EW 6.08 Red Mage: Small improvements

Context and purpose
Personally, I think that Red Mage has come into Endwalker very strongly (from a design perspective). I think that many of Red Mage's longstanding design issues were respectably improved, and that its gameplay is currently in an overall good and enjoyable place.

So, I personally do not think that Red Mage's fundamental design motivates any sort of major overhaul, and from general impressions of various FFXIV community discussions, I think that most players feel the same way.

Instead, I think that some relatively small changes could improve and refine Red Mage's current design even further, and those are the kinds of suggestions that I am trying to make in this post.

000 — Table of contents (for jumping with Ctrl+F)
000 — Table of contents

111 — Reduce cast times to 1.50s / 2.50s GCD

222 — Reduce Moulinet cost so 1x Manafication = 3x Moulinet

333 — Normalize AOE threshold to either 2 or 3 targets

444 — Condense the Melee portion of the ST combo to one button

555 — Questioning whether Jolt and procs are still necessary design features

111 — Reduce Red Mage cast times to 1.50s with 2.50s GCD.
Summary of the core issue: Red Mage OGCD drift
Red Mage design has a specific and peculiar issue: Red Mage has a significant number of OGCD ("Ability") actions that need to be frequently activated, but Red Mage only has space to weave an OGCD every other GCD, due to the alternating rhythm of "Dualcast".

This is because the 2.0s cast on "Jolt 2", "Verfire", "Verstone", "Veraero 2", and "Verthunder 2" means that it is not possible to weave an OGCD after these casts without "clipping" into the next GCD, since the 0.5s gap between cast completion and GCD completion is not long enough for most (all?) players to safely insert an OGCD's animation-lock.

This has the net effect that Red Mage can only weave its many OGCD actions during "Dualcast" or other instant-cast windows, creating a specific rhythm of weaving opportunities, alternating with weaving "lockouts".

This design situation clashes with the cooldown of OGCDs, such as "Fleche", in several ways.

Firstly, the new EW Red Mage rotation extends the "Mana combo" by one GCD due to the addition of "Resolution". This results in constantly off-setting the Red Mage GCD rhythm from its OGCD cooldown timers, even during 100% uptime.

Secondly, any delays or interruptions to the Red Mage GCD cycle due to normal encounter mechanics, enemy RP sequences, etc, will also desync the GCD rhythm and OGCD timers.

Thirdly, the use of normal Red Mage cooldown tools that insert an extra instant-cast GCD into the rotation — "Acceleration" and "Swiftcast" — also has the inadvertent effect of shifting the alignment between Dualcast windows and OGCD timers.
Issues with current ways of compensating the drift tendency
These effects can be compensated and adjusted by micro-managing the way that Acceleration/Swiftcast are used, in order to insert only as many instant-casts as necessary to "re-align" the Dualcast rhythm and the OGCD timers.

However, this adds significant complexity to the usage of tools that most players likely assume are simply there for either prolonged movement situations, or pure DPS.

In fact, simply using Acceleration/Swiftcast as they become available — a natural and typically-correct habit for players to approach their OGCD timers with — has the potential to throw the Dualcast/OGCD alignment into perpetual disturbance. I think that this is strange and unintuitive.

Furthermore, while the issue can be controlled carefully during 100% uptime or well-planned encounter timelines by rationing Acceleration/Swiftcast in predetermined ways, these sorts of solutions will unravel quickly in more general content, where uptime is less determinant.

This can be deranged further by such factors as excessive Raises being required (eg, by interrupting the point at which an Acceleration/Swiftcast was planned to be inserted), or having an opportunity to Vercure during an intermission (leading to a recalculated rhythm being necessary due to coming into resumed uptime with a Dualcast ready).

Why these Red Mage OGCD clashes matter
The reason that all of this becomes an issue is that Red Mage's many damaging OGCDs form a meaningful contribution to its total damage output, and also have overall very short cooldowns.

Thus, repeatedly mis-aligning the Dualcast window from OGCD timers can result in being forced to delay shorter OGCDs, such as Fleche, by a significant portion of their cooldown timer whenever their cooldown finishes during a 2.0s-cast rather than an instant-cast window.

