Suggestion for: RDM improvements

[Maero]

Anyone that says Red Mage dmg is "fine" obviously does not play it past expert roulette..

[Shurrikhan]

This isn't about what I personally think is simple. RDM is objectively much easier to play than most other classes, and possibly maybe on par with a couple of the classes Wayfinder pointed out. And it can rez and heal. It's notorious for being braindead, everywhere from these very forums, to ffxiv reddit, to FC forums, to in game chat.

I mean, I'll respect your opinion on this once you at least get the job to 68 or 70, but meme-y echo chambers aren't really known as reliable sources. Else, DRG would have still been "mopping floors" all through Heavensward instead of being central to its meta comp. Once you have your own opinion from having run a couple raids on the job, at the least, then I'll know you're not just regurgitating past regurgitations. Until then it's just scarcely possible to know one way or the other. Frankly, I'd sooner trust what you personally think, or could better discuss the job from that standpoint, so long as your opinion was informed, than I'd trust the majority of reddit comments or shout chat.

[Duskane]

besides obvious pot buffs id like
Scorch and enchanted reprise to proc dual cast

[Sylvain]

Personnally I would rather have a shorter recast after ver thunder/aero.
I know it, could cause clipping issue but I really dislike the downtime after every thunder/aero.

I also wouldn't mind 2 charges on both flèche and contre sixte.sometime they come back right before a transition or at the very beginning of jolt making you loose a few seconds.

[Corbeau]

I want a couple oGCD heals as RDM. If it's gonna be themed as a hybrid, with pDPS accordingly, then make it actually contribute to both jobs.

[Mhaeric]

Upper right number seems confused.

It's less than 20 difference between Max and Min on Red mage, about the same as Dragoon, and only 1 less than Ninja.

In other words, you got differences of 19.x, 20.x, and 21.x.

No one in their right mind would say "Dragoon is only slightly easier than Ninja" or "Red mage is just as difficult as Ninja", or "Paladin is harder than all of them."

To clear up what that number in the chart is: Its the percent difference of the minium value from the maximum value, rather than the raw difference between min and max. I.e. (max-min)/max. (There's 2 typos in the chart: either Monk should be 20.2 and Dancer should be 19.0 or one or both of their min/max values has the typo)

DISCLAIMER! Everything from this point on in my post is just some math stuff I did for fun rather than actually making an argument for anything. There are way too many factors to be able to represent how hard a job is with a single number.

That number in their chart is meant to represent the skill gap and how wide of a dps gap there is between different skill levels. I think a better gauge to the above calculation would be comparing the percent difference of the minimum compared to the median to the percent difference of the maximum compared to the median since that would give you the relative difficulty of reaching median level compared to the relative difficulty of reaching the maximum. Just for funsies I did just that! The numbers in a list below are just the final relative differences, but before that I've listed Monk's calculation in full to show how I arrived at them.

Monk:
(Max-Median)/Median = (99.4-88.65)/88.65 = 12.1
(Median-Minimum)/Median = (88.65-79.28)/88.65 = 10.6
Difference = 12.1 - 10.6 = 1.5
This result indicates it is harder to reach skill cap than it is to reach the median but needs to be compared to the other jobs first.

Now for the full calculations in order from "hardest" to "easiest":

Ninja 3.9
Samurai 2.6
Dancer 2.5
Black Mage 2.4
Summoner 2.0
Red Mage 2.0
Dragoon 1.7
Monk 1.5
Bard 1.3
Machinist 0.6

Edit: Adding tanks:
Gunbreaker 2.7
Dark Knight 1.9
Warrior 1.2
Paladin -0.7 (Yes, Paladins are apparently so easy that they ended up with a negative number)

[Kabooa]

Now for the full calculations in order from "hardest" to "easiest":

Ninja 3.9
Samurai 2.6
Dancer 2.5
Black Mage 2.4
Summoner 2.0
Red Mage 2.0
Dragoon 1.7
Monk 1.5
Bard 1.3
Machinist 0.6

This can only inspire the most rational of responses.

