Red mage is great the game state is the problem

Red mage is the best it has ever been. It's not the weakest caster for once, it still has god tier res spam, made double caster viable early expansion before melee cry babies got pictomancer nerfed.

It's also the only true caster left in the game besides pictomancer. It's still stylish and has Magick barrier for mit.

My problem is people are upset red mage is not top dps despite being a utility focused job. I understand it's harder to play than any other caster but they dont balance around job difficulty anymore but selfish vs not selfish. This is way brain dead jobs like samurai viper and black mage continue to dominate.

If red mage was that strong then machinist should be too but then the melee players would actually defecate themselves.

Another facet of red mage that blows my mind is that instead of making enchanted reprise more forgiving to use they just made melee combo ranged every 2 minutes. Why?

The game is so movement intensive now and the devs think of the most random and obscure ways to make older jobs work with it.

Is it?

I mean don't get me wrong it's far from bad, but there's so much greatness hinted at but never materialized. Among the easier ones is triviality of procs (due to high proc-chance and hence pretty reliable energy income) essentially making them pointless, easy of mobility (a problem shared by all casters including in particular BLM actually!), the removal of 120s melee combo, lack of incentive to be mobile via gapclosers + backflips as the potency of the non-flip has been equalized, and the two big ones:
* Our white magic side is severly underdeveloped. At the very least I'd like the support abilities to be more healer themed, that is, instead of +healing on barrier, make it a weaker version of the WHM wings + chain, giving the group damage reduction and a regen effect. Even better would be full-on Verregen on top of Vercure, Verholy being a weaker AoE nuke but also having a stun (balance it by making Verstone give more white than Verfire gives black?), Veraero causing a DoT both on single target and AoE, etc. Bonus points if in turn, some black mage originating spells interact with our mana pool more than the near-triviality it is right now.
* We have a melee weapon, but use it for three attacks ~1x in 120s now that Manafication is the lamest thing ever. That's... sad. As hell. Even our autoattacks are a forced 1 damage point now. Might as well just remove it entirely if we're being honest. But that's not what I want. Give me actual melee abilities. Maybe some positionals? Make physical melee damage a non-trivial portion of the whole damage output, basically.

I dunno, personally I feel that DPS wise, RDM is in a great spot even if I'm unsure if its intentional or not.

For most of EW, RDM could barely touch the damage of melees and selfish casters. I had runs where I performed nigh flawlessly and did less damage than melees who died twice.

But this patch, I've consistently been competitive damage wise.

I don't think RDM being the best DPS in the game damage wise would be healthy considering verraise, but I also don't feel it needs to be as punished by having verraised as it was in the past.

Verraise is extremely strong, but its a situational button and it felt awful in EW to be bottom of the DPS list despite trying to optimize my performance just because I had this button I might not even press.

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Originally Posted by Sarantserel

I dunno, personally I feel that DPS wise, RDM is in a great spot even if I'm unsure if its intentional or not.

For most of EW, RDM could barely touch the damage of melees and selfish casters. I had runs where I performed nigh flawlessly and did less damage than melees who died twice.

But this patch, I've consistently been competitive damage wise.

I don't think RDM being the best DPS in the game damage wise would be healthy considering verraise, but I also don't feel it needs to be as punished by having verraised as it was in the past.

Verraise is extremely strong, but its a situational button and it felt awful in EW to be bottom of the DPS list despite trying to optimize my performance just because I had this button I might not even press.

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I agree. I have a lot of experience with rdm, cleared 4 ultimates with rdm, played and perfected it since release.
It has never been better! This is the best rdm we ever had.
I stuck with the job during the hard times in shadowbringers and endwalker when it was considered bad, due to verraise having zero value in endgame because of bodychecks.
Tbh it is a joke that rdm even deals more damage than picto now! That is just nuts, as if there was no rez tax anymore!
It also shows that picto was severely overnerfed, while every other job got buffed.
Add phases also help rdm's damage output a lot, giving it an edge in multi target fights.
A well timed vercombo with finishers during m9s add phase and m10s cleave maxxing does quite a bit more than melees could do.

RDM mechanically within the bounds of 14’s restrictive encounter design is good, I think it doing more damage than PCT is bad but that’s more a problem that they overnerfed PCT not that RDM is doing too much damage

But its job feel has never been worse. RDM released damn near perfect in SB and for some reason ever since then the idea to add more to it is “more melee combo” but now more melee combo can be done at range. Which feels off and bad

So it’s DPS position is good, its job identity feel keeps getting worse

I think minus the recent melee combo change the design of red mage has stayed consistently intuitive yet skill expressive. As Car-san stated, the loss off potency gain by playing riskier with your backflip instead of spamming disengagement took a lot of challenge from the job but i think it was a fair change if the devs wanna experiement with death walls and smaller arena's.

I also like Car's suggestion to add MORE white magic and off healer tools if red mage wants to be a low damage high utility job going forward. The current underpowered state of combat raise in a lot of players minds makes the current res tax on dps feel far to stringent.

I'm personally of the opinions that the dps should all do relatively equal damage but I'm not sure if that'd make more people quit than happy.