Why do I suck so much at RDM?

All you ever hear is how brain dead easy this class is, and while the skill set is pretty straight forward I find myself having slow reaction times when it comes to deciding whether to cast either Jolt, Impact, Verstone or Veraereo.

What can I do to improve reaction times?

I'm only i313 with verity weap and can barely keep up 3900 dps on SSS Susano. Am I just undergeared? Or just lack experience? What are pro RDMs doing that I'm not?

Do it like me: change your interface so that your proc skills(verstone/fire and impact) have really huge icons and place them in very visible places.

Well, I'm no expert but there's a lot of information here.

Red Mage Guide

The general idea is cast Jolt at a single target, Impact at multiple targets, then either a white mana spell or black mana spell depending on the your gauge. In addition, you always make use on your proc by casting Jolt again, then the proced spell.

That's because you're thinking too much.
Don't get me wrong, many jobs have decision making components and need it all planned out (I'm look at you, SMN and BLM).
But these meaningless things ("what spell do I cast next?") have to be ingrained.
I'll glance at my mana (and TP, if I sprinted) to determine what filler spell I need to cast when I enter my UI cycle (Foul or something else if I have the mana for it/know it'll be a fast tick). You need to look at stuff like your Aetherflow cd on SMN.
But I don't think "do I Fire next?"- I instinctively know this (and even if I have to Fire early due to mechanics).

Read that guide, or any guide, or read the tooltips and do some napkin math yourself to figure out what's optimal.
And then go bash a dummy for like an hour, or two hours, or how many hours you need (I'm not joking with this).
Eventually, you'll get bored and distracted and "zone out" of what you're doing. When this happens but when you regain awareness you notice you're still keeping up with the correct rotation, then you know it's ingrained.
All I keep track off on RDM are my ogcds and my mana just as I start the melee combo (to pick the correct finisher). Everything else is already second nature.
It's all practice, really.

OP, dps is acrnym of damage per second and guess what, it is a function of time. Ur dps is dependent on fight length and varies based on how many capable players in the same group. If you have 4 dps with good skills it is easy to get 4k DPS, if u r the only good player among the 4 DPS< guess what u will never reach 4K, do not be so obsessed with DPS meter and instead you should use it as a tool to learn stuff

Could be your UI. I'm so use to WeakAuras from WoW that I struggled with not having strong visual indicators with this proc heavy job. Make sure you can easily glance at your buffs/Dualcast, Veraero/fire, and your balance meter. Once I found a comfy spot for everything it was just a matter of learning the rhythm of dualcasting. Took awhile but the job went from feeling clunky and a bit overwhelming to quite fluid.

I'd say just practice until it starts being second nature to you. At first I had that problem too but now it's like instinct. I play with a controller and adjusted my UI so that I keep my gauge and buffs close to my cross hotbar.

You'd be surprised how often I hear things like this. A lot of it is just experience and learning how to deal with each situation as it comes. Looking at your mana and procs and then going from there, it can be weird sometimes if you have, for example, higher black mana than white but you have a verfire proc that will set you over the 30cap you'll have to know that and know that you need to jolt into veraero first then go back to that verfire proc. Mostly it seems like a lot of people have the opener wrong.

I had never seen that guide linked above until now, but it's got some really good information in there! If you want a visual aid you can check out my youtube where I have 2 different guides for red mage that might help clear some things up for you. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNC...SEdnij70NFn8XQ, but it sounds like you pretty much got it though. Just let it be more fluid and you'll get it :)

Red Mage might be simple to play but it requires you to pay attention to other things compared to other jobs.
It's not a set rotation to remember but its more "reaction" (or prediction) based and that way of thinking is something you will get used to over time.

Always have your gauge in the back of ur mind or look often at it because what element you will have to cast next depends greatly on it.
You pretty much have 4-5 seconds to think about it after you cast jolt/impact whether you should use your Veraero or Verthunder in your next Jolt/Impact rotation.
Jolt/Impact/Scatter always give equal amount of White & Black mana so you will already know before you start casting Jolt which mana will be lower so you know which skill you should use next.

Impact has a lower priority compared to your other 2 procs Verstone & Verfire so always cast Verstone or Verfire first when procced. And if both are procced always use the one of the lowest mana.
Only use the Impact proc when you generally should cast Jolt. Impact is pretty much a stronger version of Jolt. Generally you should be casting Impact whenever you should be casting Jolt & you have the Impact proc up. The less you have to use Jolt the better.

The general idea of Red Mage & reaction timers is think about what you should cast as soon as you finish your dual cast. Think before you have to decide so you won't have to "react" to what you should be doing.

RDM might have an easy rotation but it has a diffirent type of difficulty that might take some time to get used to for some people.

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Originally Posted by MelvinK

OP, dps is acrnym of damage per second and guess what, it is a function of time. Ur dps is dependent on fight length and varies based on how many capable players in the same group. If you have 4 dps with good skills it is easy to get 4k DPS, if u r the only good player among the 4 DPS< guess what u will never reach 4K, do not be so obsessed with DPS meter and instead you should use it as a tool to learn stuff

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Um no. It should not vary wildly with fight length. Since dps is damage per second it's the average amount of damage you are doing every second. Any fight longer than about 1 min should show the same dps regardless of length or other dps classes. The only difference would be buffs, more balance uptime will increase dps, as well as other buffs from other classes.

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Originally Posted by Wolf_Gang

All you ever hear is how brain dead easy this class is, and while the skill set is pretty straight forward I find myself having slow reaction times when it comes to deciding whether to cast either Jolt, Impact, Verstone or Veraereo.

What can I do to improve reaction times?

I'm only i313 with verity weap and can barely keep up 3900 dps on SSS Susano. Am I just undergeared? Or just lack experience? What are pro RDMs doing that I'm not?

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Are you comparing to other rdms in the party or just fflogs? It's possible the ones in the logs are getting better buffs from other members.

In terms of priority though verstone = verfire > impact > jolt. For stone, aero, fire, and thunder aero and thunder should never be cast without dual cast, never hard cast them. For all 4 cast the one that gives whichever mana is lower. This does mean alternating around. Say for example you have 40 black mana and 38 white mana. If you cast jolt or impact follow it up with veraero. If instead you cast verstone follow it up verthunder(cause after the stone cast white mana will be higher than black).

Hard to say with little detail on your rotation and gear. From my experience as others said practice of the fight helps a lot, but I saw no one really mention gear. Though we may not have official stat weights yet for RDM to work off, a single piece of gear being subpar for you could lead to lower numbers. Group composition, buffs use, and even yours and those you are doing run with mood can also as much play a factor. You of course can only control your own gear, rotation, and mood, but take a look at the group as a whole. It can play a lot into it as well.

Isn't 3900 meant to be fairly good DPS at that iLv on SSS dummy, bearing in mind no party buffs etc etc? If not I'm doing something fairly wrong considering I'm i316 on my alt character. So I may post about this later after I do a rough recording of the rotation I'm using. Though some of this may be down to a little RNG, there's some occasions I'll pop out 3840, and others I'll pop out 3961 or so. The class as far as I can say is only easy in principle, but rather fairly difficult to actually execute.

In terms of reaction times, I just reorganised my hotbar and resized my UI and it made the world of difference.

Most of it just comes down to practice. Take advantage of the 2.5sec between each dualcast to take a glance at your balance bar, procs and cd timers, then plan out your next 2-3 spells. After doing it for awhile and seeing the same patterns multiple times, it gets to the point you know what to do next almost without thinking.