So why do we have the worst Espells?

[ManaKing]

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO back on topic <.<

What's actually wrong with RDM and why should we care? RDM lacks for both damage and utility. Enspell 2s lack damage and utility at lvl 99. Not a hard parallel.

I'll start with utility because it is rather straight forward.
What does lowering a mobs magic evasion do for a party? There isn't a large presence for either magical damage or enfeebling magic. We can't lower dark magic evasion, which would be useful for dark magic. Enfeebling magic isn't hard for a RDM to land/if we can land it at all. In situations where targets have significant magic evasion, does the debuff from Enspell 2s result in anything worthwhile for any relevantly applicable battle strategy? Generally the sources of magic damage that are significant for this game are already accurate, such as BLM. We are generally the only exception to that rule because our elemental magic skill is somehow lower than a DRK.

::Am I missing anything here, like Wildfire or SMN/BLU magic or some other form of magic that would actually benefit from a lowering magic evasion?::


The damage for Enspell 2s is poorly designed because it omits synergy with anything that could make it good. There are several factors to this, and while it's not really complicated, it does really make you wonder why we get the short end of the stick on every single one of these issues.

The damage starts out low and doesn't factor in enhancing gear.
500+ Enhancing magic does nothing for the 'upgrade' of Enspells. You start hitting lower than Enspell 1s and hit by hit grow to around 52 damage. If you at least started at 30 and went up to 60 (or more) then at least you would be equal with Enspell 1s when you dual wield assuming no additional attacks(which is a poor assumption). If it calculated off of your Enhancing magic and gave you the 60 damage out the gate, it would be better and make sense that it is based off Enhancing magic.

A single hit on your main hand only is poor implementation from a damage aspect.
Most RDM that are attempting to do damage are dual wielding and have Temper. Enspell 2s don't interact with additional attacks. Additional attack are one of the biggest increases to damage in more recent years and Enspell 2s implementation essentially left us out of it. We make up for our lower Sword and Dagger skills with Enspell damage, but we just aren't keeping up. The options for improvements are make Enspells work on all hits, all main hand hits, or the first hit of both hands while dual wielding. But we get none of these. We literally get the worst setup we could have been given with no actual advantages and no good reasoning for why we are given such lacking damage.

The priority of additional effects is not optimal.
Enspells get in the way of us getting nice things. If you are using Enspell 1s, you will never get Haste Samba nor your additional affects from weapons. If you are using Enspell 2s, you will never get Haste Samba or Additional affects from your weapons without dual wield or additional attacks from things like double attack. So if we use the amazing information that we have thus far gleamed from this forum topic, when using Enspell 2s 'appropriately' (aka single wield) we would miss out on additional affects without the assistance of additional attacks. Hardly optimal. I made the mistake of thinking that Enspell 2s had lower priority than Enspell 1s because I was getting additional affect procs from Excalibur on my double and triple attacks. Imagine my disappointment when I figured out that Enspell 2s didn't even have the luxury of playing nice with additional affect from your main hand. I was pretty angry to be honest and also a bit of an asshole on the forums. Enspells have the worst priority possible and it makes me very unhappy.

They don't give additional stat boost, unlike Enlight or Endark.
Enlight is fueled by Divine magic and Endark is fueled by Dark magic. I can, mildly, understand an explanation based on these kind of reasoning. But what I can't understand is why we don't get Accuracy and Attack Bonuses based off our Divine and Dark magic skill. It would give me a reason to finally cap my Divine Magic. We have 300 Divine and Dark Magic a pop. We would get 50 Attack and Accuracy based off Enlight and Endark Calculations for the initial hit. How it would degrade or build if it were implemented is half the reason I wanted to post. So I could get feedback for the idea. We wouldn't even have to get Attack or Accuracy, but those are the current examples and about the only thing I that could make sense otherwise is M.Acc and MAB for RDM. Please comment on this subject if you have any thoughts.

