Red mage 7.0 Wishlist

[Milkbeard]

Listen,
I added a survival category to the OP. Please let me know if you guys think there should be more changes. Hopefully it can address and reflect all concerns with that area of red mages.

[kayll]

I don't think we can form any causal links using that data. If two classes who don't have personal mit moves are performing different in death percentages for a given encounter or phase i'd be inclined to lean more towards what you originally said about durability, hp values and resistances. Sorry that I didn't address that in your original post, that is something I too think should be changed. I don't personally think casters should have radically differing HP or resistance values than roles other than tank.

Yeah I don't actually want a personal shield for our capstone, I'm just pretty fed up over overkills of 500 damage, despite no one in my party making a mistake.
If they haven't fixed HP/Resistances values by now, I don't have high hopes, and there is currently no way to justify the massive differences they have currently.

[Silverquick]

Now I want to put a hot fact out here that most of you, for sure aren't seeing or realizing. Self-mitigation is redundant outside of all content other than expert roulette.
Self mitigation is redundant, it doesn't negate death in any situation in which you have the slightest coordination with a healer and or tank. Every mechanic and attack *in the game* has a mitigation threshold. You meet the threshold using group mitigation. If you do not meet it, someone in the party dies. Self-mitigation is redundant because mitigation thresholds are the bare minimun expectation for surviving an AOE and are balanced around players not self-mitigating.

This is a fact ladies and gentlemen of this forum. You may not agree with it, but it is how people who clear hardcore content know exactly what moves to pop. You plan the mit, and then execute the completion of the mechanic.

Sumn personal mit, BLM personal mit, all DPS personal mit. Is redundant, a literal waste of button space.

I challenge you to come up with a single mechanic in the entire game that requires it, (spoiler) there are none. Because they are all balanced to be handled without it.

Regardless, I will add it to the post as something red mages think would be fun to use. Is it needed? It is not, never has been, never will be.

Hot fact, that's incorrect.

That is way too many assumptions. First of all you assume... the healer or tank is going to be doing that. You assume... that someone is covering you. You assume... you're not going to end up outside the healers radius and be able to do that.

That is not what happens in reality...

That's what happens in a perfect world. And I can tell you one thing it definitely doesn't apply to Alliance Raids. They are chaotic and f'd up half the time. You can't control what happens there.

And I can tell you now that Personal Mit as you call it has saved my az a million times on SMN. I don't have to worry about anything like that. I have two of them, and almost never out of them, unless I really screw up. Not so on RDM. I have to constantly Vercure myself. And in your words in a Raid that is going to cost you DPS.

RDM is actually behind the other mage jobs in staying power in combat when it clearly should be one of it's strengths over and above the others.

[Rongway]

That is way too many assumptions. First of all you assume... the healer or tank is going to be doing that.

You are absolutely allowed to assume that the tanks and healers will be doing their jobs when you balance duties. That's the whole point of forcing tanks and healers in the party composition.

And every bit of content in this game that actually cares about job balance is balanced around the idea that it can be cleared with the DDs providing no self-healing and no self-mitigation because there are tanks and healers who are expected to provide enough to cover the minimum requirements for surviving the unavoidable damage in any given fight.

If people die because they failed to avoid avoidable damage, that's a player problem, not a "this job needs personal mitigation" problem.

[Shurrikhan]

Now I want to put a hot fact out here that most of you, for sure aren't seeing or realizing. Self-mitigation is redundant outside of all content other than expert roulette.
Self mitigation is redundant, it doesn't negate death in any situation in which you have the slightest coordination with a healer and or tank. Every mechanic and attack *in the game* has a mitigation threshold. You meet the threshold using group mitigation. If you do not meet it, someone in the party dies. Self-mitigation is redundant because mitigation thresholds are the bare minimun expectation for surviving an AOE and are balanced around players not self-mitigating.

This is a fact ladies and gentlemen of this forum. You may not agree with it, but it is how people who clear hardcore content know exactly what moves to pop. You plan the mit, and then execute the completion of the mechanic.

Sumn personal mit, BLM personal mit, all DPS personal mit. Is redundant, a literal waste of button space.

I challenge you to come up with a single mechanic in the entire game that requires it, (spoiler) there are none. Because they are all balanced to be handled without it.

Regardless, I will add it to the post as something red mages think would be fun to use. Is it needed? It is not, never has been, never will be.

This is objectively correct, but it's also objectively a non-sequitur if we're interested in gameplay.

No tool whose use is not yet forced is required, true. But, every tool that is generated can be give a potential use... while tools trimmed or precluded obviously... cannot.

