Seeing Red - A Complete Red Mage Guide

[Sacerdos]

I can appreciate your work, but why go through every possible situation of starting with white or starting with black and then every single GCD of with proc and no proc. opener rotations wont work with this class, its more about teaching the priority and following it, the real work comes down to how long it takes to get to 80/80 with all your cooldowns to use embolden for the melee combo wit flare/holy. I dont see holding off on things or using things at certain times to be any use since it takes varying number of cooldowns to reach to 80/80 each time. I see the priority list as this.

Someone asked about the opening, I was going through the best and worst cases proc wise in the opener, to show that:

1. You'll always hit 40/40 in at most 9 GCDs.
2. You'll never hit 40/40 faster than 7 GCDs.
3. If you use Swiftcast in the opener, you can guarantee 40/40 in 8 GCDs.

I'm actually not sure of the impact of getting into Melee combo faster is DPS wise though.

[Fortune_Cookie]

I'm actually not sure of the impact of getting into Melee combo faster is DPS wise though.

In the opener this will presumably depend on the timing of raid cooldowns?

From a sustained dps perspective, getting into melee 2 GCDs earlier or later shouldn't make a difference of itself. RDM is limited by the amount of WM/BM it generates. You can do one melee combo for each 80/80 mana you generate; going slightly earlier or later just shifts the same damage around in time a bit.

(Obviously, if the reason you're going into melee earlier is because you got more procs and hence more mana that equates to more damage. But it's really the additional mana that results in additional damage - outside openers/burst windows of course.)

[Tide]

I'm actually not sure of the impact of getting into Melee combo faster is DPS wise though.

Remember that our hardest hitting spell, holy and flare are off the melee combo, getting there faster means squeezing in more melee combos in a fight duration. as for the start of a fight using manafication, as someone else had mentioned, perhaps raid buffs or fight mechanics, ultimately you will want to learn to cater to the fight, making sure you are ready for a melee combo for a dps check phase etc.