bring a whitemage to heal/buff/stand out of range.... then why the hell invite a RDM? Grab a BRD instead.

RDM does need a fix, but buffing their melee would be pointless.

[Daniel_Hatcher]

If the solution to having a rdm melee is to bring a whitemage to heal/buff/stand out of range.... then why the hell invite a RDM? Grab a BRD instead.

RDM does need a fix, but buffing their melee would be pointless.

I'll agree with that, as I've said before, RDM needs something as a reason to bring it whether it's Melee or otherwise, as it stands there is no reason to bring it.

[Supersun]

If you are talking about efficiency you have to ultimately realize you are referring to some form of economics.

Ultimately you have to realize that in terms of efficiency that EVERY job can contribute more on the front lines. There's nothing you can really do from the back you can't do from the front, but there are plenty of things from the front you can't perform from the back. Even a Blm on the front can only hit 20% of the time for 1 damage and he's already doing more then he could from the back. (Ranger might be the exception since their damage relies from standing at a certain location towards the back.)

The reason there's a back line though it because being in the front simply puts you at risk. Whether from nasty AoE, status effects, or auras.

If a job is still very useful even in the back and loses relatively little from not being on the front then generally when the risk outweighs the benefit that job moves to the back.

The more useful a job is on the front lines the more danger people are willing to expose that job to. The more and more danger a mob presents to the front line the more and more people get delegated to the rear to perform whatever utility they can perform from the back.

Keep in mind this isn't an on/off switch, but a sliding scale.

On one end you have the mobs that "people don't care if the Whm melees" because there's relatively little threat to the people on the front line and adding Whms front line efficiency to the front is well worth the minimal risk involved.

On the other end you have stuff like the ACP crystal at 75 where unless you were CS stun zerging it only the full MDB Pld was allowed on the front lines and every other job no matter how useful they were on the front were delegated to the back to contribute whatever they could.

This is the issue with Rdm melee and why this thread exists. Because Rdm is pretty much a job that has less front line utility then a White Mage (while white mage already has a ton more backline utility then Rdm), and Red Mage pretty much adds the most risk to your front line for the least benefit out of every job in the entire game.

Rdm needs more utility on the front lines.

Now there's a few ways they could accomplish this. They could simply just make Rdm more damaging, but this would be a very difficult route to balance since Red Mage does still have a bit of back line utility (less so then other jobs at this point though), and if balanced improperly they could easily create something rivaling the tank mage.

The other thing they could do is create benefits to having the Red Mage on the front like like Misery mode with White Mage. Certainly it wouldn't be impossible to create some form of utility that would be worth the risk of having a Red Mage on the front line.

The idea solution will likely be a mix between the 2 though. Certainly with Rdm being one of the worst melee leaves him with plenty of room for some form of adjustment on the damage end, but at the same time he needs some form of special utility to give him the staying power of other close range fighters without needing to output their damage.

[Duelle]

Actually, my major quip with ANY mage meleeing is mostly down to efficiency sake. It's just not VIABLE as it currently stands to put any soft-armoured job up close to a NM, moreso one that provides such a useful boon to the party. Heavy strength enfeebles, useful buffs and additional healing is nothing that should be laughed at.

Front line non-tanks are all equally squishy at the baseline. I don't see how a front line Red Mage would be any different. Or are you implying that front liners in general are a liability?

This isn't partly due to people thinking redmages can't DD. It's more to do with mob design. They could change RDM into an awesome DD, but the vast majority of people will always go back to the most efficient method of doing things and unfortunately, that'll put you back into the backline.

How can you be so sure? People's strats and approaches to things change when you alter class mechanics. This is because things that were not plausible suddenly become real options. Again, I wouldn't be so in favor it of had I not seen it work before.

Recently we've seen a surge in NMs with aura-esque effects which are even worse than the standard mobs as you've pretty much got to ride it out (para/slow/silence/terror being the worst ones), and those, as any mage will tell you, can easily mess you and your entire parties day up.

This depends on what you're doing while in the front line.

You would be mad to stand toe-to-toe 100% of the time and melee on the vast majority of mobs. Actual MELEE jobs don't like meleeing some mobs.

I can agree with this in that a melee RDM would follow the rules other front-liners do. This is fine and good.