The magic evasion buff on the mob generally doesn't help the party or even the RDM.
So Enaero II does wind damage and lowers magic evasion to ice. So besides 'that's how elemental wheel magics work', how does that make sense? If you are fighting a wind elemental, and you wanted to lower your resist rates with ice magics, you would hit it with wind.....at which it's damage would be subject to heavy resists. That doesn't make any sense at all. Why wouldn't you want to use Enblizzard II in that situation for it to lower Ice m.eva and do (hopefully) un-resisted ice damage on hit? The situations where you are fighting things that don't take a lot of physical damage, but do take reasonable magic damage are generally elemental type mobs and slimes. That's what Enspells should be really good at, but even that they fail at being particularly effective. Enspell 1s are still the better solution for those scenerios because Enspell 2s aren't well thought out.

The building nature of Enspell 2 damage makes lowering the magical evasion of more than one element unattractive.
The subject that links utility and damage woes is changing Enspell 2s to accommodate for lowering more than one element for enfeebles. If you want reduce the resists for both Slow and Paralyze spells you could use Enaero II and Enthunder II before you cast the spells to attempt to maximize their duration/land the spell(lol). If it were ever the case that it made sense to do that, it would once again be not to your advantage from a damage perspective because you would have reset your damage counter for your amazing Enspell 2 damage.

Why can't any of this work right and be good for RDM? It all has to have problems for why we can't just have nice things. There is no advantages to this system. It feels like it was built wrong on purpose.

If I were going to rebuild Enspell 2s and attempt to make them 'fair and balanced' in the current system, it would go something like this:

• Enhancing Magic, Divine Magic, and Dark Magic are calculated on cast.
• Enspell 2 damage = Enspell 1 damage formula x 2 and is fixed at time of cast.
• All main hand attacks are subject to Enspell 2 damage.
• Offhand attacks are not subject to Enspell 2 damage.
• Enspell 2s grant the RDM Accuracy and Attack = 1/2 of the Endark and Enlight formulas but it does not decay.
• Enspell 2s reduce the M.Eva of a target by -10 and increase the damage dealt by 10% to the element of the Enspell 2.
• Raise the priority of Additional Affects from Weapons so that they are the first additional affect to go off.

This is obviously better than Current Enspell 1s and offers advantages over Enspell 1s as well. The rational behind most of this is simple. By building a better RDM you get better results out of your Enspells. It gives you a small level of customization with gearing so you can decide what is most important on your gear for magical proficiencies for either enspell damage, accuracy, or attack. The increases would put RDM somewhere close to an A+ rank in either Swords or Daggers. It plays nicely with both additional affects for weapons and sambas and you could even have an Ephemeron in your offhand work while benefiting from Sambas. You would basically optimize RDM for front line fighting and best part is that you would actually get some party utility out of it.

Increasing the damage done by the corresponding element would benefit your party's magical damage output. I would probably pair with a COR and keep up Enfire 2 up all the time for larger Wildfire damage. They would also be less like to be resisted, which would be a plus. At the beginning of the fight, you could transition between Enstone 2 and Enblizzard 2 for Slow and Paralyze if you thought it would make a difference. You would actually do something for party synergy for magic damage by debuffing the target, which would be an appropriate and welcomed change of pace.

Before people tell me how unbalanced this is, just consider that RDM will never have Dual Wield and Berserk at the same time. We will never be a top physical DPS. Our WSs will never be as good as even a BLU with the possible exception being Requiescat(and even that is questionable since last update). How would this level of change actually affect balance at all?

