The Black vs. White balance bars for Red Mage is kinda pointless....

[maestroanth]

Make all DPS jobs a 1 button spam to be honest. Why apply so much complexity to damage dealing. Maybe two buttons like God of War.

Lol, why even have that button, just bot it ;P

I cannot even imagine playing this game on a playstation controller instead of my gamer mouse.

[maestroanth]

Yes to both of these. In short, the balance does matter if you want to get the most out of both your melee combos and Verholy/flare. Furthermore, the job also gives you tools like Acceleration and Manafication to help manage things. You want to try to keep one side only slightly higher than the other to take advantage of the mana boost for your finisher spells, too. The trick isn't so much in keeping balance rather than pushing both sides of the gauge to the appropriate levels as quickly as possible on a continuous basis.

Okay, ya, the purpose of the balance gauge makes a bit better sense to me after reading the last two spells a red mage gets. Where I'm at now there is no reason for you to not keep that gauge perfectly balanced all the time which to me says "you might as well consolidate the two bars into one and call it a red mana bar or something".

[maestroanth]

.....

Still...I wonder though if a RDM design with a little more freedom would be better no? Take out the necessity of any maintaining balance in that gauge at all and whenever you feel like playing a WHM role you can obtain and use white mana with white spells, and whenever you feel like playing a BLM role you obtain and use black mana with black spells, whenever you feel like playing a melee role (or when you are simply 00M) etc., and just have a mixed "red" spell here and there when you accumulated resource in both magics. You just pick which role as how you feel the environment/situation warrants it.

I know that style flies in the face of how traditional MMO's play in regards to parties. Nonetheless, that's how original FF felt with me with red mage which made that class a lot of fun.

[zuzu-bq]

Seriouness in, the RDM's original identity wouldn't fit on XIV's game. The devs did a greate job into implementing Red Mage into Eorzea making it natural to the MMO's system. RDM was not the only job to suffer throught this on its "conversion" to FFXIV. SMN and DRK to some degree also did and people complain about it from launch to this date.

About complexity, the rotation is very very very simple if you remove the mana aspects. Actually if you remove those and the melee attacks it's simply ARR BLM's base design with more instant spells. Isn't that the fun of the DPS jobs though? Complexity and barriers imposed by the job's very own design that once you overcome you deal more damage. The better you are doing that, the better you are dealing damage.

[Besame]

Red Mage seemed more confusing and complicated to me than Black so I made her, tried it out, said NO and she still sits at 50. I like to focus on the fight and not keeping gauges balanced, but that's me.

[NewAgeDoom]

Red Mage seemed more confusing and complicated to me than Black so I made her, tried it out, said NO and she still sits at 50. I like to focus on the fight and not keeping gauges balanced, but that's me.

It's not really about keeping it perfectly balanced though, is the thing. You always want to have one a small chunk higher than the other, so you know which of the endgame spells to use at the end of your melee combo.

I understand if it's not for everyone, though. I'm looking at Summoner, and it's start to intimidate me with its opening rotation, even with as far as I've come with it already.

[Mhaeric]

Red Mage seemed more confusing and complicated to me than Black so I made her, tried it out, said NO and she still sits at 50. I like to focus on the fight and not keeping gauges balanced, but that's me.

RDM is currently the easiest dps job to play. There is a lot of leeway in keeping the gauges balanced, and it comes fairly naturally. E.g. Generally you just cast whichever version of the spell you have less mana in or don't already have a proc in. It flows quite naturally. The numbers on the gauge make it seem like you might have to do some math on the fly, but I can assure you that is not the case. There's also no dot or buff maintenance to worry about at all. In short, it is an incredibly straightforward job that is very forgiving of any mistakes.

[duvvvv]

...and if you just want to keep the gauge balanced without worrying about your DPS output, once you're lvl 66, just rotate between your oGCDs + jolt II + impact, lazy rotation and works great in Eureka xD
but I get OP, the job quests tell you that you're balancing the white and black magicks but in reality you're just casting damage spells (mostly associated with black magic) while vercure/verraise (white magic supposedly) are not expected to be part of your rotation.
it would be awesome if there are other things happening, like building up your white mana will grant buffs on you/party while black mana debuffs enemy. so balancing is kind of a mini-game to keep the buffs and debuffs up, not just building up the gauge.
however, the current RDM is what we got, and don't get me wrong I do enjoy this job, but I wouldn't mind seeing more from it in the future.

[Ceallach]

Granted I'm only lvl 55 in this class, but so far the white/black bar casting to me feels like needless complication since it all pertains to just dps. The spells are about the same dps-wise, so essentially it can all be reduced to just a 200 pool of resource of either the verthunder or veraero as the nuke. It's all virtually arbitrary since they just take one nuke spell, call the same thing with two different names to spit the white/black magic labels on it.

Not even the cure spell screws up the white bar which I kinda wish it would to make it more challenging to manage the resources.

Going in newb, I thought the system would have been more like: all utility spells such as cure, protect, raise, i.e. -> white mage stuff gives white resource, and all nuke spells/enchant sword with fire stuff i.e. -> black mage stuff gives black resource, and each can be spent on either a black uber spell or white uber spell every once in awhile. With a few special/blended spells here and there that require both (like give an aoe damage and aoe heal all at once that require resource of each).

As of now the white and black magic spells you cast to gain resource have no separate roles in it and kinda a shitty design...

Say that again when you're level 70.

If you build only one color of mana, it gets harder to build the other. You need both for your weaponskills to become enchanted. Your combo finisher depends on what mana you have more of (Verholy if you have more black mana than white, Verflare otherwise). It's fine as it is. Besides, too much utility stuff on a DPS would be really bad. You may as well just call it the game's first support job and piss off the bards.

[Powe]

Lol, why even have that button, just bot it ;P

I cannot even imagine playing this game on a playstation controller instead of my gamer mouse.

It’s actually super easy, I play all the time on a ps4 controller lol. Only bad part is the typing