Integration of the Sword: Red Mage

[Shurrikhan]

Alright, so I found part of the old pipedream document... You may remember the Elementality concept (Enemy held granular values for Heat, Mass, Saturation, etc., as to be manipulable by all element spells in addition to Gravity, etc.) from a thread back in 1.0 I wrote, I believe, around the same week you swapped to that signature...

At your own risk. It's a mess, and somehow in 7 pages still only the first half...

[YokeM]

Your Ideas sound great. It`s to bad, that you are largely ignored.
A real spell fencer would have been much more interesting. Right now, RDM will be really just a caster 80%-90% of the time.

[Duelle]

Your ideas sound great. It's too bad that you are largely ignored.

The story of my life. ~_~

I've made some tweaks to the OP.

Having done some tests and looked at the gameplay, I'll post some initial impressions of the job so far. I'd rather do it here than to make a new thread about it, specially since I'm not going to exactly gush over the design.

- Mana gauge: It might be the way the gauge is laid out, but it is VERY distracting. The fact that you're managing two bars doesn't help, and neither does peripheral vision. Unless the job is meant to sometimes go off-balance, but I find that unlikely. If there's a way to turn it sideways to make it easier to see (since I'd put it over my actions bars), I've yet to find it. Even Weak Aura-style bars would be better than what we currently have.

- Corps-a-corps & Displacement: As I predicted, forcing the job to make rotational use of mobility was not a good idea. Again, telegraphs and other mechanics are not going to be fun to deal with, and will intervene with your 3 GCD combo if you hit 80/80 at the wrong time. Sure, 80/80 means you have some wiggle room since you can try to get close to the mana cap without going over while waiting for an opportunity to rush into melee range, but gameplay-wise you're stuck in limbo. Which ties to...

- General gameplay: You can't stay in range because you'll cap out in mana, but you can't stand in melee unless you're 80/80. Auto's deal pitiful damage so you can't even use that to justify staying near the target to cast until you hit 80/80 to combo the mob. Jumping in and out sounds cool until you realize that this game has telegraphs and other things to look out for in a fight. It looks good on paper and I guess it has a "cool" factor if you're willing to ignore that it's a very impractical approach to combat, but I find the execution lacking since it tries to tie two styles of gameplay in a way that doesn't really work. There's a reason why "ranged/melee" hybrids tend to buy the farm; they're almost as bad from a design perspective as melee healers. Funnily enough, this design would actually work better in a game like FFXI where you don't have much in the way of mechanics to worry about.

In before "they can still patch it/you don't know how to play/it's only the first day of the expansion/I accept everything SE gives me without question/Yoshi-P is infallible/wait until lv70/just quit the game".

PS: For those curious, the skill spread for RDM is very close to how jobs were designed for ARR and Heavensward. RDM has the same pace of growth as a GLA or CNJ from lv1-30. The job has no other skills past lv30 aside from those that correspond to the ARR/HW job quest abilities (35, 40, 45, 50, 52, 54, 56, 58, 60). It also does not have two lv30 abilities (unlike a GLA which got Shield Swipe from the lv30 GLA quest and Shield Oath from the lv30 PLD unlock quest).

[Kuukii]

Red mage should have been the reverse. Instead of casting for 90% of the time and unleashing melee attacks it should have been melee attacks build up mana then spend it on nuking magic attacks. Seriously whats the point of the sword if you barely use it.

[Ceallach]

I feel like this would make red mage just another ninja. If red mage was turned into what the OP did, I'd much rather just play ninja and avoid having to toggle a stance every time I wanted to switch between casting and attacking.

People need to understand that the red mage was always the jack of all trades, and the only two times the red mage was a master of anything was debuffs in FINAL FANTASY XI and arcane magicks in FINAL FANTASY XII: The Zodiac Age. In this game, it's a Disciple of Magic DPS with Vercure, Verraise and weaponskills, things no other Disciple of Magic DPS can rationally boast beyond summoner's Resurrection (which basically requires Swiftcast).

Also, Dualcast is part of the red mage's history more than any other job. It was sometimes called Double or Doublecast.

Finally, it's important to point out that this job has always been the red mage. Of course magic is going to be at the forefront of what this job does. The OP is trying to change that, and I think that demonstrates a lack of understanding of the job.