Jesting aside, I'm going to come out and say that difficulty should never be a significant impact on Job performance if we want to talk about balance. All that does is create a timeline until the "easier" job is obsolete. There's a reason characters in Moba-types that have more value while being more 'skill based' (RE: Not point and click) get constantly adjusted down to a normalized value.

The skill floor (and ceiling) will eventually be surmounted and reached, thus ensuring every other option is just a weaker option.

Now - If -every- option had a 'harder' variant of itself that lead to higher performance (RE: Monk Tornado Kick), then I think that's fine, if we're talking values in the 5-10% range, but the punishment for doing it wrong should also be equally lower.

The fun in having more demanding options is the demand itself. Having a suitable, stable and simple 90%, but with the option to attempt a more volatile 80-100% range, and having that for every job, might seem antithetical to what I just said, but the key is that the option exists for every job, instead of just some jobs.

I think players should have the opportunity to excel, but the prestige should primarily be the playing itself, not the end result. Having a 'more than enough' simpler path but also a challenging 'it's worth it if you can do it right' path would be ideal.

[Archwizard]

• Manafication now gives a flat 40/40 Mana, while Enhanced Manafication increases this to 50/50 Mana.
• Embolden reworked: now increases ALL personal damage by 10% and ALL allied damage by 5%, no longer diminishes over time.
• Verraise is now a (90 sec to 5 min) CD with two charges.
• Jolt II and Scatter now give 4/4 Mana; Impact gives 2/2 Mana per target struck, up to 5 targets; Scorch now gives 10/10 Mana.
• Enhanced Contre Sixte increases the potency of Veraero II/Verthunder II to 130 each.
• Enhanced Displacement also reduces the CD of Displacement and Corps-a-corps by 5 sec.
• New trait at 80, "Enhanced Redoublement": Reduces the recast time of Enchanted Redoublement, Verflare and Verholy to 1.5 sec.

Just a few tweaks here and there, all that I think are doable this expansion.

VerHoly/Flare/Scorch all do AoE damage scaling 50% off on 2 targets

Okay, let's start with... why?

I get that Verflare and Scorch look a bit like AoEs, fine, but the problem with this suggestion is that it completely ignores context. If you're at a point where you're meleeing in an AoE scenario, you're not going to be bursting your melee combo somewhere Moulinet is an option, and I don't think "two-target scenarios" where enemies are grouped are common enough to rebalance our finishers over.
If there is some multi-target scenario where Moulinet is practically insufficient, where our single-target combo plus 50% cleave on our Verfinishers would far and away be more potent output, then by all means suggest away -- but I would say the problem in that scenario would be our existing AoE option, not any lack of a new one.

Vercure buffed to 800 potency gives a Stone Proc immediately upon use (why not)

"Why not" is because we aren't a healer, and a potency buff of that magnitude (bigger than Cure II/Benefic II/Emergency Adloquium, with Dualcast to boot?) would either lead to our damage being penalized as an offset to this utility, or us replacing a healer in raids, neither one of which sounds good to me.

Verraise gives a Fire Proc immediately upon use.(community can decide if they want to keep this or not, I’m over it)

Gonna tackle something of an elephant here: A) rewarding us for spamming raises is going to make "Rez Bot" memes worse not better, and will definitely lead back to the above where our potency takes a big hit, and B) ignoring that Verraise/cure/stone are White Magicks and Verfire is a Black Magic, having forced damage procs off of Vercure and Verraise promotes Mana imbalance since the two of them are not used equally.

For 6.0, I’d also consider a bit of a redesign to truly capture that SpellBlade White magic support casting DPS identity that rdm was supposed to be.

Okay, yikes. Spellblade's a separate job, Red Mage is a caster DPS, and the "more melee, more white magic" thing will make us more of a disjointed mess, not somehow cause a wave-function collapse into a perfect rendition of the job that will make everyone happy.
There's no reality where a caster with hardly any access to survival tools is better off with more attacks that restrict them to a 3 yard range of the target, and heaven help you if they add positionals like a true melee without True North. And in RDM's particular case, it would require an extensive revamp of the Mana Gauge economy to actually amount to more time in melee rather than more time casting to fund it anyway.

