Red Mage is top tier - [job effectiveness = player skill]

[Powercow]

Well, RDM was called out as getting some changes next major patch in the Live Letter, with details coming in the next LL.

Granted this could be like when they said they were going to buff Ninja and it got, like, 20 potency per combo or something hilarious. But hey, at least there's acknowledgment.

[Shurrikhan]

Well, RDM was called out as getting some changes next major patch in the Live Letter, with details coming in the next LL.

Granted this could be like when they said they were going to buff Ninja and it got, like, 20 potency per combo or something hilarious. But hey, at least there's acknowledgment.

To be fair, that Gust Blade potency buff put it ahead of Dragoon in most Savage fights at the time, once top-tier players had gotten used to bringing NIN again. For low-ping players, its actual output changed very little between that "hilarious" little buff and the whole massive rework thereafter.

[Archwizard]

I'm very curious as to what the coming changes are. I admit RDM is in a pretty satisfying spot in terms of gameplay, especially after the buffs to Acceleration and Enchanted Reprise, but there's always room for improvement.

On the one-hand, there's an irrational part of me that holds out a bit of hope from the Samurai changes last patch, that the devs may go as far as to add new skills to fill out the rather lackluster advancements RDM obtained this expansion. Obviously "add new skills" is rarely their main goal, especially mid-expansion, but if the intent is to alter the gameplay in a positive way, I look forward to however they intend to and wouldn't discount the possibility.

On the other hand, it wouldn't surprise me if it was more oriented towards addressing the value of our utility, improving our statistical damage as an offset. Could be anything from finally making Embolden a static buff for both casters and melee, to nerfing Verraise along the lines of the recently-added BLU Raise.

[Nedkel]

the problem with "a few percent" is if these few percent make you wipe do to enrage, or even a mechanic you wouldn't have seen because the boss would be death by now you now wasted 10-13 minutes hitting on a boss for nothing, and assuming the next try doesn't go better you may even have wasted an entire evening. more often than not it happens that you get this one 1% wipe and afterwards die for 2 hours in phase 2 cause people lack focus. its not that people care what others did after the boss drops (unless someone is playing truly abysmall) its "the stronger the group is, the more likely the boss actually is to drop dead.

If you wipe because of low dps, the reason is not jobs you have in your team but people playing those jobs, its the most likely scenario.
Difference between bottom green summoner and top violet is a whooping 15%, player skill is determining when it comes to rdps.
You could do any content just fine with any job you play in this game.

The differences of the jobs you see in the charts only says that you have to be a little more skilled on RDM than on SMN, thats basically it, the 80-99 percentiles are super rare and we really should start taking them with a grain of salt, they dont say if certain job is capable or not.

[Akiudo]

If you wipe because of low dps, the reason is not jobs you have in your team but people playing those jobs, its the most likely scenario.
Difference between bottom green summoner and top violet is a whooping 15%, player skill is determining when it comes to rdps.
You could do any content just fine with any job you play in this game.

the very fact the difference between bottom green to top violet is "15%" just shows how freaking much the difference between different classes actually is, no one ever said everyone plays totally awesome uber raider goodlike, especially not in pf which is where most exclusions happen and when taking an average bard+redmage instead of an average (literally 50% percentile) mch/smn is pretty much the same dps loss as if you would take a 25% percentile summoner instead of a 90% summoner something is wrong, and thats literally the case right now, taking 2 weak classes compared to two stronger ones (well, mch is "strong" by physical ranged standarts) costs you as much as replacing a guy that could go for gold parses with a bit more practice/gear with someone that can barely make green

[Silverquick]

If you are healing and rezzing as a RDM, you aren't even going to get a blue parse, let alone top parse, or even average. The pool is pretty big at 3000 parses over the past two weeks, which if you think that's too small, then it would actually lean away from your argument as those who would be healing and rezzing probably aren't using FFlogs.

The content is old, people have been farming it for months, people aren't dying to an extent that a RDM needs to help.

That's actually not really true,

We are talking a very miniscule difference in damage here... that means one or two cures/verraise is going to drop your damage by about that percentage, its that small.

