RDM Engagement/Displacement/Corps-a-Corps in END

[Kaedys]

The few RDM players I've been talking with about END (plus RDM is my caster DPS of choice as well), have told me they plan to basically stay in melee anyways. Even NOW, I basically just sit in melee unless there's a specific mechanics reason not to.

See, this is annoying to me, both thematically and from a gameplay perspective. Now, an argument could be made that everyone, ranged and melee alike, should generally remain somewhat close to the boss purely for AoE heals and area effects like Sacred Soil. That said, the whole RDM theme of charging into melee, slashing the target to ribbons, then backflipping out and dropping massive spell nukes on them is really really neat to me.

You can even see this being the "proper" theme of a Red Mage in the Endwalker trailer, with how Alisaie attacks at the beginning. She drops a couple sabre slashes, then leaps back and drops a Verholy, and starts casting what is presumably Scorch before being side-swiped by another monster. That's the entire "fantasy" of a Red Mage, going back and forth between melee slashing and spellcast nuking from ranged. So I rather dislike the notion of just being a melee class with a cast bar. And tbh, that's basically what we have right now, since the cooldowns on Corps-a-corps and Displacement/Engagement don't necessarily align with our melee combo. For optimal damage, we should be largely staying in melee range, and that's a problem, as far as I'm concerned.

That's part of why I'd rather those mobility buttons be purely for mobility. That removes the need to in melee range, except for the melee combo. It gives us far greater control over when we're charging in or dashing out, since we don't have to be concerned about things like raid buffs and such for them, or ensuring we don't cap on charges. It lets us properly exist as a class that darts in and out of melee range, and to do so tactically, rather than simply to maximize damage.

[MellowMink]

Even if auto-attack damage for casters isn't much, it's still more than zero, so I can see why people would want to consistently stay near the boss as much as they can get away with even if most of their attacks allow for lots of distance.

[Kaedys]

Even if auto-attack damage for casters isn't much, it's still more than zero, so I can see why people would want to consistently stay near the boss as much as they can get away with even if most of their attacks allow for lots of distance.

I mean, that can be fixed by having spellcasts reset auto-attack interval (if they don't already). Rapiers have a ~3.5s auto-attack delay, so that would entirely preclude melee auto-attacks outside of a dualcast -> swiftcast (which is irrelevant, 1 AA per minute), or during the melee combo itself, as there's only a 3.0s delay between the end of our hardcast and the start of the next one (and that's then reduced by spell speed). That's actually how it works in WoW as well, specifically to remove any odd hyper-optimization need for casters to be in melee range for auto-attacks between casts.

[SaberMaxwell]

The few RDM players I've been talking with about END (plus RDM is my caster DPS of choice as well), have told me they plan to basically stay in melee anyways. Even NOW, I basically just sit in melee unless there's a specific mechanics reason not to.

Can confirm this.

Displacement now has three problems that mean I'll just drop it off my bars come endwalker:

1) It has the same potency as engagement
2) it takes both doubleweave "slots" due to animation length
3) it's not fast enough and simultaneously too large a jump to be useful

Breaking it down: it having the same potency as engagement means as a dps tool it has no meaning anymore. In ShB it was a risk/reward structure where you traded a more dangerous attack with potentially less desirable positioning for more potency; used intelligently you could optimize more potency per manafy cycle.

It taking both double weave slots means that any time that the ability will come off cool down alongside fleche or contre sixte, you'll use engagement instead anyway simply because you don't have to delay the much harder hitting attacks. Giving charges helps this issue somewhat, but now that it's the same potency as engagement, there's even less reason to bother.

The long animation lock means that it won't get you out of anything that running via slide+dualcast won't. It's insane distance, Ironically, makes it more liable to kill you than anything else--everyone knows the suicidal rdm meme. That's why I said earlier that displacement was risk vs reward: you risk death, either by flying off the arena or out of healer aoe distance, for more potency. Now you don't even get that.

So it's worthless as a movement tool, worthless as a damage tool, and has an infinitely better and more applicable alternative for no trade off. Goodbye displacement.

To add, I'll quickly discuss using displacement as a "reactive tool":

First, casters are not reactive. This includes healers. They're by nature proactive: to get optimal performance, you need to know where you'll be, when you need to be there, and for how long until you need to move again. Every single one of caster's movement-focused abilities, including things like swiftcast and triplecast, are geared to get a caster to where they need to be before they need to be there.

