Red mage 7.0 Wishlist

[Rychu]

Hot take, this is how you optimize the fun out of a game. Only allow abilities that suit the highest level of play and eschew all aspects of design that don't cater to balance at the highest difficulty. Don't worry about what would be fun or give a job an identity, only design for a short encounter against a single enemy in an arena and all other content does not matter.

This is part of the reason why I think that the 2 minute meta is bad for the game overall. It requires everything to be designed within this small time frame and every job that existed before it will have to be gutted to end up fitting into that bubble.

[Shurrikhan]

This is part of the reason why I think that the 2 minute meta is bad for the game overall. It requires everything to be designed within this small time frame and every job that existed before it will have to be gutted to end up fitting into that bubble.

To be fair, jobs being advantaged even over others of equal raw DPS for being able to deal their damage in tight bursts goes back to 2.4. It's not new.

All that has changed over time is the degree to which kits are tailored to reduce the disparity between nDPS and DPS (raw DPS vs. in-party-contexts-DPS) by making damage profiles more similar.

We could as easily have all kits just spread out their damage further despite 2 minute buffs. And we'd still be max-bursting inside of 15s windows (or, if we were to go back to pre-EW, within 10s windows), even if we had just one raid buff or those raid buffs were staggered.

The context has not forced the kit design; we are as bursty as we are not so much because of that context (for which we otherwise could just compensate less advantaged jobs with greater raw dps, especially if we have no plans for mainstay 4-man Savage content or are okay with adjusting how raid buffs work to reduce their scaling with party size) as simply because the devs seem to think that we believe that it is more fun to have periods of dense action than to have more constant moderate action.

[Milkbeard]

This is part of the reason why I think that the 2 minute meta is bad for the game overall. It requires everything to be designed within this small time frame and every job that existed before it will have to be gutted to end up fitting into that bubble.

Gutted you say? What would you personally bring back for red mage, from the time before this 2 minute meta? I know the streamers and twitter are very charged about this topic right now, aren't they?

[Rychu]

Gutted you say? What would you personally bring back for red mage, from the time before this 2 minute meta? I know the streamers and twitter are very charged about this topic right now, aren't they?

Haha guess that was pretty confusing since this is a Red Mage thread, sorry I should have clarified in the original post I made.

Red Mage actually transitioned pretty easily between Shadowbringers to Endwalker since it's burst lined up anyways. I was referring to every other job in the game that had to be changed to fit into the 2 minute meta. Paladin is an easy example of a job that was really good at sustained damage but because it didn't fit into the 2 minute meta, had to be mini-reworked to remove the sustained damage aspect that it was known for.

[Shurrikhan]

Paladin is an easy example of a job that was really good at sustained damage but because it didn't fit into the 2 minute meta, had to be mini-reworked to remove the sustained damage aspect that it was known for.

Tangent, but... "Sustained damage" isn't a perk. There's no value in being "good at" sustained damage. The things nearest that that may have actual benefit are merely either advantages in fight-length DPS, at least in certain types of comps (e.g., those with minimal buff value), or lesser variation in that overall damage over variation in context (such as to fight length or composition).

Jobs can have a lead in typically-produced nDPS (or "damage irrespective of buffs") or contextually in aDPS ("damage in practice," wherein the degree of buffs available and exploitation of them through burst can make large differences), but ultimately only burst offers further value than just how much damage you fit into the time between the fight's start and end; sustain does not.

That's not to say that all jobs should be equally bursty or the like, but for a job to be less bursty, it would generally need something else/more in compensation; otherwise, the same raw damage just means less actual / in-practice damage.

And that, in turn becomes a bit of a can of worms for balancing, as you end up with less coordination-dependent jobs just being outright superior into some turning point and, like Dancers' (who want to be matched with a "selfish" DPS for greatest total party value between themselves and their partner) compositional obligations, you end up splitting comps into Minimal Coordination (low burst and low buffs, and therefore less party damage coming from exploitation of buffs) vs. Maximal Coordination (the opposite), where Minimal Coordination would punish deaths and desync significantly less.

[Rychu]

Tangent, but... "Sustained damage" isn't a perk. There's no value in being "good at" sustained damage. The things nearest that that may have actual benefit are merely either advantages in fight-length DPS, at least in certain types of comps (e.g., those with minimal buff value), or lesser variation in that overall damage over variation in context (such as to fight length or composition).

Oh yeah I didn't mean it like a perk or a benefit, more as just a different option. Like I think it's a little unfair to people who aren't a fan of bursting classes that there is quite literally no options for them.

And this is coming from someone that is perfectly happy with Red Mage's rotation as is which fits perfectly in the 2 minute meta