Red Mage thread

[Madrone]

The question is also what position will it be in?
Will they make it to outshine blm and smn or something in between.
If it has not much utility, what will they do?
Rydia actually makes good points and i would hope they have some sort of haste ability since chaining combos and the like

Likely Caster LB and Caster spot in raid balanced parties. It could have melee LB and compete utility/slot-wise with melee DPS, and i would like for it to, but I don't think that's very likely. Its not hard to outshine BLM/SMN in utility given that what they offer mostly defensive (E4E, Virus/Supervirus, Apoc, Raise, weak Physick) benefits but what is most attractive are offensive benefits. There some skill changing and new skills coming, so comparing utility right now vs utility at level 70 might (hopefully) be different.

Haste is a sticky issue. AST has Arrow card and no one really likes it except for BLM due to it accelerating resource depletion and BLM having infinite resources. Self speed buffs are a bit different since MNK and NIN TP costs take into account that they have a Haste effect most of the time. Adding on top of that is still a problem. There are plenty of other options for RDM utility though.

[Rbstr]

RDM should absolutely have healing skills. Sure White Magic has also usually included some damage dealing, but the RDM has black magic and weapons for that. The benefit of RDM's white magic has been healing/buffing. It wouldn't feel right to me if RDM wasn't chucking a heal occasionally.
Of course pure heal GCD skills on a DPS character are pretty much wasted unless you make it such that their DPS does not suffer for it. So make them oGCD or some kind of oGCD buff that adds healing effects while you still do damage or whatever implementation that doesn't get in the way of DPS. Doesn't have to be more than a couple skills, just make them fairly useful generally and/or clutch.
(The healing magic problem is the main reason I thought RDM would make a neat tank, White Magic = damage reduction CDs and a panic heals button. Oh Well!)

Outside of that? Well RDM should really not have "high level" magic spells on their own. I think the sort of theme should be combining their weaker magic and physical prowess in fun ways to do damage. It'd be fun, for example, if they had fire 1, blizzard 1, aero 1, and cure 1 but had combos and things so end up working very differently than the BLM/WHM versions.
And Dual Cast has to be important to them somehow.

[Duelle]

Clemency is saved from being utterly useless simply because the class that has it is usually in the position of taking massive amounts of damage. Clemency is still completely unnecessary most of the time provided that the healer knows what they are doing, but it's not a total trash skill. Generally speaking, though, it tends to be better that the PLD continue to attack rather than stop to self-heal.

In the case of PLD, this is because the PLD is busy tanking. A DPS with clemency would have more opportunities to use it (though, as I've said, you'd need to tie it to some mechanic to limit/control its use).

True hybrids don't work in this game. Your opinion is your own, of course, and valid as far as that goes, but there's nothing in this particular game thus far that supports a true hybrid class being successful unless you want to consider SCH one.

I'm not sure where you get that I'm asking for a "true" hybrid. I know well enough that it wouldn't work in this game. My argument was that you can't base utility on whether it's used all the time. I could take it a step further and say that at that point it's no longer utility, but a rotational ability.

I've already covered how an oGCD action that happens to heal someone wouldn't be horrible (even if it most likely wouldn't be very useful), but I wouldn't want to see actions like that become the focus or theme of a DPS Job, because no one needs a healing DPS. That's more or less my point.

Now I'm convinced you're not understanding the other side of this conversation. No one is asking for a healing DPS. What is being asked for is some limited utility that involves healing. Firstly because it fits the concept of the job (RDM being a combination of swordplay, white magic and black magic) and second because it could prove useful in cases where things start to go badly but at a notable cost to the RDM.

I'd personally still want the job to focus on DPS and would expect the bulk of the skills to be meant for that. If you need examples of what I was hoping to see with RDM, I'll point to WoW's enhancement shaman and retribution paladin, since those are actual "hybrids" that focus on DPS but have utility built into them; both fight in melee range (hint hint, SE), both can spot heal but quickly consume resources when doing so (which means you're likely not using heals but are there if shit hits the fan), both have some form of party/raid buffs, and the latter has the equivalent of Benediction but better and a cooldown that makes one party member immune to physical damage.

[Cynfael]

snip.

By this point I'm getting the idea that we don't actually disagree on much of anything. I'm just emphasizing the risk of having healing-type utility as a DPS Job gimmick because a lot of people in various sections of the forums seem to be excited about the possibility of RDM having healing, and game designers everywhere seem to balance the scales in ways that don't actually mesh with player needs. I wouldn't want to see "RDM has slightly lower DPS than X Job because it has the ability to clutch heal/mitigate damage/what-have-you" since the actual demand for additional healing and mitigation outside of the healing and tank roles, respectively, is basically nil.

[Apeiron]

So, I'm a little confused by people saying RDM will have black/white magic since according to the slide they provided they've stated red magic is a hybrid of black and white magic... yet everyone is so focused on what healing spells RDM will get?

