6.41+/7.0 — SE, if you won't buff RDM damage, at least improve usability and utility

[Raikai]

1. Rework combat so Haste is a direct DPS gain for all jobs
2. Give RDM Hasteaga on top of Embolden

Honestly, yes. I really wish they would merge SkS and SpS into just 'Speed' (or rename to Haste) and change how it functions, so it's an actual interesting stat for everyone.

However... to achieve that they need to get rid of the 2min meta, because as long as that exists and it's so prevalent on job design, there's no speed modifier that will ever be desired at the cost of alignment.

[remiff]

Yes they should totally rework the spell speed and make the stat a little more interesting than it is now,
now beyond a cap it's not really useful to have a lot of spell speed for the summoner that suck and for the red mage it's not the most interesting stat either, when it takes for the black mage.

Except that the equipment is full of them, so they should rework the stats so that they are of interest in all circumstances and for every jobs.

[Eorzean_username]

Thanks for the replies and constructive critiques so far.

I think that Red Mage is an extremely-tricky Job to adjust, or to develop at all, because it seems like an especially-wide variety of players are drawn to Red Mage for an especially-wide variety of reasons. Like some players just want to be a flashy swordsman while tearing up the DPS charts, other players want to be the heroic heart of the party that's inspiring people and saving the day... etc. It feels like Red Mage doesn't really have one single "identity" in the way that most Jobs do.

So for me, this is somewhat of an exercise in just throwing a gigantic colander of spaghetti at the wall, and seeing what sticks and what doesn't.

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Anyway — Not in a good place in terms of work/time to address everything in detail right now, but I'll do my best try to do so eventually.

Real quick though:

Hostile/critical responses
This is fine and I don't think it's bad to dislike any or all of these suggestions. I think that pushback against ideas is just as important, overall, for finding a sane middle-ground when trying to problem-solve.

Pushback against constraining Raises or changing Gauge spending
Interesting, but not a problem. If this feedback continues to consistently come in, then I'll eventually mark those sections as "radioactive" / deprecated, and hopefully the devs will use them as signposts for "What not to do" — which is just as important a sort of feedback, I think.

Excessive "gauge-play"
Yeah this is a tough call. On the one hand I think it's interesting to "do more" with the Balance Gauge than just treat it as a pseudo-cooldown on the Enchanted Combo, and adding more uses to the Gauge, or at least interactions with it (eg, scaling the effect of Frazzle) increases space for the mythical "skill expression". But on the other hand, it does just create more traps / riptides / failure-points, which then works against creating "accessibility". I admit that a stubborn part of me would like to see more Black/White interactions rather than less, but keeping things much simpler is probably the correct idea from a more rational design perspective, all things considered.

Tuning issues
This isn't tuned, lol. For the sake of rough conceptual comparison I list potencies in various places, but overall — especially in terms of 7.0-style brainstorming — I'm just operating on the idea that it's easier to design when you go completely bonkers and remove all the rails, and then once you've settled-out the basic ideas, someone who gets paid to do so can refine down to what the numbers should "actually" be.

Mobility overkill
I mean "yes", but that's also the explicit intention, if Red Mage is being positioned directly against Summoner in terms of damage tuning, and Summoner's design isn't budging (which... it probably isn't). However this is also "intentional overkill" — I think if you implemented everything here, all at once, then Red Mage could very easily become a fire-breathing demon from hell. But, generally-speaking, I find that you have to go completely-overboard and ask for way too much, way too loudly, before the giant Snorlax of XIV's designers will actually grumble, get up, and fix something. So I'm imagining that the actual implementation would be only some (mystery surprise) portion of the total changes proposed here, and therefore be "sane" in actual practice.

Chainspell displacing Combo
Not the intention — rather, the idea is that Chainspell generates enough Mana that you have a 2-part burst: CS+VU → Enchanted Combo, which would take up ~22.5 seconds and so still be "buff window congruent". This has issues though, because if you ever want to reverse it for whatever reason (Combo → CS) then you just end up with a deficit. I like the general idea of bringing in Red Mage's zippy-zoom-zoom gameplay from FFXI, but I can see that the current rough-draft here has various problems, and I don't think that it's a "finished" design as-is.