And, perhaps more importantly still, that use does not have to be reduced to, as you've hinted, a single party-wide-coordinated use in order to forgo a healer GCD in Succor or EukProg where the party would otherwise die and every Broil/Dosis matters. It could as easily come from fights having many more small instances of avoidable damage and to be used as a personal recovery tool, or even an uptime-greeding tool, for when free external spot-healing tools are depleted and/or the timing of that damage taken would not be recoverable in time.

Does any non-tank NEED personal mitigation tools? No. Can one's total decision making, sense of agency, and variety of gameplay met within a given fight benefit from having them? Yes, most definitely.

Increasing the instances of (avoidable) damage and granting some modest self-heals/shields accordingly (that are, due to that increase, not sufficient to degrade the healer experience) may not "require" those self-saves to be used (though, if they would otherwise languish on CD, they should at least replace some ST-spot-heals), but they create a new optimization challenge, felt more deeply for those who cannot necessarily dodge every bit of damage but still experienced even by those who do. Such is a net deepening of gameplay.

________________________

Now, that's not necessarily conferrable to every type of self-save, though. There's a serious issue of diminishing returns there. For instance, if I could use Manaward to 0 a knockback after receiving a Succor/EuP and thereby nullify it completely... but I have Arm's Length that doesn't depend on anything else for that, Arm's Length is just going to become the non-contextual, no-coordination-required mechanics-canceller, which in turn may also remove the point of banking Thundercloud or Swiftcast, etc. for that mechanic. Many such tools can go too far, erasing more depth than they could possible add. So, don't take the above "if it adds to gameplay, there's merit in adding it" as a blank cheque to be used without considering net impact.

[SieyaM]

Now I want to put a hot fact out here that most of you, for sure aren't seeing or realizing. Self-mitigation is redundant outside of all content other than expert roulette.
Self mitigation is redundant, it doesn't negate death in any situation in which you have the slightest coordination with a healer and or tank. Every mechanic and attack *in the game* has a mitigation threshold. You meet the threshold using group mitigation. If you do not meet it, someone in the party dies. Self-mitigation is redundant because mitigation thresholds are the bare minimun expectation for surviving an AOE and are balanced around players not self-mitigating.

This is a fact ladies and gentlemen of this forum. You may not agree with it, but it is how people who clear hardcore content know exactly what moves to pop. You plan the mit, and then execute the completion of the mechanic.

Sumn personal mit, BLM personal mit, all DPS personal mit. Is redundant, a literal waste of button space.

I challenge you to come up with a single mechanic in the entire game that requires it, (spoiler) there are none. Because they are all balanced to be handled without it.

Regardless, I will add it to the post as something red mages think would be fun to use. Is it needed? It is not, never has been, never will be.

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.

[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.

[kayll]

Again, the "personal mitigation as a capstone" thing was a joke.

While I do agree it would help slightly, it wouldn't feel great having to press it on RDM either seeing how weaving it between Dualcast would feel bad, but I guess at least you wouldn't die when you used it.
But what about after you have used it?

I'd much prefer if the HP among all classes except tanks were equalized to avoid the situation entirely.
Seeing how many more Physical damage raidwides have been in EW making casters even more at risk, If they continue making more mechanics like that, I'd like the HP to be fixed.

[Milkbeard]

Hot take, this is how you optimize the fun out of a game.

Sieya, this is clearly a reminder for myself that it isn't always what I say that incites a response, it is how I say it. I'm not trying to sway anyones opinion that this was like a hot shot optimization. I could have stated it differently, and I apologize. Personal mitigation is currently not too great as whole concept.(yet! who knows, it one day could change!). Optimizing all fun out of the game isn't the point of the wishlist, so don't feel discouraged, please still recommend what you would think is fun if they added it to the class in 7.0.

This is objectively correct, but it's also objectively a non-sequitur if we're interesting in gameplay.

Personal mitigation might seem like it offers an ocean of depth, and optimization, and identity, but there isn't very strong evidence supporting that it really does.

The depth of gameplay involves assuming that the bare minimum mitigation wasn't going to be used by your party. So it isn't something reactive, like some sort of skill shot, it is literally a player not trusting that bare minimum mitigations are being used, before a mechanic goes off. Either that, or you're pressing it in situations where it isn't beneficial and is just redundant with group mit.

I just don't quite agree that it is something fun, or nuanced.

Who knows though, open world solo content might get harder, personal mitigation might be a saving grace in that content and everyone could be happy. Who knows, maybe it could be a button that "negates 1 vuln" instead.

Currently for me, it is kind of a nothing burger. The majority of the times you don't need it, doesn't yet justify the times you could need it. I would rather have just increased HP and resistances. I can't deny its not something people are passionate about though, and that it doesn't deserve a spot on the wishlist.

Shurrikhan, sorry if this doesn't entirely address your argument. You're eloquent almost to a fault my friend, so apologies if I didn't grasp it all. I am going to try an not be non-sequitur for both our sakes moving forward .