6.0 Red Mage speculation

[Duelle]

1) It performs a powerful oGCD melee attack in-between melee steps

2) It channels the b/w mana gauge spent on enchanted melee combo steps into a secondary job gauge which is used to perform a powerful finisher melee attack at the end.

Late reply, but better later than never... >.>;

The problem I have with this is that you're cramming more things to the melee combo. What I'd aim for is adding more sword use during the build phase, because adding more to the spender phase screws RDM over even more in situations where targets died before you do the whole combo, the boss becomes untargetable and/or phase transitions. Also, the enchanted combo's GCD is too short to reliably allow weaving stuff between the weaponskills, giving RDM an issue similar to what MCH currently has where latency plays a huge role.

- I'd love if Engagement became the default melee 200 potency finisher and Displacement had both its damage and target requirement components removed, thus becoming purely a movement based skill, to be used on demand at the end of the melee combo or if you'd actually had to leap some other time. It always feels a bit weird to tie in utility (movement) abilities with dps components.

This is something I've always felt was off about the job, so I agree that Engagement should be separated from Displacement and have its potency increased so that it can join Fleche and Contre as buttons you push between GCDs.

As for Displacement, there's two ways to go about it. One would be to remove the damage component. The other would be to give RDM enough oGCDs to make use of Displacement a DPS loss, relegating it to being something you only use when you absolutely need to open distance. The former is much easier to implement than the latter.

- I wish the potency of the non-enchanted melee combo was raised, but not to the point of being the same of the jolt>etc rotation... Reason is, there would be a few opportunities to use that on trash targets that would die too fast for you to complete cast spells... It wouldn't really affect the main rotation at all, but offer an option in such cases. E.G. Heaven on High runs where things die way too fast, I feel kinda useless as a RDM.

The main issue here is that, as I've mentioned before, the devs have shackled RDM to the mana bars and Dualcast. In order for non-enchanted weaponskills to be worthwhile they have to interact with at least one of those elements (either generate mana that offsets not casting Jolt+Verspell or making the next spell instant) or make up what what RDM is missing out on by not interacting with either. On top of that, you're dealing with the hard-coded rules on weaponskills where if you're above a certain amount of B/W mana, the weaponskill instantly consumes said mana. It's a very rigid system in that regard.

the flip-side to this is Engagement just being an oGCD melee skill for the sake of having one.

Considering how underrepresented the sword is in the bulk of RDM gameplay, having melee skills (even if oGCDs) that don't involve the mana bars isn't a bad thing. Yeah, it's an extra button to push, but it's a fair tradeoff, IMO.

having Displacement send you to the position of your last Corps-a-Corps

I'd like an example for this because I can't visualize it.

offloading their damage onto Corps-a-Corps and giving it charges

This puts a bit too much power on Corps, which I'm not comfortable with. Not to mention you're still encouraging squandering mobility tools between GCDs (though to be fair, gap closers aren't as big a deal as gap openers most of the time).