In turn, this increases the chance of either losing a usage entirely, or pushing the action outside of valuable party-buff windows.
Why I'm advocating for 1.50s cast times for Red Mage
If Red Mage's primary cast times — "Jolt 2", "Verfire", "Verstone", "Veraero 2", "Verthunder 2" — were reduced to 1.50s, then Red Mage would be able to weave its OGCDs semi-freely as they became available.

This is because the gap between a 1.50s cast completion and a 2.50s GCD completion is sufficient for most players to safely fit 1 OGCD without clipping their next GCD.

To be clear, there would still be situations where multiple OGCDs finish their cooldowns at the same time, and after a 1.50s cast, Red Mage would only have "weave space" for one of them, resulting in drift still occurring.

However, I think that it would still be a significant improvement in Red Mage quality-of-life and "playfeel" to be able to weave at least one OGCD after every cast.

This change would also make it easier and more comfortable for Red Mages to contribute party support such as "Magicked Barrier" and "Addle" when needed, especially in situations where memorizing and pre-planning an entire encounter pattern is either not practical, or not possible.

I do not favor an alternate solution — adding charges to all OGCDs — because I think that FFXIV is already suffering from players having far too many OGCD actions to cram into narrow buff windows, and adding charges to a damaging action will only result in players feeling pressured to dump all charges during major buff windows, thus adding even more keypress-clutter.

222 — Reduce Moulinet cost to 16 Mana
Endwalker added the "Mana Stack" system to Red Mage, which now serves to unlock the "Spell" portion of the "Mana combo" ("Verholy/Verflare" → "Scorch" → "Resolution").

As part of this system, "Enchanted Moulinet" currently costs 20 Mana, and generates 1 Mana Stack per use. This allows Red Mage to unlock the "Spell" combo chain even during AOE situations.

However, any Mana Stacks are lost and wasted if the Red Mage uses any non-combo Spells before consuming the Mana Stacks.

All of this combines to create an awkward constraint: Red Mage must always use Moulinet 3 times in a row, or the Red Mage will become "trapped" in a situation in which the Red Mage has no choice but to discard Mana Stacks in order to continue activating actions.

Plainly, since one Moulinet costs 20 Mana, achieving those necessary three uses in a row requires 60 total Mana.

But this creates a schism with the Red Mage single-target rotation, in which a single use of "Manafication" instantly charges the Red Mage with enough Mana to execute a full Melee Combo + Spell Combo.

So, for example, a Red Mage that starts an AOE pull and uses Manafication, then uses Moulinet immediately, will become "trapped" with 2 Mana Stacks and 10 Mana remaining, unable to use a third Moulinet, and unable to generate the Mana to do so without casting a non-combo Spell and thus, deleting their Mana Stacks.

I think that this is unintuitive, and that it would simply be more fun if Manafication also intuitively granted Red Mage enough Mana for a full AOE "combo", just like it grants enough Mana for a full single-target combo.

By reducing Moulinet cost to 16 Mana, three Moulinets would only cost 48 Mana, and thus one usage of Manafication would also enable a full AOE combo.

Alternatively, Manafication could be increased to generating 60 Mana, but as this has the potential to have wide-ranging consequences for the single-target rotation, I do not favor it as a solution.

333 — Adjust 2-target Spell balancing
The current imbalance between 2 and 3 target situations
In interviews, a stated minor goal for Endwalker Job design was an attempt to make it easier for players to have a "ST" and "AOE" hotbar set, by streamlining target thresholds for AOE actions.

Red Mage is currently not aligning with this goal cleanly, making it awkward to attempt to divide Red Mage actions into ST and AOE hotbars.

Currently, at 2 targets, the highest potency comes from:
Switching to "Impact" to spend "Dualcast", instead of "Veraero/Verthunder 3"

Exclusively using "Jolt 2" to trigger "Dualcast" (since "Impact" usage means that "Verstone/Verfire Ready" are no longer being generated)

Continuing to use the "Riposte" combo to spend Mana.

