Anyone else think caster has suffered this expansion? (hopes for the future)

[Ayche]

It's like starting a game of dark souls, and then the devs decide Parry is the only way to play when launching their Sekiro expansion. If you don't enjoy parry, guess you should just quit because all other playstyles are invalid.

Mmm yes, but also Sekiro IS the best game ever made...

[NightHour]

SE has been jerking melee off for a long time now and it looks unlikely to change

[Taranok]

I agree 100% with this. The fight design has shifted to constantly mechanic vomit rather than make the mechanic meaningful and fun. Everything has to be a massive stage, with 1 second reaction time mechanics stacked onto each other. Jobs need mobility more than ever with how much running we need to do in a fight.

It's funny because I actually called out Zot's final boss as pure mechanics vomit, and it's amazing how many people think it's not that bad. It's so...awful. Playing BLM on that dungeon was just a nightmare.

[Sequora]

I am praying that the next expansion will be kinder to casters. We have 3 options and nothing in the middle as far as complexity. Summoner is the braindead caster with zero optimization, red mage is the slightly more complicated, but barely a step above summoner, and then black mage is one of the most complicated jobs in the game. Probably just below monk. We need a new job, and summoner honestly just needs more. Zero room for optimization.

[Taranok]

I am praying that the next expansion will be kinder to casters. We have 3 options and nothing in the middle as far as complexity. Summoner is the braindead caster with zero optimization, red mage is the slightly more complicated, but barely a step above summoner, and then black mage is one of the most complicated jobs in the game. Probably just below monk. We need a new job, and summoner honestly just needs more. Zero room for optimization.

Ehh, I find monk is less complicated than SAM, and neither hold a candle to BLM. It's hard to compare any class to BLM because that class is literally designed for a game the devs stopped making back in mid-shadowbringers.

I don't even want it to necessarily be 'kinder,' for casters. I want the devs to actually admit that casters as a role want to sit still and cast, and need fights designed with spots that you are able to get to, to sit still and cast for the majority of the fight. That's not the same as being stationary, but rather that mandatory movement for casters needs to be few and far between.

Which is why I support the other part of your statements. But I'd very specifically say that whatever class is added, they need to add a caster adjacent to BLM's playstyle. That is, a class that for greater than 50% of all GCDs, is sitting still and casting. I'd prefer it was at least 70%. Not even modern BLM is technically that. I digress.

[Ggwppino]

But objectively the rdm in this expansion is having much more movement difficulties than the blm. True, the rdm at each cast has an instant with dual cast + melee combo, but it gets so much unnecessary movement that when it has to actually move from point A to point B it has difficulty. The blm instead has instants, triplecast x2 + swiftcast in the case that allow it much more large and prolonged movements. The blm has more motion planning leeway than the rdm.

The blm behaves much like the smn should have behaved in this expansion according to Yoshi-P during the expansion's pre-launch interviews. The smn, according to them, had to be a strategic movement planning class, a pity that the amount of cast is minimal, making this aspect totally lost.

[CKNovel]

I am praying that the next expansion will be kinder to casters. We have 3 options and nothing in the middle as far as complexity. Summoner is the braindead caster with zero optimization, red mage is the slightly more complicated, but barely a step above summoner, and then black mage is one of the most complicated jobs in the game. Probably just below monk. We need a new job, and summoner honestly just needs more. Zero room for optimization.

Welcome to the caster role, we have:
The actual caster, BLM
The ranged in disguise, SMN
That half caster half melee, RDM

I also find it really funny how RDM used to be the easiest caster, barely changed since its release and is now the job with the least adaptive mobility.
As you pointed, the caster role lacks choice, you either have the very demanding job or the easy two, with one of them being the least mobile of them.

[Taranok]

But objectively the rdm in this expansion is having much more movement difficulties than the blm. True, the rdm at each cast has an instant with dual cast + melee combo, but it gets so much unnecessary movement that when it has to actually move from point A to point B it has difficulty. The blm instead has instants, triplecast x2 + swiftcast in the case that allow it much more large and prolonged movements. The blm has more motion planning leeway than the rdm.

The blm behaves much like the smn should have behaved in this expansion according to Yoshi-P during the expansion's pre-launch interviews. The smn, according to them, had to be a strategic movement planning class, a pity that the amount of cast is minimal, making this aspect totally lost.

If this were true, there'd be more BLMs than RDMs. Objectively, people find RDM more enjoyable than BLM in the content, and its movement difficulties are overblown compared to BLM. From my experience, BLMs suffer a hell of a lot more. For example, there is no amount of triplecasts or xenoglossies that can truly save you from phase 7 DSR's movement. RDM, on the other hand, has significant amounts of movement it can strategically save.

Just off of strategically saving your melee combos, you can breeze through phase 6 in a way BLM wishes it could.

What I also know is that BLM would have a slightly easier time at something like Pinax than RDM. It's tedious saving movement skills like corps-a-corps for high movement when you might have to randomly go across the entire arena whereas BLM just needs 1 instant and an AM to get 70% of the way there. Something like Purgation in P7S is just outright miserable on BLM, whereas RDM's dualcasting can help carry it with proper slidecasting.

You can only save up so many resources, and a lot of these fights demand way too much movement out of casters, period. RDM definitely has more practical movement than BLM, but it also depends exclusively on if Aetherial Manipulation is useful or not. It's easier to bank up a melee combo and, worst case scenario, you always have reprise to lean on instead of the utterly abysmal scathe.

Really, this is all also completely ignoring the most important point. It doesn't matter if BLM or RDM suffer more on X or Y fight. What matters is both are suffering.

[Ggwppino]

The blm has a much more demanding rotation, it has meat on the fire that it has to keep track of where its dps is based on, which the rdm does not have. I don't doubt that overall the blm is more complex, but on balance the movement of the blm can be calculated, it really has a lot of planning leeway and spells like AM that if you use them very well they take you everywhere, while the rdm is subject to slidecast continuous and can't run or teleport like crazy from point A to point B. The blm has about 20 sure seconds of instant cast, hypothetically continuous too. Clearly the BLM suffers a lot from micromovements but this has always been its characteristic: it is up to the player to pre-position himself in the best possible way in order to move as little as possible and lose as little uptime as possible (if it is actually lost). That is, it's the caster's job to figure out when to use what and where to stand to maximize damage. If the bosses were dummies it wouldn't be fun.

Of course, I also understand that from BLM it can be gnawing to see an SMN screw up your caster position when it is clearly a physical ranged without even resources to manage. (If the rdm is a caster with the melee combo, the smn is a physical ranged with the caster combo. Change my mind.)
But frankly I wouldn't complain about becoming similar to smn or reduce the casts even more, but I would ask for more balance for casters: casters must be casters. Which is exactly what you want. A truly caster class to complement the blm and rdm, that have >50% cast time. As it should be.

I also don't think the rdm and blm are suffering: they are just being challenged more than other classes, but in other games it's always been like this.

[SilversLyu]

I dont think it's even an argument anymore at this point that BLM is the hardest job in the game, especially in its current state where the job feels like it is being abandoned by the dynamic design of the fights. Meanwhile melees needing to pay less and less attention to positionals and the hitbox of the bosses being greater than the mariana trench.