RDM Proposed Change

So I love RDM. There really isn’t much about it I would change except to have it be even more versatile and more in line with the melee/caster it is in the lore.

As it stands now, mana enhances your melee combo by using spells. What if…..

They buffed the melee combo so melee gives you black mana and spells give white mana, and that mana can be expended on either spells or more melee combos.

Basically, I’d love to see some way to allow more Red Mages the ability to play the way we want. Do we want to stab and slash more, or cast all the ver, or do a bit of both and still achieve the same end result and same average DPS parsing.

I love Red Mage but I wish I wasn’t so pigeonholed into casting primarily and having melee be for mana expenditure. Both casting and melee can build and damage equally, and both can expand equally.

That’s my dream. Thank you for coming to my Red Talk.

From the way i see it, RDM's time to shine has yet to come. I mean, it does have a solid skillkit to a degree, but if this game had something akin to Skilltrees from where RDM could pick his skills/spells from (for example: White Magic, Black Magic, Fencing and Scarlet Magic, with the latter being something similar that Lambert uses from the lv60 Jobquest), Red Mage would without a doubt, be one of the most flexible jobs to play, a true jack of all trades.

I'm currently leveling RDM, about half way through 79 as we speak. I agree with the above comment, the time will come when red will outshine the other magic users. Currently its Jolt>Verthunder, Jolt>Veraero filling in with procs all the way to balance gauge 80>melee combo>Verflare or Verholy. Rinse and repeat. I have soooo much fun with this class, I laugh myself stupid when I managed to backflip off an arena when ending melee. However, I feel it is lacking in terms of playstyle. Once the newjob changes are shown for Endwalker we will know better which direction RDM is heading... but I hope for more variety.

Don’t get your hopes up. RDM is a caster and designed specifically that way so it works as that in comps. I would however not say no to a beefed up melee combo or perhaps some mitigation on self when going into melee range.

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Originally Posted by Xyranthion

So I love RDM. There really isn’t much about it I would change except to have it be even more versatile and more in line with the melee/caster it is in the lore.

As it stands now, mana enhances your melee combo by using spells. What if…..

They buffed the melee combo so melee gives you black mana and spells give white mana, and that mana can be expended on either spells or more melee combos.

Basically, I’d love to see some way to allow more Red Mages the ability to play the way we want. Do we want to stab and slash more, or cast all the ver, or do a bit of both and still achieve the same end result and same average DPS parsing.

I love Red Mage but I wish I wasn’t so pigeonholed into casting primarily and having melee be for mana expenditure. Both casting and melee can build and damage equally, and both can expand equally.

That’s my dream. Thank you for coming to my Red Talk.

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The issue is that there's only going to be one optimal way to play the job. So, regardless of design, you will be pidgeonholed into playing the job a certain way, or you're just going to be faffing about not doing the job you signed up for--doing as much damage as you can.

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Basically, I’d love to see some way to allow more Red Mages the ability to play the way we want.

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That's not the game you signed up to play. FF14 is about playing DDR and dodging mechanics while playing Guitar Hero and executing your rotation as its core combat gameplay. The game and combat literally isn't designed for people to just 'freestyle' and hit whatever buttons they want in whatever order they want. And even if it were, there'd still be an optimal path which permits you to do your job most effectively and you're still going to be expected to be on that path.

So, to make RDM more 'freestyle' would actually be a curse--it would do a bad job of communicating or letting players discover that 'optimal path' and would instead be a job filled with 'traps' that actually hinder you rather than help. You'd end up with RDM doing poorly, not because they're necessarily unskilled, but because they decided to try some avenue of freedom that turns out to be a bad way to play.

Ultimately, you're complaining about the Mage part of Red Mage. Red Mage has always, in its entire history, been a caster first, and melee second. That's why it's a Red Mage and not something more like Mystic Knight.

RDM is in a very good place design-wise I don’t see a reason to redesign it; however they could make RDM melee combo a little longer by adding a fourth hit into the combo and a proper AOE melee combo with 2-3 attacks.

at best we just get a ogcd that lets us get 3 enchanted uses for free.

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Originally Posted by Brightshadow

RDM is in a very good place design-wise I don’t see a reason to redesign it; however they could make RDM melee combo a little longer by adding a fourth hit into the combo and a proper AOE melee combo with 2-3 attacks.

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The challenge adding a fourth stage to the melee combo would be: how to make it interesting? They would just add yet another button that worked the exact same way as the 3 previous ones? Maybe they could also add in a specific melee ogcd to be used there, like happens with the Continuation combo from GNB? I just feel that simply adding a fourth stage wouldn't bring a lot more to the table;

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Originally Posted by Gruntler

The issue is that there's only going to be one optimal way to play the job. So, regardless of design, you will be pidgeonholed into playing the job a certain way, or you're just going to be faffing about not doing the job you signed up for--doing as much damage as you can.

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Only bad players are following any kind of meta, and a meta exists solely to be broken and rebuild again. Its about damn time, that this dumb dps meta in FFXIV gets thrown out of the window and we get something new for once, before it starts to smell bad.

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Originally Posted by Anhra

Only bad players are following any kind of meta,

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Stopped reading here.

If you want to purposely play badly and waste your own time, that's fine. Don't waste other people's time though.

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Originally Posted by Rongway

Stopped reading here.

If you want to purposely play badly and waste your own time, that's fine. Don't waste other people's time though.

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As long as something gives you the intended result (by whatever means), it is more than enough for me. Putting more effort than that, just so you can exit some content 10 seconds earlier is a WASTE of effort for me.

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Originally Posted by Brightshadow

RDM is in a very good place design-wise I don’t see a reason to redesign it; however they could make RDM melee combo a little longer by adding a fourth hit into the combo and a proper AOE melee combo with 2-3 attacks.

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Please no fourth combo hit. The melee skills fits nicely onto one hotbar of the PS4 version right now and I don't want to have to figure out where to stick an extra one.

I'm really happy with how RDM plays at the moment and I don't want it to change much in future. Complex rotations make me tunnel-vision and miss mechanics.

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Originally Posted by Rongway

Stopped reading here.

If you want to purposely play badly and waste your own time, that's fine. Don't waste other people's time though.

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Get off your high horse, please.
I do read my tooltips and think about how to better my rotation. I'm not gonna watch lengthy guides on YT and play Simon Says because you want a run to be over 10 seconds sooner. And I only do savage with friends so we are all on the same page. Your 'complaint' is a non-issue for the majority since content is brain-dead anyway most of the time.

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Originally Posted by Anhra

Putting more effort than that, just so you can exit some content 10 seconds earlier is a WASTE of effort for me.

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Originally Posted by Payadopa

Get off your high horse, please.
... I'm not gonna ... play Simon Says because you want a run to be over 10 seconds sooner.

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Anhra's first reply was to a post talking about there being one way to play the job right, which was a reply to the OP who wants to be able to choose whether they want to be more caster or more melee.

In re: Gruntler's post, they are quite right in the context of the OP's request. If there were more choice between caster mode and melee mode, there would still be a correct way to RDM and many wrong ways to RDM. Choosing one way when the other would do 20% more damage would be a waste of everyone's time.

And if you had eight people playing their jobs wrong, a hypothetical 20% damage loss across the board would result in a difference of minutes, not seconds.

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Originally Posted by Payadopa

I do read my tooltips and think about how to better my rotation.

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If that's true, you're going to come up with something very close to the meta* and won't waste people's time.

* unless you play BLM. The action and buff texts for BLM are obscenely poor, and I don't expect anyone to devise an appropriate BLM rotation without being told the basics of how to BLM.