Also, if anything I would argue we need more Black Magic tools next expansion, since we already have nothing to balance out access to Vercure and Verraise. I would normally have argued for a literal "Verscathe" to offset Vercure but we've already got Reprise so that's moot, and BLM's not exactly a fountain of utility to start with.

If people want a Spellblade next expansion, just be direct and ask for a Spellblade. You cannot have it both ways of "There's too many melee jobs and I don't want them to add more, but I also want them to (for all intents and purposes) turn existing an caster into a melee job in all but name."

[Wayfinder3]

snip

I like your suggestions, but here are my reasoning, everything i've suggested is open to input but it's all still grounded in this games combat and what can be expected from this game.

1st. VerHoly/Flare/Scorch being AoE means RDM have a proficient way of using their mana on 2 targets, moulinet doesn't enough damage at 2 targets to warrant expunging mana for it.

Moulinet on 2 targets for 5 gcds= 2000 potency
Melee combo on a single target for the same amount of gcds = 2270 potency


this means RDM in prolonged 2 target scenarios such as adds in ucob or add heavy fights like o7s can only use single target melee combo which puts them behind SMN and BLM who have dots that help with this as well as powerful AoE abilities to spike their damage. while this is a niche scenario, giving rdm this flexibility will help them should they aim to do longer add phases in future ultimates or savage encounters designed around multiple enemies. not every change needs to be groundbreaking, some can be little touch ups and future proofing, this won't change RDM in anyway besides give them more AoE options and if 50% is too strong, we can reduce it to 30% so that E moulinet isn't invalidated at 3 targets.

2nd. giving a fire and stone proc for using raise and cure isn't a true reward, you still lose the 310 potency from veraero and thunder and these are RDMs 2 most potent GCDs over the course of a fight. This is called mitigated losses, it's the same concept behind white mages lily system. Afflatus misery's 900 potency is worse than the 4 glares you alternatively would've had (1200 potency). vercure would be buffed by this but only so far as downtime and this would at least save the RDM some potency on their follow up cast by allowing it to be verfire or stone . the issue you present about using the spells equally wouldn't matter as much because cure and raise give you Procs, not mana, you still have to cast the spells to get the mana and thus won't have to worry about imbalancing.

3rd. Paladin has a very functioning heal in clemency and doesn't pay for it as it's arguably the best tank and the role is so well balanced. taxes are flexible, giving RDM an effective single target heal on the GCD doesn't require the job to be 15% weaker than BLM. if 800 is too much, 500 is fine but i can assure you, a 800 potency cure 1 isn't replacing any healer anytime soon when none of them in optimized play ever cast their cure 2s. Adlo is the exception but thats for a deployed shield. Cure 2, Cure 1, Bene 1, Bene 2, Physick and arguably Lustrate all go unused because 1 GCD on a single person isn't worth the DPS loss. suggesting that it would implies RDM would be able to help the main healer heal up 8 players with this one single target GCD as well as heal through attacks like tumults. If you chose to bring up the AST solo heal thats currently possible, RDM getting an 800 potency heal won't make that main stream largely because again, it's a single target heal and 2, fflogs standard comp metric would make that solo comp pretty much ignored. All this 800 potency would do is allow RDM to recover runs by keeping the tank alive on top of members making it better for prog(what it's currently designed to contribute in the most)

4th. In later implementations, More melee can be handled easily if it's stored nukes like xenoglossy that also add mobility. Personally, i believe the red mage melee aspect of the job would flow better if it were a GCD combo on a cooldown like GNBs gnashing fang combo for a couple reasons. first, It allows us to plan our melee combo without worrying about mana generation, second, it means the job will no longer have a delayed burst which will add a fun layer of optimization. as for additonal melee abilities, you can BW mana build to a strong melee range hit, that can be used every 50 B/W mana and have acceleration immediately give 50.
also, caster rarely don't want to be in at least max melee range and the idea that them not having survival tools ala second wind is a very strange argument to make. if this was a legit concern, they could just give casters second wind or an equivalent, BLM has manaward so survival tools aren't alien to casters. Red mage can easily get more melee as long as its handled properly


more white magic can just be more defensive ogcds, such as a possible AoE regen, a shield to mitigate damage, (it could be a weaker rdm version of temperance as an example) some healer abilities that are nerfed but can slot into a dps kit without turning it into a healer. verraise and vercure are fine defensive utilities but they're too niche in their application which causes the job to feel like that white magic identity is too small. the only BLM utility offered that RDM could've taken was apoc which doesn't exist anymore. frankly, if they added a nerfed blizzard ability that restored mana, that would be a nice Black magic ability to take.