Hell, I get annoyed at some whitemages who stand inside melee range only to see 'XYZ is paralysed.' over and over again. We all know who gets the blame the second someone dies... and if your RDM is meleeing, and gets paralysed and someone dies, I BET someone will stop and go 'hey, why were you in range in the first place?'.

Again, depends on what you're there for. If you're there to wack things with a sword you're playing by the rules the other melee follow, which is fine.

Your current job identity is back line and it's where people expect you to be.

Our identity is that of buffbot with cures. We're aiming to get away from that, and with good reason.

I can tell you what the eventual melee camp expected when we rolled this class all those years ago, but you know that already.

It's been how many years now with the melee camp getting walked over by the nay-sayers and the avestas in our ranks?

So we got tired of being buffbots and want the class to be something more. Sure, we should have been going full force since the days refresh and haste were added to our spell lists, but better late than never.

The potential gain of having a RDM melee (assuming of course that they're capable of keeping up their debuff/haste/refresh cycle, in addition to cures) comes at an enormous cost.

That's a losing proposition already seeing that you're expecting the RDM to heal, refresh and haste while in melee. That's not going to realistically happen unless you turn Refresh and Haste into 30-minute duration AoE spells. Off-heals and the occasional buff, sure. Cycles and all that comes with it, not a chance.

If the solution to having a rdm melee is to bring a whitemage to heal/buff/stand out of range.... then why the hell invite a RDM? Grab a BRD instead.

You're looking at it from the wrong perspective. Looking at things in the "RDM is cures, refresh and haste" light won't do our class any good. Perhaps I'm alone in this, but the idea is more along the lines of "front line RDM does A, B and C" and "back line RDM does D, E and F". The current way things are done with RDM needs to be dropped and buried, if only because it has made us something that is a far cry from what Red Mage should be.

[Dart]

Rdm is actually quite damaging, certainly not on the level of a blm but rdm nukes are nothing to laugh at especially when you gear for them properly, as I previously mentioned with getting T4's being such a boon to my rdm. I don't see anyway of balancing melee dmg to the magic dmg rdm can already do without utterly breaking the job.

This reminds me of the drk forums where they want everything and completely break the job to the degree that it would be god mode and you would have an 18 man alliance of all drks (or rdm's in this case).

Seriously cure5 and we could be whm placebo and get the job done. Wanna do dmg? Get that kick ass nuke set together and spam those T4's.

Lack of cure5 is what is killing our job inside abyssea, and to a much lesser extent outside. I lvl'd rdm on my mule as well and anytime I do something outside abyssea I get him off his whm and on his rdm to keep us alive.

[Supersun]

CONGRATULATIONS!

...you just described Scholar

[Dart]

edit: not worth it

[Seriha]

MP is finite. If you're setting Atma for melee, you won't be nuking hard and will also have a small MP pool over time. Thunder IV isn't going to be nearly as beneficial as Blizzard IV was to us thanks to Beyond. So, no this won't create some kind of RDM superman, and will be doubly so outside of Abyssea.

[Aleste]

I was never a fan of dissecting posts; however..

Front line non-tanks are all equally squishy at the baseline. I don't see how a front line Red Mage would be any different. Or are you implying that front liners in general are a liability?

The difference is not that some jobs are more/less squishy at the frontline. It's the loss of what RDM brings to the table (in it's current form) that causes it to be a more drastic loss than loosing, say, a dragoon.

If you your frontline dragoon bites the dust, you loose a chunk of DOT. The fight lasts a bit longer. Big woop.

If your frontline redmage bites the dust, you loose someone capable of:

Hasting all DD's
Throwing emergency potent cures
Removing ailments
Weakening the mobs accuracy/attack/attack speed
Additional re-application of buffs (for those spammy mobs)
A large amount of utility spells
Additional sleepga/stuns for crowd control and NM lockdown

Unless of course, you're not doing any of those things. In which case, why invite someone with below-par melee?


I've seen you reference "had I not seen it work before" twice now. Care to give an example, or two?

The playerbase has always been known for doing things in the most efficient way possible, it's the reason why some jobs are seen as unwanted, and why you see specific shouts for specified jobs. It has been like this for as long as the game has existed.

That's a losing proposition already seeing that you're expecting the RDM to heal, refresh and haste while in melee. That's not going to realistically happen unless you turn Refresh and Haste into 30-minute duration AoE spells. Off-heals and the occasional buff, sure. Cycles and all that comes with it, not a chance.