What we might be more likely to see are things like low oGCD abilities that help buff healing (think something like Mantra) and a buff/debuff to help DPS casters (similar to something like Foe's Requiem maybe?). I don't expect to see a piercing resistance debuff, though. If I remember correctly, there was an interview where Yoshi-P was asked if RDM would deal physical damage, and Yoshi-P started to explain but stopped himself because he didn't want to give anything away. If we do get one, then we're looking at DRG Disembowel being overwritten like with what happens to WAR Storm's Eye/NIN Dancing Edge and DRK Delirium/MNK Dragon Kick.

The skills used in the video to me ring of something like the MCH Wildfire. Cast "Chainspell" for X amount of seconds Y% of damage done to target is compiled and dealt at the end of the duration. Rushing in would allow the RDM to apply DoT(s) or a debuff, or get close to aide the party with a utility ability, and then jumping back out would re-position them to return to their red magic rotation. The positionals would be important because if you're too far from the main body of your party, they can't benefit from your utility, and if you're too close you're likely to eat more damage.

While the traditional RDM has been the jack of all trade, utilizing both white and black magic, it's been stated before that the FFXIV RDM would be different from previous installments (could be mis-remembering this and I don't remember when/where the statement was made). The hybridization of white/black could purely be lore related, and we will see the faintest of traces of white magic in the elements used for spells, or how a RDM might augment potency of party abilities/skills.

...Thoughts? Need someone to double check I'm not using crazy logic here.

[Madrone]

So, I'm a little confused by...

It only takes 1 spell to have utilty healing. Casters have one now from either being ACN or from cross class, its just failed to scale with what ilvl does to our max hp. So it wouldn't even need to be a native red magic spell per se. So long as there was a way to leverage the stat that powers it, or said spell's very poor scaling was fixed in either the 4.0 battle skill review/purge or cross role skill system re-org.

Because its a dps, its worth discussing dps healing capabilities. RDM should have something. Everyone else but MCN does, and looks like they'll fix that too in 4.0.

Utility sort of determines how desirable a dps job is in raid settings. There are other, more important utilities than weak self or off healing from a dps, but a lot of people are looking for the familiar traces of actual RDM that will make it through into XIV RDM. Swords, check. Its a dps so offensive/debuff (black magic), check. Healing/buffing (white magic), ????? Just talking about what might be acceptable and still balanced with the other dps jobs.


The skills in the video looked more like /battlestance, Chainspell, attack spell A, attack spell B, oGCD lunge, Weaponskill A, oGCD backflip slash, spell finisher A, /victorypose. Maybe a spell/melee combo that works like mudras resulting in different finishing effects depending on what you put into it. Probably not rotationally accurate though. Just some skills with animations that were ready to show off.

Sharing piercing debuff wouldn't be bad. We wouldn't go out of our way to apply it with a DRG in party. Its desirable for any party with a brd or mcn, so any 8 man raid group would want either a rdm or a drg, if they both had it. DRG has a monopoly on it right now. RDM could be fine without it though. It might in fact do all magical damage or mostly magical damage.

I'm really leaning on RDM being like Casters in many ways, and NIN.

[Apeiron]

It only takes 1 spell to have utilty healing. Casters have one now from either being ACN or from cross class, its just failed to scale with what ilvl does to our max hp. So it wouldn't even need to be a native red magic spell per se. So long as there was a way to leverage the stat that powers it, or said spell's very poor scaling was fixed in either the 4.0 battle skill review/purge or cross role skill system re-org.

Ah, alright. They way I was reading some of the posts made it sound as if players were expecting a unique RDM healing spell that scaled well, and that the RDM would be expected to use (if somewhat reluctantly as is the case with some abilities/skills -- e.g. Feint, etc.) on other players.

[Madrone]

I'd define scaling well in this context more like physick cast with 1/2 the mnd of a healer instead of like 1/7 that casters have now. So like in a level 60 context a heal that does 2000. It'd be weak, but a lot more functional than Physick is now for casters. I really wouldn't hope for anything much stronger than that for a dps. It could be native, but its also just a good opportunity to fix cross classed Cure/Physick, because they're getting worse as max hp increase.

[CatStarPrime]

it'll be the lolgoon of 4.0 already read people calling him lolmage or Re(tar)dmage for that subject

I vote for Deadmage (or DedMage)

[Thunda_Cat_SMASH]

"RDM has slightly lower DPS than X Job because it has the ability to clutch heal/mitigate damage/what-have-you".

Rend Mind. Dismantle. Dragon Kick. Virus. E4E. One thing that these all have in common is the fact that they all mitigate damage. 2 of these are available to healers as well, however, it still remains that MCH, with Dis/RM and a clutch Virus or lucky E4E proc can come from jobs that aren't involved with tanking/healing. This argument is not only moot, it's completely dead in the water out the starting gate. There's dps jobs with mitigation skills, and their dps hardly suffers for it.