At 3 targets, the highest potency changes to:
Using "Impact" to spend "Dualcast"

Switching to "Veraero 2/Verthunder 2" to trigger "Dualcast".

Switching to "Moulinet" to spend Mana.

Potential adjustments to normalize AOE usage
"Impact" is currently very powerful relative to "Veraero/Verthunder 3": 210 potency vs. 380 potency. So, pushing the "Impact" threshold up to 3 targets would require a significant nerf to its potency that would likely displease most Red Mage players.

Of course, players tend to view buffs more favorably, so alternatively, the entire Red Mage AOE threshold could be pulled down to 2 targets.

This could be accomplished by increasing the potency of "Veraero 2/Verthunder 2" to 160.

Regarding the Mana generation difference between "Jolt 2" and "Veraero 2/Verthunder 2", this would hardly be enough to motivate VA2/VT2 on a single target, and thus there would likely be no need to adjust the Mana generation of "Veraero 2/Verthunder 2", even if their potency was increased like this.
As for "Moulinet", one possibility is to simply increase its flat potency to at least 160, which — if "Moulinet" was also reduced to 16 Mana cost — would make 3x "Moulinet" slightly more attractive than "Riposte combo" at 2 targets.

An alternative adjustment would be to give "Moulinet" a new feature: its damage could increase by 25% per Mana Stack. Thus, a "Moulinet" pseudo-combo would have potency 130 → 162.5 → 195.

The first option would give a 48-Mana "triple Moulinet" a total potency of at least 480, for a potency-per-mana of 10, and the second option would give 3x Moulinet a total potency of 487.5, for a PPMana of 10.15625.

The "Riposte combo" is 980 total potency for 50 Mana, or 19.6 PPMana, so either way, it would allow "Moulinet" to edge out "Riposte combo" at 2+ targets, while "Riposte → Zwerchhau" would still remain more desirable against a single target.

444 — Condense the "Riposte combo" functionality
Currently, the "Riposte combo" occupies 3 buttons, for very little reason, because the intended gameplay is that these actions are never begun with less than 50 Mana, and the actions are always used in an unbroken sequence.

It is currently true that there are extremely niche optimizations related to encounter phasing and kill-times wherein a Red Mage may intentionally mis-use their combo actions, such as beginning a combo at 45 Mana, or using Zwerchhau twice in a row. However, I think that the overall design quality of the job should take precedent over preserving these types of bizarre, rare, and likely-unintended optimizations.

It's not that it is difficult in the slightest to press 3 different keys for "Riposte", "Zwerchhau", and "Redoublement", but... that is also the thrust of my argument: I think that breaking the Weaponskill combo into 3 keys adds mechanically very little to the job's playfeel, since it's not much of a real decision, and more of just a mechanical habit to A-B-C through it.

I think that it would be cleaner overall to condense the Red Mage "Riposte combo" down to a single key, which would free up design and keybind space for more actions as the job's design continues to evolve.

To do this, the "Riposte combo" could be converted to function like Gunbreaker's "Gnashing Fang":
"Riposte" costs a flat 50 Mana to activate.

Activating "Riposte" converts it into "Zwerchhau".

Activating "Zwerchhau" converts it into "Redoublement".

Activating "Redoublement" converts it back into "Riposte".

As for Red Mage gameplay while synced to very low levels, the cost of beginning the combo could simply increase as the Red Mage levels up and unlocks each step.

Alternatively, the cost just remain at 50 Mana at all levels, because honestly, down-synced low-level gameplay is going to remain atrociously unfun either way. (But perhaps this viewpoint is too cynical)

A third option could be to simply unlock the entire basic combo at once at an early level, but to allow each portion to only become "Enchanted" at certain levels, so that the combo still feels like it is "upgrading".

555 — Heretical proposal: Remove "Jolt" and procs
Explanation and motivations
This idea is probably controversial, and I don't mind being disagreed with sharply about this point, since it would fundamentally change an aspect of the job. But I'd like to open this idea up for discussion.

And, admittedly, this steps outside the scope of "Simple improvements", but while I'm here making a post, I guess it's as good a time as any to make this suggestion.