With this in mind, displacement is not a reactive tool. It doesn't exist as an "oh no" button to zip you out of that point-blank aoe you weren't expecting, and using it like that will A) clip your cast, and with RDM missing one cast means missing two casts and B) probably get you killed anyway as you either careen off the edge of the arena or get caught in the pbaoe anyway because of how the server registers the player's location during animation lock. That's even assuming the aoe happened during your dualcast time when you can freely weave: how good of a reactive tool is it when a pbaoe shows up while you're casting? If you end up needing to cut and run, then you might as well just...cut the cast and run. Displacement won't get you out faster in that situation because of how animation locks in this game work.

Let's say you're instead using the skill proactively, which would be ideal anyway: that can work very well actually. However in that same scenario, what's stopping one from just slidecasting over to where they need to be instead? We go again to how large a jump displacement is, and more than a few healers have had problems with Red Mages just standing in timbuktu because that's where displacement landed them.

Some things that could improve displacement would be something like ArchWizard suggested: if used after cac it would just jump you back to where you used it from. Or maybe the inverse, give cac the ability to cut displacement's animation, giving a spiderman-like effect where the RDM kicks off of the enemy only to zip back in for another attack. Maybe have displacement grant dualcast to make up for it taking up two weave slots, or even have it empower the next spell cast which would line up better with the trailer incarnations of RDM. No matter what, cut its distance to 10y, 15y is just excessive for a kickback.

Their chosen "fixes" so far just invalidate any reason to bother using the skill.

[Kaedys]

I mean, I use it pretty regularly as a movement tool. It requires just accepting the potency loss (because I'm not using it on CD, I'm holding it for usage for movement), which sucks from an optimization perspective. But if you're good at aiming (and I have a lot of practice via Disengage back in WoW), it can be very useful for quickly moving around, which then can contribute higher overall uptime by getting you where you're going and letting you plant earlier. I feel like swearing it off entirely as a death trap is simply ignoring with how strong it can be in the right hands. And ya, like Disengage (and many other movement abilities in FFXIV as well), reckless usage can kill you. That's part of mastering the usage of those skills, though.

That said, I do wish it worked like Dragoon's Elusive Jump (ie, no damage, doesn't require a target, jumps backwards according to your character's orientation). That would, of course, require removing the damage from it, but if it were simply an arbitrary backflip, based on your character's orientation rather than the potentially unstable vector between you and your target's center-of-hitbox, it'd both be more useful (and reliable) as a movement tool and have more use cases than simply "GTFO melee range". I've also found that movement, even rearward movement, that's based on character orientation is, imo, more intuitively predictable than movement based on a vector to a target. That's actually one of the reasons I'm excited for the Reaper mobility buttons, because they aren't targeted (and don't have any damage attached as a result).

[ForteNightshade]

I mean, I use it pretty regularly as a movement tool. It requires just accepting the potency loss...

Then it's a terrible movement tool. Literally everything you said after this statement is completely meaningless. The whole point of movement tools is to prevent potency loss while putting you in an advantageous position. Engagement is now better is every conceivable way for all the reasons Saber mentioned above. Even now, Engagement is still better if Displacement causes you to delay other oGCDs or needs to be held for a long enough length of time you're losing uses. Trying to make it work doesn't magically make it useful any more than slamming a square block into a round hole. It'll eventually go in... or you could just use the square block and save yourself the trouble.

[Kaedys]

The whole point of movement tools is to prevent potency loss while putting you in an advantageous position. Engagement is now better is every conceivable way for all the reasons Saber mentioned above.

Engagement isn't a movement tool. It's an oGCD attack that happens to share a cooldown with a movement skill (well, excepting that Displacement is only sorta a movement skill).

That's precisely why I want to see the potency entirely removed from Displacement and Corps-a-corps (and ideally, for Displacement to work like Elusive Jump, not requiring a target and being based on your character orientation). I want them to actually be movement skills. Currently, those two are doing double duty as movement skills and oGCD attacks that have a side effect of moving you around (potentially into unhealthy positions), and it causes them to be bad at both use-cases. We don't have them available when we need them for movement, because we're using them for damage, and using them for damage can be hazardous for your health due to the forced movement built in.

Remove their potency, remove the CD linkage with Engagement, and make Engagement a weave for use between the melee combo skills instead. That gives us actually usable movement abilities, ones we can actually use for mobility, rather than for optimizing damage, and then something useful to weave around our melee abilities during the combo.

Also, RE: your specific argument, the charges added to them in theory alleviate some of the potency loss, since you can keep a charge "in the bank" while still letting the cooldown tick. However, it's still a small potency loss, because you're not using those charges during buffs. If it gains you more GCD uptime, though, it's worth the trade-off.