All in all, I would kick a whitemage out of the party if they refused to do their job. Same as I would kick a tank for not tanking. You have those spells for a reason, they make other jobs better; ignoring, or failing to cast them is NOT DOING YOUR JOB.

However you make a fair point with the casting burden redmage faces. It has a large amount of spells to cast often on multiple players. Typically, I'd expect NO LESS than 2 melee jobs hasted and anyone who uses MP to be refreshed; whilst still maintaining their enfeebling role (and I often struggle to find a RDM decent enough to do that, let alone anything else). SE did reduce your casting burden by introducing enhanced duration enhancements via your RDM AF3 set, although it's not enough to free up the kind of time you're expecting to have to wave your sword about.

I wouldn't expect RDM to get -ga versions of any of those spells as RDM seems to be the single target enhancer, whilst WHM (or alternatively accessionable, SCH) the AOE enhancer... whilst it might be... useful for RDM to get spells like that, it doesn't fit in with their current spell lineup in comparison to other mages.

Perhaps I'm alone in this, but the idea is more along the lines of "front line RDM does A, B and C" and "back line RDM does D, E and F".

The trouble lies in that ~12 other jobs currently do A, B and C in far greater capabilities than you'll ever be able to achieve. Buffing your A, B and C to compete against them will overpower your job as you'll still have D, E and F (which can easily be replaced by WHM + BRD).

If however, you feel that SE should take a give-and-take stand point via heavily buffing ABC and heavily weakening DEF, then why wouldn't anyone just get meleejob-ABC or actualmage-DEF?

If you are talking about efficiency you have to ultimately realize you are referring to some form of economics.

Actually, as MEng I refer to efficiency via its mechanical definition ("The ratio of useful work done to energy expended").

If you're to meleeing, you are actively contributing damage over time via sword attacks, enspell damage and the occasional WS.

In doing so, you've now placed yourself inside AOE range of the mob.

You'll now require to be healed (amount varies depending on NM) and you may be inflicted with a various assortment of ailments (of which can reduce your DOT to 0 temporarily). You'll also have to remember that since you are using your sword, you'll not be gaining the magical accuracy boosts to your debuffs or your cure potency... and you can't forget to haste yourself too~ (implication that you'll have to cast additional spells)

(note -- Presuming that you've somehow the inventory to carry all those assorted gearsets. SE has stated that there is only so many stats they can stick on a single piece of gear. If you're moving gear out to move TP/WS gear in, then you're loosing part of the benefits of backlining)

(Side paragraph -- Although, if you are /war or /nin you'll have no way to remove your ailments. If you are /dnc, you'll have to expend TP to remove them one at a time, TP presuming, on a 15 second recast timer, amnesia-not-prohibiting.)

So, for your RDM meleeing to be AS EFFICIENT as backlining then the potential difference damage gained will have to be EQUAL to the difference lost in MP expenditure/regain and potency of debuffs/cure.

(side note -- For the playerbase to suddenly stop and rethink your current 'position', it would have to be heavily in favour of melee damage gained.)

Of course, this is impractical and currently swings heavily in favour of backlining.... and it's because of a multitude of problems... which is kind of the point of this thread; to stop, and think out the reasons for and against of an idea, and also the possible outcomes of implimenting it.

I rather liked your idea to combat the difference in stave potency via:

Job Traits:
- Arcane Combat: Your magic accuracy is increased by your main-hand weapon accuracy while under the effects of composure.

However, given SE's way of doing things, you'd probably have to balance it out a little.

Job Traits:
- Arcane Combat: Your magic accuracy is increased by your weapon accuracy while under the effects of composure. Your magical attack is similarly reduced.

For debuffs, that shouldn't change anything. Now, that's 1 thing crossed off the list, care to try any of the other problems that you'll end up facing ?

[Duelle]

I had a long post typed up but the forums ate it. I may sound short in this, but that's more for expediency's sake than anything else.

Hasting all DD's
Throwing emergency potent cures
Removing ailments
Weakening the mobs accuracy/attack/attack speed
Additional re-application of buffs (for those spammy mobs)
A large amount of utility spells
Additional sleepga/stuns for crowd control and NM lockdown

The short answer is you can't expect a front liner to do all that. It simply is not plausible with the other things front line play involve.

Unless of course, you're not doing any of those things. In which case, why invite someone with below-par melee?

Which therefore means RDM does need melee buffs.

I've seen you reference "had I not seen it work before" twice now. Care to give an example, or two?

