Embrace the mana glitch...?

Many are always arguing about RDM is extremely easy to play and lacks punishment for messing up the rotation.

And I will agree with both statments, there is no decision making as RDM, you pretty much casts whatever is shinning in your screen, and wastes dualcasts procs on whatever skill will generate the mana that you have lower at the moment.

As for punishment, the only thing that can actually mess up your dps is letting your mana bars VERY unbalanced or starting your melee combo without enough mana to finish it. Both these mistakes are very easily avoidable, and anyone should easily avoid them them after playing a RDM for like... 30 mins or so?

Now here comes the mana glitch, an unintended mechanic(as far as we know) that encourages a risk gameplay of playing on the very edge of the balance gauge, and also encourages and adds weight to smart usage of swiftcast and aceleration as well as verfire/stone procs instead of just pressing them the moment they become available.

It also has a lot of decision making: Before saying "fuck it" to the balance gauge you would have to judge your chances of hitting the sweet numbers and decide to go unbalaced or go for the basic 80/80, from what I've tried: if you have swiftcast and/or aceleration up then go for it, if not then it is risky and leaves a lot on the mercy of RNG. On the long run, I believe that going for unbalanced without swiftcast or acelaration ends up being an overall dps loss.

It is also good thing because as you grow accustomed to it, you feel yourself improving and it feels good(this is called class depth), and the control of your mana bars is in your hands, there is no boss mechanic that will mess it up since there is no boss that forces you to cast veraero when you were supposed to have casted verthunder.

But of course, it's gameplay right now presents some issues that need fixing if it is to become a core mechanic of the class:

> you need to be sitting on very specific mana numbers to execute it;
> have not done the maths, but it is possible that in some situations you would want to cast vercure instead of an offensive spell in order to get a dualcast proc without messing your mana bars.

Other than these 2 things I don't see a problem with the concept, it is engaging, and fun and everything falls on your ability to make decisions, and it also would not be the first time that devs take a glitch/unintended playstyle and add it to the core of the game, and it probably would not be the last.

EDIT: as I was writing this text patch notes came out and the mana glitch is now fixed.

We'll see on the logs if the BLM buffs and the glitch fix even out RDM vs BLM dps. Hopefully SMN's aetherflows will be less punishing now as well.

That said, even if they didn't fix the glitch, I would still go out of my way to avoid being THAT imbalanced on my mana. Feels dirty cheating dps up like that.

[QUOTE=Dualgunner;4311467]We'll see on the logs if the BLM buffs and the glitch fix even out RDM vs BLM dps. Hopefully SMN's aetherflows will be less punishing now as well.

Not sure how to feel about BLM... Those buffs seem enough only to make BLM a class that can 'come along' not someone who will activelly compete for a raid spot on the meta comps, I could be wrong tho, who knows if with these buffs and enough spell speed you can actually make a 4 fire IV-1 fire I rotation?

And the topic was about having the glitch added as a core mechanic of the class, instead of what it is now allowing you to pull higher numbers than intended.

Also: RIP SMN, 2013~2017.