Basically, I think that Red Mage has developed a very solid core gameplay design, to the point that it does not need additional crude randomness elements tacked on to it.

Furthermore, I think that to some degree, the "proc system" for Red Mage holds the job back from developing a more nuanced or interesting GCD cycle in-between burst phases.

Also, speaking personally, I find the proc-fishing portion of the Red Mage cycle to become somewhat dull, bland, and repetitive after a while. But the proc system also tightly locks the job's keybind capacity and rotational space, so it's difficult to insert new actions into the rhythm that is currently created by the proc-fishing process.
The basic idea
Imagine a design in which "Jolt 2" is deleted, and "Verfire/Verstone Ready" are removed.

Instead, "Verfire" and "Verstone" can always be cast, and the Red Mage simply chooses between them freely based on the current state of the Black/White Mana totals.
Going beyond the basic idea: things that could replace Jolt
Once that line has been crossed and changed, now space is freed for something else to be added to the Red Mage GCD cycle, to liven it up in a more interesting way than the current perpetual smears of proc-fishing that fill up the in-between phases of the rotational cycle.

As one off-the-cuff example: a 30s CD, on-GCD, Spell that changes its potency based on whether it is "hard-cast" or "Dualcast", allowing it to be inserted into the rotation regardless of where it comes off-cooldown in the rhythm.

For example, taking a cue from FFXI's Red Mage combat roles, Red Mage could gain "Enfeeble", a GCD that applies a 30s dot — "Verbio" if imbalanced to Black, "Verdia" if imbalanced to White, or both dots if Mana is currently balanced.

"Enfeeble" would have an additional on-hit potency when cast. If hardcast, the potency would be 330 (like "Verstone/Verfire"). If Dualcast, the potency would increase to 380 (like "Veraero 3/Verthunder 3"). Meanwhile, the potencies of the applied dots, Verbio and Verdia, would always be consistent.

This way, "Enfeeble" could smoothly replace whatever type of GCD was ready whenever the "Enfeeble" CD became available, while remaining potency-neutral in the rotation.

That's only meant as one off-the-cuff example (and I know that FFXIV seems to be developing an allergy to on-target effects, so perhaps it wouldn't be acceptable design parameters).

Another idea could be finally adding in Verice and Verwater as a 30s CD on-GCD Spell, changing based on the preceding Spell: if it was Verstone or Veraero, then the action becomes "Verwater", and if it was Verfire or Verthunder, then the action becomes "Verice".

And so on — I'm just trying to give examples of things that I think would be more fun or interesting in the Red Mage rotation than its current GCD filler process.
Proc-removal purpose summary
Basically, I just think that the "proc" system feels somewhat-superfluous and tacked-on, and could comfortably be retired without harming Red Mage's overall quality or enjoyability.

Then, with "Verstone/Verfire" always available, that would allow "Jolt 2" to be deprecated and replaced by something more fun, more interesting, and that feels more "Red Mage-y" in terms of the overall FF series.

For AOE, you may think this is insane but you can cast Verthunder II -> Veraero II -> Impact to reach 10 Black and White Mana using 1 hardcast Verthunder II, 1 dualcast Veraero II, and 1 acceleration/swift cast Impact at level 90. After your last Veraero II, you can enter Manafication + Embolden -> Go into Moullinet Combo. Plus, it aligns with burst phase on the 3rd GCD. After the initial AoE, you should never be running into the issue of not having enough black and white mana for AoE when using manafication due to the initial Verholy/Verflare + Scorch + Resolution generating black and white mana as well. This is generally the worst case scenario though.

Personally, I never have an issue with not having black and white mana in AoE as I start casting as the tank is pulling, dual cast & immediately gap close with Corps-a-corps, acceleration -> Impact for a new weave slot, then use displacement to pull myself ahead of the tank and to continue casting + dualcasting. I generally am way above +10 black and white mana when the tank stabilizes their pulls, so I never really need to waste time trying to gain the extra 10 black and white mana before entering embolden + Manafication burst phase.