This was the meat of my post that got eaten. I'll try to type from memory with some extra edits.

RDM is not the only class that was defiled for the sake of convenience. There was another class at around the time Refresh and Haste entered the picture that ran into the same discrimination, the same insults, the same resistance and had the exact same problems Red Mage had (and continues to have).

Rather than a magic fencer, this class was a knight-in-shining-armor archetype that was designed with weak melee, which forced it into the role of healer and buff bot, much to the chagrin of the people who rolled the class to be the knight-in-shining-armor only to find themselves healing and buffing others if they wanted to see the content that mattered. After much ire expressed by the melee camp, the developers started looking for ways to make the front-line aspects of this class work.

They first went with Seriha's suggested approach by introducing hybrid gear with STR, INT and Auto-Refresh and front-line abilities that were leaning more to the side of supplemental melee (auras that increased group damage, attacks that reset the duration of certain debuffs). Problem was that the hybrid gear had such spread out stats that from raw stats alone the class was still way behind the other front-liners. Their supplemental melee proved worthless because they still could not measure up to what was expected of a front-liner, leading to them still being used a cure bots and buff bots.

The developers eventually bit the bullet and made a couple of changes. First they placed the melee aspect of the class and balanced it around being in melee gear. This means you don't wear caster or hybrid gear to front-line. Then they changed abilities to scale with attack power and melee accuracy for those who chose to be in the front lines. Then they tossed in stat conversions for the certain abilities of this class that scaled from spell power that you could no longer gear for because you were wearing melee gear (the short of it being that X% of attack power also acted as spell power for those abilities).

Then they added melee mechanics to seal the deal. My favorite of those was a proc from critical hits that made the weaker of your two healing spells or your nuke-type spell instant cast while consuming the proc.

The result of all this is the "lolmelee", "shut up and heal" and "lol ur not dd" arguments died after those changes went through. You could suddenly stand in the front lines, be as equally valuable as the other front-liners, while still keeping parts of your utility and identity without being this broken overpowered thing that dwarfed all other melee. The guys that liked to heal and support got to continue doing that, while the melee enthusiasts got their wish. The world (of warcraft) was suddenly a better place.

I think the above can be applied to RDM. While I understand that XI's game engine might not support certain parts of the above, the basic idea is there. Create melee emphasis, balance it around melee gear, separate it from how the class is currently played and then touch up and leave to dry. You'd make both camps happy and even kill the redundancy that exists when you have more than one RDM in the group.

All in all, I would kick a whitemage out of the party if they refused to do their job. Same as I would kick a tank for not tanking. You have those spells for a reason, they make other jobs better; ignoring, or failing to cast them is NOT DOING YOUR JOB.

The guy with a sword in one hand and magic glowing out of the other should be swinging that sword and going Seifer on mobs by releasing spells at point-blank range. The refresh/haste/cure bot model has been nothing short of a violation of the Red Mage concept and everything the class has stood for...at the cost of our class identity for the convenience of others. Enough is enough, really.

For the other parts of your post, all I can say is that mechanics and limitations can be put in place to keep things under control.

I rather liked your idea to combat the difference in stave potency via:

Job Traits:
- Arcane Combat: Your magic accuracy is increased by your main-hand weapon accuracy while under the effects of composure.

However, given SE's way of doing things, you'd probably have to balance it out a little.

Thanks. Admittedly, this was taken from my "Red Mage redesigned with stances" proposal, but modified to fit the class as it currently plays. I do understand the risk involved, however, as RDM would merit sword or dagger, equip that to boost accuracy for spells and then stack MAB gear.

The original version of Arcane Combat is available only while in melee mode, which has a bunch of other restrictions to focus on front-line play. These include reduced casting range for nukes to 5 yalms (AKA melee range), MAB not affecting nukes while in melee mode and instead scaling from a portion of attack power or STR (haven't made my mind up on this one), elemental resistance debuffs from enspells playing a bigger role (and make them same-element instead of opposite element like enspells II), emphasis on enfeebles, limited support ("nerfed" versions of our current spells such a Haste, Refresh, Enspells and Phalanx lasting a lot longer but being self-cast only, longer cast times for cures and possibly higher MP costs), and so on.

I just brought that up because I wanted to show it is possible to make one side (melee) benefit the other (mage), not to mention it is well within Red Mage's theme as the guy that stands between the melee and magic paths.