I feel Red Mage got completely shafted with 5.0. Nothing they showed remotely excites me, and instead has me worried... In no particular order;
  • I really don't get why we need four whole skills which sole purpose for existing is AoE rotation... Most Jobs get one skill to spam, maybe a second, and the rest is oGCDs... Scatter spam and Moulinet was perfectly fine as is... The AoE Veraero and Verthunder are just wasteful skill bloat IMO, it would have made far more sense to simply make Scatter into an AoE stance... You turn it on, Jolt/Impact are AoE, Veraero/stone/thunder/fire are AoE... Makes far more sense than wasting two new actions on nothing...
  • Contre Sixte and Fleche still have the same lame animation... Look at all the awesome new animations other Jobs get, and we're busy just shooting a lame reskin of the Serpent Officer's Longsword from Palace of the Dead... Imagine if Paladins new skill was just them summoning a big reskin of an existing weapon, instead of the beautiful animation they got...
  • Engagement... OK I get this skill, I use it when I can't use Displacement because Displacement will throw me off the arena... I get that... Why is Engagement 150 potency while Displacement is 200 potency, though? Why is there nothing remotely interesting about our Lv72 skill? It could easily have an additional effect, perhaps that new Charge Skill mechanic? But nope... It's just a DPS loss in punishment for certain arena designs, something which shouldn't be an issue to begin with... How hard is it to code dash backs so they can't take you off an arena? How about just using the same logic you used with Repelling Shot instead? Back at Stormbloods launch the logic there was that movement skills shouldn't have to be part of your damage rotation, so you took damage off them, yet you went and made Red Mages movement skills deal damage, and now you're persisting with that? What's more you're wasting a new skill on "fixing" the issue presented by a dash back being part of our damage rotation... This is just stupid...
  • Scorch? Yeah that's OK. Nothing really interesting about it, just an extra step in the burst combo.
  • Reprise. It's not offensive, it's just again, not particularly interesting. Can't say much without knowing its Enhanced potency, but I can at least see its utility, even if it is fairly niche.
  • Manafication. Putting this here solely as a question mark. It still seems to double Mana (although in both the trailer and Live Letter, they use it at around the 60/60 mark instead of the <50/50 mark... not sure if that means anything), but it also seems to have a status effect attached to it now. Honestly this was the biggest point of interest for me in everything they showed off with Red Mage, which is troubling...

A Verdisappointing showing to be perfectly honest... Nothing stood out... Most of what we did get seems entirely redundant, Machinist gets a freakin' mecha while we get pointless AoE skill bloat...