Red Mage: Potential adjustments

[Duelle]

Hell, if it did even half the things for RDM that Fracture did for Monk (adding soft-CD access to a non-positional skill AND a rotational +1 mod, atop a ppgcd bonus, per ~18 seconds), I think we'd be happy. But it's a matter of context. If it does nothing more than the ppgcd bonus, it merely makes RDM feel slower to ramp up.

Fracture may have been a boon for MNK, but was a waste of a GCD for the class that learned it (MRD/WAR), which is what I was getting at.

Again, though, is that fun?

So this is where you lose me. Fun is a subjective thing, and I consider it a cowardly way to try to justify a design (hence why I've taken umbrage with WoW's devs when they made changes to classes under the guise of "fun", as said changes often turn out to be anything but). Putting something together and expecting people to find it fun is like a professional wrestler that comes up with a gimmick and expects it to get over with the crowd. Neither is a sure thing, and to count on it is basically counting your chickens before they hatch.

The exact style of DoT I would want on Red Mage is one that allows it to use mana of one type now to gain more mana over time, without interrupting your regular dualcast sequences, giving you a reason to use it over Reprise. My concern with the idea is whether it should rely on two mechanics we don’t have use for currently: intentionally unbalancing your mana, and converting mana of one type into another. The unbalanced state just acts as a punishment mechanic at the moment, but granting access to an ability to immediately escape that state does give it a use case, and would also allow us to apply a soft cooldown to the use of these DoTs to limit their uptime.

Well, the issues to address are that a) you're currently not going to imbalance unless it's on purpose, b) RDM is already built with not having perfect parity between mana bars in mind because of how Verflare and Verholy are designed, c) messing with mana accumulated has the risk of delaying the spender phase which means lower DPS potential. That aside, it being an alternative to Jolt makes sense, though it might require some adjustments because of the rules RDM is designed around.

- Will a tick happen as I was about to use Manafication? If you're at 48/49 and you want to Manafication NOW, the DoT would overcap your mana when you Manafication.

Wouldn't the existence of this hypothetical DoT change how people approach Manafication? I mean in that context, instead of waiting to hit 47-49 mana, there's a chance players would adjust to lower numbers like 43-45 to account for the passively generated mana. At least that what I think would happen.