Red Mages need some love

[NewAgeDoom]

Rift and DDO....

I'm actually playing Rift again because they have a new Prime server and it's fricken awesome. They have a talent tree now for a warrior to shoot lightning like some storm titan! And you can have any 3 trees active at once as a sort of pseudo multi-classing. And yes, a warrior, not a mage, lol.

And TBH, I've never really had any problems whining too much if I diverted from a pre-determined spec with those two games. I remember this was more of a problem in old school WoW I think. I think Rift and DDO passed a complexity boundary where it becomes a headache to ask other's their exact spec and fighting about it is pointless whereas WoW never quite reached that boundary.

Just have to make sure the auto-payment is off now on this game lol.

Congratulations?

You claim to dislike this game, yet you still seem to spend quite a bit of time on the forums for it.

If it acts like a duck, quacks like a duck...

[EllieShadeflare]

It's because FFXIV is an over-simplified MMO. No customization whatsoever. So if you don't like your RDM out of the box, too bad because all RDM's are the same....

Unfortunately for your mindset, we're in a different era of MMOs than the age of user-hostile, complex for the sake of complexity time sinks that massively enforced an attitude of git gud vs have fun.

Even in FFXI and early WoW, customization was heavily scrutinized and treated as a science, to the point that players created metas on the absolute most "efficient" builds as possible without thinking about the way it'd be treated by other players. Or rather, how jerks would try to limit other players based on the meta.

And yeah, I've constantly been the person who's had to say that Raises are absolutely useless outside of progression and 4-mans because they are. You can't complete a fight if you raise too often due to rez weakness, lost threat or lost healing. To balance Red Mage around a situational at best, actually harmful at worst utility is one of the most bone-headed moves the dev team has done. So Dualgunner's posts highly resonate with me because someone else finally sees the real issue with this.

Red Mage does not have the DPS contribution to justify having the lowest DPS of any DPS in the game. Perhaps if Embolden had a smaller cooldown and had a 20% initial damage boost, things'd be different, but as it stands, we are arbitrarily weaker than anyone else without having the ability to make up. And since DPS is king in FFXIV, balancing our DPS contribution or our actual damage around Verraise is 100% counter intuitive.

[maestroanth]

Unfortunately for your mindset, we're in a different era of MMOs than the age of user-hostile, complex for the sake of complexity time sinks that massively enforced an attitude of git gud vs have fun.

Such a better era.....no customization = no fun. Bring on the science and make this shit interesting once again!

[EllieShadeflare]

Such a better era.....no customization = no fun. Bring on the science and make this shit interesting once again!

It'd come out to the same, because people will always try to find the meta (which will be found quickly), and buttholes will always use the meta to justify keeping people out of their parties.

It changes nothing and you just get a clunky system that few people are actually gonna take full advantage of (except in predetermined ways discovered by other players).

Also, I saw something that irritated me (despite being from a user that I tend to agree with), so we're going to unpack this a bit.

1. Remove Raise from Red Mage and Summoner.

I don't think this is necessary, if only for the reason that there's lore reasons for the former and mechanical reasons for the latter to keep their Raises. Red Mage has it to emphasize that they're users of magic of both White AND Black, but they're not a healer so they only chose the most basic abilities from White Mage (other than the elements). Summoner needs their Raise because they're Arcanist, and I don't know if it's actually possible to replace one skill with another in its entirety from the base class set. Summon 1 and 2 don't exactly count because they only change the result, not the skill itself (you still summon something, but it seems to be a conditional "If Scholar then Fairy" kinda thing.

That said, you could limit these raises in various ways. For example, Resurrection (for Summoner) could have an absolutely unreasonable MP cost which is handled by a level 1 trait for Scholar, whilst Red Mage can't use Dualcast on Verraise (but could still use Swiftcast). It'd also help if we got more mages in the Caster Role to also show that Raise is simply a class/job lore thing rather than a role thing.

2. Dual Cast increases Spell Potency (10-20%). This equates to around a 5-6% damage buff.

This feels unnecessary, considering that Verthunder/Veraero are already higher potency than the spell you hardcast.

