RDM Proposed Change

[Gruntler]

So I love RDM. There really isn’t much about it I would change except to have it be even more versatile and more in line with the melee/caster it is in the lore.

As it stands now, mana enhances your melee combo by using spells. What if…..

They buffed the melee combo so melee gives you black mana and spells give white mana, and that mana can be expended on either spells or more melee combos.

Basically, I’d love to see some way to allow more Red Mages the ability to play the way we want. Do we want to stab and slash more, or cast all the ver, or do a bit of both and still achieve the same end result and same average DPS parsing.

I love Red Mage but I wish I wasn’t so pigeonholed into casting primarily and having melee be for mana expenditure. Both casting and melee can build and damage equally, and both can expand equally.

That’s my dream. Thank you for coming to my Red Talk.

The issue is that there's only going to be one optimal way to play the job. So, regardless of design, you will be pidgeonholed into playing the job a certain way, or you're just going to be faffing about not doing the job you signed up for--doing as much damage as you can.

Basically, I’d love to see some way to allow more Red Mages the ability to play the way we want.

That's not the game you signed up to play. FF14 is about playing DDR and dodging mechanics while playing Guitar Hero and executing your rotation as its core combat gameplay. The game and combat literally isn't designed for people to just 'freestyle' and hit whatever buttons they want in whatever order they want. And even if it were, there'd still be an optimal path which permits you to do your job most effectively and you're still going to be expected to be on that path.

So, to make RDM more 'freestyle' would actually be a curse--it would do a bad job of communicating or letting players discover that 'optimal path' and would instead be a job filled with 'traps' that actually hinder you rather than help. You'd end up with RDM doing poorly, not because they're necessarily unskilled, but because they decided to try some avenue of freedom that turns out to be a bad way to play.

Ultimately, you're complaining about the Mage part of Red Mage. Red Mage has always, in its entire history, been a caster first, and melee second. That's why it's a Red Mage and not something more like Mystic Knight.