Red Mage is Range Combat? (Discussion)

[Teiren]

To be fair, the other part of "combat system overhaul" is remaking Enochian, maybe Greased Lightning, and maybe Darkside. Those could be substantial, but yeah, the game isn't getting anything fundamentally huge like changing the GCD, removing global server tick, removing delay of others' movements on your screen, etc. I was expecting we would be getting an option to collapse the various weaponskill combos into one button each, but it seems like that won't happen, oh well.

Anyway, to stay on-topic: Red Mage will primarily play like Black Mage, in my opinion. That means it'll spend about 80-90% of its time at range but unlike BLM will need to melee for MP or something, probably. I believe the video shown at Fanfest shows 3 different actions before the mini-Flare at the end: An Ability to get into melee (the holy tether at the beginning), a Weaponskill to cause damage with some personal benefit (the rapier barrage), and a second Ability to leap back with a slash (like Elusive Jump with damage). I've also considered the possibility that the backwards leap is actually the same Ability as the holy tether but dynamically changed to a leap after use, starting its recast after 10 seconds or leaping back, or something like that. Keep in mind Ability means off the GCD, Weaponskill/Spell means on the GCD. I very much doubt Red Mage will have any actual weaponskill combos like DRG but instead activated weaponskills like Monk.

The only problem is that, unless they do something hokey like making some spells literally have a minimum range requirement to do full damage or be cast at all (both VERY bad ideas), I don't know how they expect to "force" Red Mage to fight at range. Then again, just the naturally HUGE benefit of being able to attack at range will likely be enough by itself.

[Mhaeric]

The major overhaul will not be to core mechanics or even to specific abilities, although there will still tweaks to those. Enochian was one in particular that was said to be receiving a way to make it less punishing to your dps numbers if you lose it mid-cycle.

The mayor overhaul will be to cross-class skills. Currently each cross-skill is specific to a class, and each job can only draw on two class' cross-skills. This leaves some key abilities missing for certain jobs. E.g. Keen Eye for ninjas. The change will be that jobs will instead pull from an archetype list of cross class skills instead of two classes cross class skills. This means that all melee dps will have invigorate, all dex dps will have keen eye, all casters will have swiftcast, etc regardless of their secondary and tertiary classes. In fact, tertiary class will no longer be a meaningful phrase since only the secondary class will still have impact for those jobs that require level 15 in it to unlock.