Esuna
Definitely intended to be a niche button you rarely press (just like it is for actual Healers) and essentially-useless for Ex/Sav/etc, but would allow Red Mage to feel like the "hero" in another way when they swoop in and cleanse some annoying debuff in some piece of content (for example, Dooms in Dun Scaith)... since I think that kind of experience seems to appeal to a lot of Red Mage players.

Support design
In working on this, I realised that it's a huge challenge to try to create a meaningful "Support" role in this game that isn't "Healing", "Healing increase", "Damage increase", or "Damage reduction". I will straight-up admit that I'm not personally thrilled with my flailing attempts to explore other possibilities (eg, trickles of bonus MP), but it was the result of trying to avoid rehashing the same few benefits again and again. But maybe I'm worrying too much about that, and the design should just "give up" and stay within the constraints of the system as already established (like Dancer does).

...Ahhh I'm out of time to steal, I'll have to come back to this later.

[Jade_Tyrant]

Excessive "gauge-play"
Yeah this is a tough call. On the one hand I think it's interesting to "do more" with the Balance Gauge than just treat it as a pseudo-cooldown on the Enchanted Combo, and adding more uses to the Gauge, or at least interactions with it (eg, scaling the effect of Frazzle) increases space for the mythical "skill expression". But on the other hand, it does just create more traps / riptides / failure-points, which then works against creating "accessibility". I admit that a stubborn part of me would like to see more Black/White interactions rather than less, but keeping things much simpler is probably the correct idea from a more rational design perspective, all things considered.

I think for me, the main point annoyance with something like Frazzle scaling based on the gauge would be that... you're already punished for not having enough gauge going into a 2 minute window, by not being able to put as much damage into burst. Less so now, admittedly, with Manafication changes, but you still lose out on a combo. Being punished even further for lacking gauge - especially if you have no gauge because of a death - feels worse, especially when on something that reduces not only your own DPS but the entire party's buff window in the 2 minute meta. Yeah, currently it's just a "pseudo-cooldown on the Enchanted Combo", but the more you put onto gauge, the more punishing death becomes. I'm not really sure it's necessary to have more punishment for that, even if it leaves the gauge a little boring.

If 2 minute meta was gone and Frazzle wasn't something that would stack with the entire rest of the party's buffs, I think it'd be less bad, but... well, your ideas have all been given assuming that nothing about the combat system is changing, so the 2 minute meta's what we're working with.

Chainspell displacing Combo
Not the intention — rather, the idea is that Chainspell generates enough Mana that you have a 2-part burst: CS+VU → Enchanted Combo, which would take up ~22.5 seconds and so still be "buff window congruent". This has issues though, because if you ever want to reverse it for whatever reason (Combo → CS) then you just end up with a deficit. I like the general idea of bringing in Red Mage's zippy-zoom-zoom gameplay from FFXI, but I can see that the current rough-draft here has various problems, and I don't think that it's a "finished" design as-is.

Leaving my other comments on Chainspell aside - I think it's hard to not see Chainspell be a displacement of the combo when it costs the same and takes the spot of a combo in your burst window. Obviously the Enchanted Combo itself doesn't go anywhere, but it IS a direct replacement of a combo in burst. Frankly there's not really any way that a new burst would avoid that, since our current burst is just... two melee combos (three, if you work at getting that in under a pot window).

Esuna
Definitely intended to be a niche button you rarely press (just like it is for actual Healers) and essentially-useless for Ex/Sav/etc, but would allow Red Mage to feel like the "hero" in another way when they swoop in and cleanse some annoying debuff in some piece of content (for example, Dooms in Dun Scaith)... since I think that kind of experience seems to appeal to a lot of Red Mage players.

That's a fair point. It would be nice if it was an oGCD like Warden's Pean so it wasn't "directly give up damage", but that also doesn't really fit a caster as well.

