Quote Originally Posted by Karshan View Post
snip
Personally, I don't like when proper performance comes down to esoteric memorization and bursts of precise activity between banal filler time, and it's far from me to wish that on RDM in any way. I want a Red Mage that still feels very capable when played at a relaxed style, but has a lot going on not just hidden away under the hood, but also readily viewable to the player, from which to find internal mechanical enjoyment from choices made. At present, RDM feels like it has precisely one choice at optimal play -- whether to open with Verthunder or Veraero.

While most jobs similarly boil down to an embarrassingly linear and scripted form of play, downtime at least impacts more than a single alignment (two, I suppose, if melee range is denied, preventing CaC and dE from being spent before Manafication, while spells are still possible) and can at least somewhat allow the player to reshape their actions accordingly, and most other jobs at least have a few different openers possible that have distinct rotational effects down the line while remaining equally or almost equally optimal in any given situation (in addition to a couple more fight-specific openers). RDM has none of that, making everything feel very same-y.

And that's not even a biggest problem; it's just the fact that the entire playstyle between burns feels like 1-2-1-3-4-2-5-3-1-6 back and forth, back and forth, augments the same as initials, and sift through oGCDs mostly as they come. It doesn't really seem to "move" through its rotations even in the shallow sense of combo chains or Astral/Umbral stages or reDoTs or DWT stages, etc., etc. It just all feels so same-y to me.