I don't want a spellblade job, i already have one and, that is the Red mage. what i want is for the devs to capitalize on the potential a magic melee job with roots in B/W magic could offer. Red mage won't be a top tier dps like BLM, i don't see the point in asking for that, but i can ask for the job to be close enough to BLM that the dps disparity won't matter unless you want extra saftey or even more damage. Red Mage should do more than just B/W B/W melee combo in my opinion. i don't need a spell blader thats 100% melee with little magic (play paladin if you do) I want a Red mage that specializes in versatility and uses it's magic enhanced sword to support the party as well as it's prowess in black and white magic. This is what red mage has always been, you seem to believe it's not possible to explore the melee dps aspects of RDM, i believe that it is and you simply need to open your eyes to the possibilities. As a caster melee hybrid, red mage is allowed to walk the line between melee dps and ranged because it's not competing with melee. Red mage doesn't need positional because it's also a spell caster and casters have cast times which are equivalent to the melee's positional as a role design choice. I'm not even sure why you think i want them to turn red mage into a melee dps. more melee doesn't mean, all melee and no spells so this argument is very strange.

i'd agree Spellblade was a different job if all of Red mages Enchanted Melee skills weren't fundamentally the same as imbuing swords with magic. the only difference between spellblade jobs and red mage in past games is that they could imbue their sword with any magic, while red mage could just use lower tier B/W magic. this however isn't true for this game where Red mage can imbue magic and use B/W magic of which tiers don't matter. In my eyes, they are the same. If RDM wasn't doing this, explain why their melee combo is functionally and lorewise, doing magic damage. it's because they are indeed a Spellblader.

[Archwizard]

1st. VerHoly/Flare/Scorch being AoE means RDM have a proficient way of using their mana on 2 targets, moulinet doesn't enough damage at 2 targets to warrant expunging mana for it.

Moulinet on 2 targets for 5 gcds= 2000 potency
Melee combo on a single target for the same amount of gcds = 2270 potency

this means RDM in prolonged 2 target scenarios such as adds in ucob or add heavy fights like o7s can only use single target melee combo which puts them behind SMN and BLM who have dots that help with this as well as powerful AoE abilities to spike their damage.

So the solution is "increase the damage of two of our Verfinishers by 30-50% for a niche scenario" (which will most definitely come with an offset to their single-target damage) instead of increasing the damage of Moulinet by 30-40p (which at worst would come with an offset penalty to our AoE damage, most likely Impact which still has 60p of wiggle room in 2-targets)?

3rd. Paladin has a very functioning heal in clemency and doesn't pay for it as it's arguably the best tank and the role is so well balanced.

Yes, but its heal is a part of the Paladin's actual role as a tank, both for personal survivability and off-tanking, in lieu of tools like The Blackest Night, Aurora or Nascent Flash -- Arguing "PLD doesn't pay a tax on its healing!" is better matched with "WHM/SCH/AST don't pay a tax on mitigation!", not using RDM as an example. Vercure is outside of RDM's role as a caster DPS, hence its primary use as a means to pop Dualcast without a target, not a heal.
Not to mention that in both cases of Vercure and Clemency, each use of the healing effect is a penalty in itself, consuming both a GCD and resources intended for offensive skills.

If RDM wasn't doing this, explain why their melee combo is functionally and lorewise, doing magic damage. it's because they are indeed a Spellblader.