So you would have to go through all those logs, remove any that used a vercure or verrraise, and take ONLY those that did pure DPS as an average.

So of your average of 3000 parces... how many are after the buffs of 5.1? Then how many of those never used a Vercure or Verraise? Its going to be a very small pool that's left.

[ReiMakoto]

That's actually not really true,

We are talking a very miniscule difference in damage here... that means one or two cures/verraise is going to drop your damage by about that percentage, its that small.

So you would have to go through all those logs, remove any that used a vercure or verrraise, and take ONLY those that did pure DPS as an average.

So of your average of 3000 parces... how many are after the buffs of 5.1? Then how many of those never used a Vercure or Verraise? Its going to be a very small pool that's left.

So just from flicking around void walker parses, so very anecdotal, I've not currently seen anything above a blue parse that has a single use of vercure or veraise, and of the blue logs I did find, there were very very few who used ver-cure. The crux of the argument is pretty easy to understand though, there is just very little utility to be actually gained through using these skills in a raid setting. Vercure is used to proc dualcast in downtime, but using it for its actual heal is so weak that youve got to wonder what your healers are doing, and wether or not casting it actually saved you. As for Veraise, its the lowest priority res in the party due to potency loss, if you healers or even a summoner if for some reason youre double caster has swiftcast up, its better for them to cast the res and not you because of total potency loss on rdm using a raise is way hgher than the others. As such, these skills see little to no use in optimised play, meaning they when looking at rdms damage output you can see they are very lackluster in comparison, and will only be more lackluster if using said utility

[Rilifane]

That's actually not really true,

We are talking a very miniscule difference in damage here... that means one or two cures/verraise is going to drop your damage by about that percentage, its that small.

So you would have to go through all those logs, remove any that used a vercure or verrraise, and take ONLY those that did pure DPS as an average.

So of your average of 3000 parces... how many are after the buffs of 5.1? Then how many of those never used a Vercure or Verraise? Its going to be a very small pool that's left.

You rarely raise as a RDM unless shit hits the fan.
If a healer is down and heavy damage is right around the corner OR if multiple people died, no heal lb3 possible, but it's not bad enough to give the wipe order, the SMN/ RDM raises. In all other cases it's healer duty. So even average kill parses where Verraise shows up are very, very rare. Whenever I'm on healer I strongly advice the RDM/ SMN against raising unless it's one of the sitations described above. I can manage my resources just fine to handle a couple of death, it's part of the job as a healer.
And Vercure is great for proccing dualcast but beyond that it's too weak in kill runs, even in average groups, to make it worth the dps loss.

Progress is a different thing.
I easily cast around ~100 Verraise during an evening full of Titan prog and sometimes spent time healing simply for safety reason. About half the time it wasn't neccessary and the person would have survived without additional spot-healing but the other half it was definitely neccessary after fails killed a several people and the healers struggled to recover from them. It's completely fine to play it safe during prog, seeing more of a fight is top priority. It's safer to let the RDM ress and safe healer resources because if I'm oom it's not a big deal. But if the healers are too drained to heal the next aoe, the try is over.
But outside prog both spells see little use.
If you spent a considerable amount of time spot-healing with Vercure or raising, chances are you are bit too jittery and intervene too quickly when the healers could (and likely would) have handled it just fine on their own. It's more for the peace of one's own mind then actually neccessary.

[Neela]

We are talking a very miniscule difference in damage here... that means one or two cures/verraise is going to drop your damage by about that percentage, its that small.

small percentage?... do u know how parses work?... if you want to play on "high level" there is absolut no time for heal/res on your abc-stigma. small percentage... those small percentage decide if you play over 75%+ (which is still just avg player level...) or not.... curious why you still fight hard fact data – maybe u should get familiar with how the data (not only for RDM but for the basic dmg formula) work before talking about it... : /

[Silverquick]

And yet, just like everyone else in this thread I am not seeing much difference at all in actual single target damage between SMN and RDM.

All of things I have brought up at this point are rational explanations for why the data is not matching reality.