Support design
In working on this, I realised that it's a huge challenge to try to create a meaningful "Support" role in this game that isn't "Healing", "Healing increase", "Damage increase", or "Damage reduction". I will straight-up admit that I'm not personally thrilled with my flailing attempts to explore other possibilities (eg, trickles of bonus MP), but it was the result of trying to avoid rehashing the same few benefits again and again. But maybe I'm worrying too much about that, and the design should just "give up" and stay within the constraints of the system as already established (like Dancer does).

Yeaaaah, that's kind of the issue with FFXIV's combat system (to the extent that one considers that an issue, of course; it seems to be by design). More involved support roles would require that kind of support being not only usable in raids, but also at least somewhat on par with bringing roles better at the four things you mentioned. When bosses are immune to pretty much all forms of crowd control, and jobs are being explicitly designed to not really need any other job being present for them to work well (for example, no jobs that naturally run dry on MP in normal gameplay without help from someone else), there's not a lot of room for a support role that isn't failing from the start.

[Shurrikhan]

Have not had a chance yet to go through the existing thread; my apologies. A few tidbits in what time I have, though:

Personally, I just want to see the melee combo made better use of, Verraise curtailed either directly or indirectly, and maybe to open up the job's skill floor in a way that doesn't hurt its skill ceiling.

To spitball briefly, let us say that rather than having a discrete skill like Reprisal we instead allow Jolt/II, Scatter/Impact, Verfire, and Verstone to be complete their casts instantly if interrupted (rather than being manually cancelled), at cost to their respective gauge. However, the effect of Dualcast is halved on non-generators, meaning that a truly instant Verraise... would come at cost to White Mana (while Jolt would take a cost from both, Verfire from Black Mana, etc.). I'd recommend also adding a slow-cast mitigation spell (say... Black Prism) that'd be useful for spending Black Mana on demand in emergencies.

As for the melee combo itself, I'd want to see it able to take on a bit more versatility, slack, and maximal power. First, have Enchanted melee skills proc Dualcast and duplicate a portion of their potency dealt onto your next source of magic damage (be it a spell or Enchanted Melee combo); this will give it some added usefulness and flavor, especially while leveling. Second, have it start with the lowest cost and ramp up to the highest (e.g., the likes of 10|15|25), so that one can use the opener for mobility (more efficient than spending MP directly on creating an instant-cast). Finally, have them instead consume a percent of available Black/White Mana, with a lower minimum cost and higher maximum, turning that Mana spent into proportionate bonus potency.

[Shurrikhan]

Support design
In working on this, I realised that it's a huge challenge to try to create a meaningful "Support" role in this game that isn't "Healing", "Healing increase", "Damage increase", or "Damage reduction". I will straight-up admit that I'm not personally thrilled with my flailing attempts to explore other possibilities (eg, trickles of bonus MP), but it was the result of trying to avoid rehashing the same few benefits again and again. But maybe I'm worrying too much about that, and the design should just "give up" and stay within the constraints of the system as already established (like Dancer does).

Yeaaaah, that's kind of the issue with FFXIV's combat system (to the extent that one considers that an issue, of course; it seems to be by design). More involved support roles would require that kind of support being not only usable in raids, but also at least somewhat on par with bringing roles better at the four things you mentioned. When bosses are immune to pretty much all forms of crowd control, and jobs are being explicitly designed to not really need any other job being present for them to work well (for example, no jobs that naturally run dry on MP in normal gameplay without help from someone else), there's not a lot of room for a support role that isn't failing from the start.

I definitely don't feel like we're going to get anywhere of much value if we "'give up' and stay within the constraints of the system as already established." Dancer definitely could and should be tons more interesting than it is.

While, yes, I do think we could easily add just a bit of valuable but at-cost support within its "standard" forms (especially, healing and mitigation), a RDM that actually has different elements instead of just different skins for identical damage with identical gauge effects would be very well primed to provide likewise varied support.

Heck, it doesn't even have to be unique support; in a world with a hefty bit of undermechanics, you could instead have every Wind spell have the same property of accelerating allied movement down its line of attack (and slowing enemies up it), every Stone spell double as magic and physical damage and apply significant Stagger, etc., while RDM would simply benefit more by virtue of having access to a greater than typical number of elements.