For RDM's alignment, I think the goal of RDM optimization is exactly to know when to utilize Acceleration and Swiftcast to reset your alignment properly, as well as utilizing them for extra weave windows. Having your single target melee combo activate at 50 black and white mana rather than at 80 also encourages utilizing your melee combo to help create windows for utilizing your Fleche/Contre Sixte skills. I don't think their quick spells need to be 1.5 seconds for that reason.

The only time drifting becomes a huge issue in the rotation is when RDM needs to verraise, but that's basically the utility raise tax RDM pays for saving the run.

Theres a few points in fights where id want a 1.5s cast time, and not even for weaving. And honestly, id be ok IF it was ONLY attached to Jolt.
It would give you an additional reason to use jolt, outside of not having procs (which you should "usually" have.)

The rest of what you said, I'm sure someone would have something to say to those, but I'm just not really seeing much to say about them.

This seems an inelegant and difficult-to-roll-back way to deal with drift issues. I don't hate the idea, but it looks like it could benefit from more time to stew. (Consider, for instance, if procs were removed, what bankable and rarely used spell might be added as an instant-cast to deal with those same issues.)

I'd rather standardize both the ST and AoE combos' total B|W Mana consumption at 60 and slightly increase B|W Mana gains. 20 per step is far more intuitive than 16 each for AoE and 20|15|15 for ST.

I actually prefer having reason to mix and match ST and AoE skills. This fixation on wholly separate AoE and ST sets just makes button bloat of either half for most of any given situation.

I'd make it optional --as some are apparently soul-scarred already by the Gnashing Fang combo consolidation-- but sure.

Flesh this out further and I'd probably be for it. I don't mind the existence of procs so long as they lead to (macro-)rotational means of optimization, but I will agree that the current proc-based lockouts are a poor design.

I feel like shortening the cast time would mess with the sense of flow. Right now the completion of your first cast is your signal to cast the second spell and get in your short window of repositioning before the next cast.

The rhythm you want to wipe out is something that defines the job to me.

The one thing I would like to see changed with current RDM play is the handling of Resolution.

There are two things I feel is an issue with the design and leads me to forget to cast it, especially if I have been flicking between max level play and lower levels.

1. The combo keeps getting longer.

2. Having it on the same transforming button as Scorch delays the appearance of the Resolution button on your hotbar, and thus delays its visibility as an available proc. By the time I see it I am already pressing something else. And having to press the same button twice just feels clunkier.

The simplest answer might be to have a different button transform into Resolution. Perhaps use Reprise instead.

Or to simplify the combo and not mess with muscle memory across levels so much, have Scorch upgrade to Resolution instead of it being added on afterwards. But of course that takes more work and rebalancing.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Iscah

The one thing I would like to see changed with current RDM play is the handling of Resolution.

...

The simplest answer might be to have a different button transform into Resolution. Perhaps use Reprise instead.

Unless we're given a brief proc-unlock period (e.g., 5 or 10 seconds) in place of its being a true combo, I would rather not move Resolution from a button I'd be pressing regularly and with the same purpose (Scorch) to a situational utility key (Reprise).

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Unless we're given a brief proc-unlock period (e.g., 5 or 10 seconds) in place of its being a true combo, I would rather not move Resolution from a button I'd be pressing regularly and with the same purpose (Scorch) to a situational utility key (Reprise).

An unlock period might be the neatest solution actually, over the instant "you pressed something else; goodbye combo" state because after Scorch I'll most likely be going for Stone/Fire and not Jolt.

they should just make enchanted moulinet cost 15 mana

Quote:

Originally Posted by Duskane

they should just make enchanted moulinet cost 15 mana

If they do the same to Riposte as to keep them the same, I wouldn't hate that, though I don't see why we'd need to be able to bank 2.22 combos (or even a whole 2, for that matter), and steps of 20 does seem faintly smoother to me than steps of 15.

(Personally, I'd most like to see any Enchanted Melee action proc Dualcast and for the ST combo to ramp up cost at 10-15-20 or 15-20-25 opposite En. Moulinet's 15 or 20, respectively. At least then the pre-50 kit would feel like it has at least something going for it.)