Quote Originally Posted by OcieKo View Post
Its mostly a matter if all the sword skills are under the Black/White mana costs, or are their some that are simply TP cost. So much of your concern about that is up in the air still, more of wait for more info issue.
It's as clear as day that you have to be above certain mana levels to "enhance" sword skills. The three that were shown consumed 30, 25 and 25 of each mana type. You're likely able to use them on their own, but they won't be enhanced. And I can bet dollars to donuts the enhancement has to do with either MP recovery or causing the sword skills to deal their intended damage (meaning you won't be encouraged to use them on their own).

That being said, if we wanted to make things a little more even, mana generation would have to be considerably higher per spell. Without using the cooldown to double current mana accumulated, you're still sitting in the back line spamming spells to generate mana that is consumed in 3 GCDs. As I said earlier, you're spending a lot of time away from the mob and a short time in actual melee range.
Now between the recent video and older descriptive info I get the impression your gunna be spending a fairly equal amount of time up close and far away. I suspect they may have a few instant casts spells for use to be weaved with your sword along the lines of scathe/ruin 2 or else the note about chainspell only affecting spells with a cast time would be redundant.
This would have a leg to stand on if Chainspell was a secondary or minor system to RDM, because you could then work around it. Sword skills proccing Chainspell would also work, which is not the case and the devs have made no effort to indicate that.

As a DPS, your job is to do as much damage as possible, and as currently presented the way to do so as RDM is to cast from range and dump mana on sword skills for the suspected proc to cast a white or black-flavored nuke. Which takes us back to my initial issue with what has been done: instead of a sword & spell hybrid, we got a black mage with a sword.
Also it is possible some of their sword skills have cast times thus why chainspell can be consumed with them. Since it seems cast times on melee will also be a thing with SAM. But I will be keeping watch on this matter as well.
Actually, the reason the effect is lost is because the game treats it like combo breaking. Or using an instant spell when Swiftcast is up. If Chainspell is up, you have to cast a spell, and performing any other offensive action cancels the effect.