Functionally? Aight, let's start with the fact that without a melee combo at all, people would complain that it's "not a Red Mage" and "just uses the rapier as a stat stick" -- all things we already hear with the token melee combo we have (which kinda just proves my point that it would be much louder), which really makes me question where their stopping point is for a "real" Red Mage, but I digress.
The melee combo does magic damage because, as a caster, we capitalize on boosts to magic damage like the personal side of Embolden (or, back when RDM was released and it still existed, Contagion). To give us a melee ability that was purely physical like RDM has historically always had (for instance, literally the entire melee combo sans Enchantment) would be as detrimental to the job as changing SAM's Sen skills to deal Ice, Earth or Unaspected damage, on top of mitigating any future benefits that could be given to casters.
I mean, unless you want to tell me the enchantment is actually a detriment, and the job would have been better off not enchanting its weapon due to the more numerous boosts to physical damage that actual melee jobs benefit from? I'll wait.
Meanwhile, historically, a Spellblade doesn't enchant their weapons simply for the benefit of dealing bonus magic damage and exploiting elemental weaknesses, but largely for the purposes of granting buffs or debuffs via their swings that scale off their more physical stats, which is significantly more useful in FF14 given the lack of distinction between magical damage types.
Plus, y'know, having the core of their attacks be melee rather than spellcasting? Much like PLD vs WHM (or arguably SMN vs DRG, rock the dragon), it's kind of a significant difference.

Lorewise... what does that matter? There was no lore for Red Mage before Stormblood much like there was no lore for Gunbreaker before Shadowbringers or Dark Knight before Heavensward. Lore is neither justification nor tipping point for any balance decision, it's flavor text on decisions that have already been made. The devs could add a Spellblade tomorrow of non-Gyr Abanian origin and they would probably add a last-second writeup that "they always existed but you just never met one before," or "the art seemingly died with [Insert Ancient Magical Civilization Here]" like they've done for Literally. Every. Single. Job. Released.
Also, lore is a funny justification coming from the person who says Verraise should proc Verfire, balance be damned. Just sayin'.

As a caster melee hybrid, red mage is allowed to walk the line between melee dps and ranged because it's not competing with melee. Red mage doesn't need positional because it's also a spell caster and casters have cast times which are equivalent to the melee's positional as a role design choice.

Counterpoint: The people who say they want RDM to be more of a melee sound a lot like "I want to play melee but I hate positionals." SAM is already a job that uses cast times with its melee skills, so the two are already not mutually exclusive.

I'm not even sure why you think i want them to turn red mage into a melee dps. more melee doesn't mean, all melee and no spells so this argument is very strange.

You're correct that it doesn't mean "all melee and no spells" -- as we see with NIN, PLD or DRK, we can absolutely have a melee that still weaves spells, much as RDM is a caster that uses melee in bursts.
The key distinction I make with that, however, is largely due to significance and uptime.

Saying "I'd like to see more melee skills or spend more time meleeing" is, in a vacuum, harmless -- and likely will be exactly the direction the devs will take towards improving our damage in future expansions since the time factor makes for an easy tuning knob. All they need to do is add traits to reduce the CD on Manafication (ding, already done once!), add new spells with higher Mana returns (Scorch says hi), or trait to reduce the cost of melee abilities by a shred, and little by little we'll push that envelope and increase our melee uptime (and consequently our damage) by a respectable amount, even without having to add new melee attacks or increase the potency of any skills.

Perhaps this is a knee-jerk reaction on my part since you specifically may not actually fit the group, but in my experience the people who ask for RDM to have "more melee" or "be a real melee-hybrid" don't want 5-10 seconds of shorter delays before melee each expansion, they want the job to spend a significant percentage of the time performing successive melee combos broken up by strings of spells, or frankly have no idea what they want. The problem with that is, by the time you get to that 50% melee uptime mark, the job functionally is a melee sans positionals, that just so happens to have ranged attacks in their main combo -- and remember, nearly every melee has a rotational or oGCD attack with ranged or line damage, which they will often burst from point-blank anyway.
Why that and not the other way around? Because you have to play to the lowest common denominator, in this case the limited range opportunity of the melee attacks. You're under no compulsion to jump back 15 yards after the melee combo before you start flinging spells, nor under any penalty from bursting spells close-up aside from being squishy. We get away with backing off from the boss now because between cast times, pathetically weak auto-attacks and the sheer lack of melee uptime, we're hardly bound to melee range as-is; true "hybridization" of any significance would negate that.