Quote Originally Posted by Gruntler View Post
To put it into perspective. The old acceleration gave you three charges every 105 seconds. The new acceleration gives you three charges every 55 seconds. Sometimes you need to park on acceleration (and you did with old accel) but in this specific case, in order to lose charges vs the old regime you would have to sit on that acceleration for 50 seconds. Meaning, you pretty much have to decide not to use it for its entire cooldown before you start to lose vs the old system.

It's a net-gain, even if you're holding it for a few seconds to get through your combo. The new acceleration requires you to practically forget it exists in order for it to not work. Not to mention, it lines up with manafication in your 110 second rotation, so if you're doing the 110 and save accel after it, you've immediately solved your problem for the rest of the fight. If you're doing 120 however, feh. Delay, it's still better than before.
In my experience since the change, while it might be a gain, and it's definitely nice for the opener, it's made the job feel like I'm tripping over the rotation (or at least the rotation I'd been using) because I used to very heavily rely on acceleration being up at specific times. Now I find that it's often either still on cooldown when I used to rely on it, or using it when I would have before means I can only get two procs before I start to overcap on mana making its timing worse, or both.

This change alone, again for me, has made the job feel so bad to play that I abandoned it entirely in favor of summoner, which now has a much better flow and better mobility than the red mage while also doing a lot more damage. The way they changed acceleration feels like a bandaid type of change to address issues with one specific part of a fight while ignoring the knock on effects of those changes for the entire remainder of an encounter.

They really need to look into how they want all the skills on this job to interact and make more adjustments accordingly, because it really just feels like a mess since this patch.