Red Mage: Potential adjustments

[Archwizard]

2nd change: Contre Sixte
The change I would make to this is to enhance the range of your melee combo AND grant it limited-range AoE (similar to the range of Moulinet/Enchanted Moulinet). The same rules will apply to the meter, except that it will have 2 parts. One at 25, and the other at 50.

At 25 meter, the melee combo skills will exhibit an AoE quality at 100 potency. At 50, it will be 200. The AoE only affects targets other than your initial target, and only strikes once per skill. The buff is consumed after 30s or when the melee combo is completed. Rules as follows:

Meter - 25/50
Strikes - 1/1 (AoE)
Potency - 100/200
CD - 35s to 40s

While the idea of a stance system is interesting in concept for our magical fencer, I have to question this particular skill for us on the grounds of practicality.
We don't need a skill to turn our melee combo into an AoE combo. We already have Moulinet for AoE. If we had an AoE melee combo that ignores Moulinet, we would ignore Moulinet full-stop.

Without Contre Sixte providing an alternative enhancement option to the combo, we'd just have Fleche adding flat damage to each melee action, which essentially makes it a waste of a skill since the devs would just reduce the individual melee actions' potency to compensate for it. And when you factor in Manafication bypassing the 40 second wait between combos, and the combo acceleration we get each expansion from things like Scorch, we wouldn't necessarily have either one of these skills every time either.
Plus it would mean losing oGCDs from between our slidecasts, which just seems like a huge waste of all that extra time.

I do think it's an interesting idea, but definitely not one for RDM. Maybe for another melee job.

RDM's action set is perfect right now. We don't need any more actions or any fewer. Its failings are in potencies. Fix Embolden's awkward "I can't buff everybody, but those I can buff get weaker every tick" and trait up the spell/weaponskill potencies a so that they're appropriate for later levels without being too overpowered at low levels and we'd be set.

I can agree with the sentiment, albeit not the specifics. RDM's kit is solid, functional, and doesn't have any glaring mechanical absences like some other jobs. It could be treated as holistic, which I think any job should kinda feel like at level cap for a given expansion.

I do, however, believe there is still room for additional expansion to the kit -- that it's a strong foundation that can be built off of, not necessarily the best it will ever be. Like how BLM felt "whole" last expansion with Foul as a capstone, but still had little spaces to slide into here and there without overcomplicating it this expansion.
In RDM's case, just to pick at a few plausible (but not strictly "necessary") openings: expanding Moulinet into a combo (or pseudo-combo), dual-Mana procs or oGCDs to accelerate the main combo without imbalance, or virtually any spell that could fit into our Shortcast-Longcast casting model. All that without having to add a second gauge (and we're one of the few jobs that doesn't have one, or any timers like DoTs or sustained buffs).

I also believe some of its issues aren't strictly related to potencies and would be better addressed via alterations to its existing mechanics. You have to know that the "Raise Tax" won't go away (if it ever does) without adjusting our relationship to Verraise.