3. Embolden no longer decays. This equates to around a 2% personal buff and a buff to 2% Physical DPS overall.

This is something I highly agree with, since the decay was originally built for when Embolden was slated to be a whopping 20% buff. At 10%, it's about the same as Trick Attack, but with almost twice the CD and also decays. It's not at all good. As a result, I suggest either we go with your suggestion or bring Embolden back to its originally intended 20%.

1. Moving Vercure to the Ability type.
-I like this idea because it does become a bonus the Red Mage brings instead of a trade off. It'd either need a somewhat comparable cooldown (like 15 seconds) or maintaining the MP Cost.

I personally don't like it myself because Vercure had a bonus utility of ensuring a Dualcast in downtime, so we could get a proc when something finally happens. It also allows us to cover for our own mistakes as needed and removes some of that pressure from healers.

[Sunako]

If vercure would be ogcd heal with small cooldown, RDM could support healers without dps loss like ninja can support tanks with extra enmity generation. I think that would be pretty cool idea?

[Dualgunner]

If vercure would be ogcd heal with small cooldown, RDM could support healers without dps loss like ninja can support tanks with extra enmity generation. I think that would be pretty cool idea?

The issue there is, RDM would then lose a valuable tool for proccing Dualcast in transition phases.

EDIT: Since I didn't get to this earlier:

i don't think people care the number of utility-skills but the flexibility/mobility/insta advantage of an int based heal

You realize Vercure is about the same as a WHM's actual Cure 1. Now tell me how many WHM actually see Cure 1 as a viable endgame healing spell to fall back on.

and if needed a 4-5x instant res in a row.

By 5x, it's no longer valuable, it's a wipe. By 3x, you get just as much taking a SMN (who outclasses RDM hard on damage), because you'd have 3 instant cast raises / minute. So 4 deaths per minute is the optimal "RDM is helpful here!" version; aside from, perhaps, "Both healers just died!" and while it's possible to recover at that point...there's really no point, wiping it up would be smarter there as well.

since rdm is still the only cls which owns the necromancer title its more than good to go in balancing...

Okay I'll bite. Yes, RDM players are the sole people with Necromancer as a title. Of everybody who's managed to get it, they're all RDM.

All...two of them, as of this post.

Is there any reason another job *couldn't* try it? It's not like either of these two players breezed through PotD. They put a lot of hard work and effort into it that I'm sure another job could do as well if people put enough effort into it.

its the only cls who acquired this title so far so what do u need more to see how "powerful" rdm support utility can be in direct comparison - its not always about dmg, dmg, dmg q.q...

Neela, you know the game you're playing. FFXIV is always. Again, read: ALWAYS. Damage, damage, damage. PLD and WHM in 3.x were trash. Why? They didn't have good damage output, and their utilities were functionally useless when the stronger damaging jobs could survive through the fight just the same. Red Mage is in the same place as 3.x PLD and WHM now: they do frankly weak damage, and their support is middling to useless.

If you're so obsessed with Necromancer, go get it. Be the third person ever to do it, and the first person to do it on SMN. You never know if you can until you've tried, and it's not like it's a total breeze for RDM either.

[CorbinDallas]

snip

White Mage damage output was fine in 3.x, it was mp issues and the 30% balance which caused people to drop it in favour of astrologian.

[Dualgunner]

White Mage damage output was fine in 3.x, it was mp issues and the 30% balance which caused people to drop it in favour of astrologian.

Sure WHM had decent personal damage output. But as you just said, it was outclassed heavily by its competition due to AST simply offering more to total party DPS.

We have jobs like that today. Rhymes with "Amurai".

EDIT: To clarify, when I say damage, I mean all damage that the job offers the party. Personal DPS and Raid DPS offered through buffs.

[CorbinDallas]

Aye fair enough, from the way you worded it, it seemed like you were talking about personal DPS. ^^

[Dualgunner]

Aye fair enough, from the way you worded it, it seemed like you were talking about personal DPS. ^^

Yeah, on looking back I realized that I was vague about it. Most important part in any discussion is making sure terms are defined after all!