[Metaking]

not to shoot you down and kinda serprized this hasn't come up yet( if it did i probably missed it after being dazed by one of the walls of text) but the main reason se is leery of giving rdm goon enspells comes down to one out dated over priced weapon, the Kclub, they try to excuse drk and pld by making the spells degrade(does not explain ifrits enfire beating all rdm enspells tho).

anyhow atm lets just imagin that weapon doesn't exists how could we make en2 spells better, well mana did point out alot of good ideas, i especially liked the -10 matching Mevasion and matching eledef -10, however i think the using dark and divine skill on enspells probably hard to code and kinda odd think something better like same enhancing magic formula as En1's (set at casting) as well as bonus dmg (to base dmg) based off int vrs int (calculated on hit), so also probably add a modifier based on weapons delay or type.

[sweetidealism]

not to shoot you down and kinda serprized this hasn't come up yet( if it did i probably missed it after being dazed by one of the walls of text) but the main reason se is leery of giving rdm goon enspells comes down to one out dated over priced weapon, the Kclub, they try to excuse drk and pld by making the spells degrade(does not explain ifrits enfire beating all rdm enspells tho).

anyhow atm lets just imagin that weapon doesn't exists how could we make en2 spells better, well mana did point out alot of good ideas, i especially liked the -10 matching Mevasion and matching eledef -10, however i think the using dark and divine skill on enspells probably hard to code and kinda odd think something better like same enhancing magic formula as En1's (set at casting) as well as bonus dmg (to base dmg) based off int vrs int (calculated on hit), so also probably add a modifier based on weapons delay or type.

You know, I actually hadn't considered Kraken club, yet still I feel that this is one of those situations where if you have a prestige weapon, you should be allowed to use it to full effect.

That said, if one weapon really is all that is keeping us from having worthwhile tier II enspells, then I can think of two immediate, if rather shoddy solutions:

1. Remove Red Mage from the list of jobs that can wield Kraken club.
-OR-
2. Write "Nullifies Enspell II" on Kraken club.

I would much rather be removed from Kraken club and instead be able to have tier II enspells worth using with my other nice weapons.

[Motenten]

Alternative: Allow Enspell II's to proc on DA/TA/QA attacks on the main weapon (as suggested by ManaKing), but not proc on OAx attacks.

[sweetidealism]

Alternative: Allow Enspell II's to proc on DA/TA/QA attacks on the main weapon (as suggested by ManaKing), but not proc on OAx attacks.

I like that better!

[ManaKing]

Alternative: Allow Enspell II's to proc on DA/TA/QA attacks on the main weapon (as suggested by ManaKing), but not proc on OAx attacks.

Nice response.

[tyrantsyn]

Correct me if I am wrong but Temper as OAX spell. That idea would kind of kill the spell's use.

[Demon6324236]

Temper = Double Attack not OAT so far as I know.

[ManaKing]

The wording on Temper implies that it could be more than Double Attack even though that is all it does. At least currently.

I'm pretty sure that it's testing was concurrent with it being double attack instead of OaT, since you would get different numbers from it being OaT. Specifically that OaT doesn't generally interact with WSs unless it's from AM3 of Mythics on Mythics WSs.

[Mageoholic]

Enspell II's suck because they have no utility. As I said a few pages back EN2's on use is to get haste samba. Otherwise on anything that is not fodder EN1's are going to deal more damage based on MACC. As for altering the way T2's are calculated I say meh.

RDM does not lack damage. We don't need it, we don't need to compete with the dozen or so other damage dealers, most of which do it better than us, with or with out enspells being better.

RDM is not going to be invited for its damage, jobs are invited for utility. BRDs are brough because they increase the value of every member they buff, same with CORs. RDM could function the same way...if we had some sort of utility to provide them...

Maybe like -25 VIT provided by Enthunder 2, which directly buffs every melee players damage via the fSTR function. Debuffing the mob is how RDM should be enhancing the party...with strong self enhancements to help it in this task. Our best spell is Dia III for a reason...the 17% ATK increase it gives everyone. Now imagine if gravity worked similarly for ACC? Minuet and Madrigal...

boy having elemental debuffs on enspells sure would up RDM's stock in utility, not to mention with the changes to DRK announced giving us access to CSS as well. Utility is what we need...otherwise we are just out matched.