RDM First Impressions (and perhaps advice) Thread

[Maeka]

Okay so I know I am REALLY late with this...


But I finally got off my duff and finally unlocked RDM. I've been tempted to now and then, I've seen RDMs in groups and they seem to do well, and I've read a little about them but never actually sat down to play the job myself.

Well I did that earlier today.

And I might say, that RDM is probably the best designed DPS job I've ever played thusfar? Just the design philosophy behind this job seems miles better than everything else.

It's got variety -- you cast spells, you melee, you have a few movement abilities (I've seen people hurling themselves off of cliffs with it though lol), you even get some measure of self-heal (probably the only DPS that does), and even an emergency Raise.

But what gets me, is the randomness of the job. Verfire and Verstone are very random, but yet it's not really a punishing sort of random, or at least it doesn't look like it? Most of the time when you introduce RNG into the mix, having too much of it, or too little of it, will impact your performance.

But not so, with Verfire and Verstone. The presence (or absence) of it will change your spellcasts so that you're not hitting the same tired combos over and over again, but yet if you don't see a Verfire or Verstone (or even see the "wrong" one), you can work around it. It doesn't feel too punishing, and it makes you think about what you're casting next (whatever you need).

Now maybe this changes later in levels, but for now, it seems like THE DPS job to be if you want something that's not over-complicated, but yet nice and varied with a decent amount of randomness to it.

I think I'm finally starting to get the hang of the basics (that whole use Jolt to get Dualcast thing took me awhile before the lightbulb went off in my head lol), now I just need to build muscle memory. I think I have a rather decent hotkey setup...

1 - Jolt
2 - Veraero (Shift+2 = Verstone)
3 - Verothunder (Shift+3 = Verfire)
4 - Corps-a-Corps
5 - Riposte
6 - Chant Du..... errr, that Z-whatever skill.
7 - Redouble
8 - That jump back skill

The idea is that Jolt is used often so it goes on #1... both Ver-White spells are 2 because the white gauge is on the left, both Ver-Black are on 3 because the black gauge is on the right, jump in with 4, 5+6+7 for the combo, jump back with 8.

Simplicity.

Now I just gotta train my hands to do it. lol.