Yet another redmage balance idea

[Shurrikhan]

Why not just have ranged apply their own Piercing?

Have it apply on Empyreal Arrow and Straight Shot critical hits and buffed Clean Shot and Gauss Shot. Decrease their damage slightly to compensate. Now that's just another trio, much like Slashing.

[Kessya]

The thing is, you can have 2 approaches to this situation:

#1: Optimize for job balance
#2: Optimize for how the job feels

My approach with the balance gauge is #2. Making Embolden into 2 separate would fit more into #1.

[Wayfinder3]

snip

I read your full statement but it was not a good idea and im telling you why regardless of what happens to disembowel. Nobody cares about any of that, stop asking for sub optimal balance choices that'll only hurt RDM
IF piercing needs to go then start advocating for it's removal instead of situational garbage. just because you raided with 2 casters doesn't mean we should give rdm a magic buff that locks out embolden.

Contagion is powerful HOWEVER, it comes at the expense of utility for jobs that aren't using magic damage making it worse than TA unless used in unconventional comps like your 2 caster. But AGAIN hypercharge buffs everyone in the raid and see's far more success than embolden or contagion. so it stands to reason we should advocate for an equivalent to THAT instead giving rdm a buff they'll never use unless they're trying to preform suboptimally. Tl;dr i don't care about your double caster experiences, magic only debuffs are a BAD idea right now. only 6 jobs in the game will benefit from them none of which are tanks which means your group will still be far inferior to just about any standard comp that isn't using double jobs. If they did implement this and lets say it did become meta, would you be happy with 3 caster 1melee or 1 ranged comps. it'd literally be the 2nd coming of disembowel which the very thing you're hoping gets removed.

NIN and DRG are both weaker in personal DPS because of their raid utility. NIN moreso than DRG because their raid utility is universally applicable. DRG is completely tied to having at least one ranged DPS to buff to be useful to a raid, and ideally it's going to be a BRD. MNKs also like them for similar reasons. It's factored into their balance at the moment.

If their lower personal dps matter, they wouldn't be meta, their Utility ceiling is astronomically higher than say embolden because it works with all jobs. It's very possible to say that every job's meta comp is some Version of NIN DRG and BRD because those jobs power on their own is great. TA is amazing without a BRD/DRG, BRD utility is great without DRG/NIN and DRG's utility is in full force as long as even 1 BRD or MCH is present and battle litany is just icing on that cake. these 3 powerful jobs make up the unholy trio because they're so good alone and even better than that together. Utility is attributed towards the job that has it, not the jobs that benefit from it. BRD's utility doesn't get worse without a drg, it still really strong

[Grimoire-M]

Snip.

Again, my problem is the current state. Hell I'd be fine if they removed Piercing/Slashing/Blunt from the weapon skills and instead added them back in as role skills that act as a TA-like buff for those specific classes, then gave casters Elemental/Magic Vul Up. Give all types to melee, Piercing to Ranged, and Slashing to Tanks. Then add a virus-like immunity to them (different immunity for each type) so they can't stack or be chained back to back. Boom, only NIN is a problem now. Regardless, SE can go all-in on adding more, or remove it all. Either way action is required, and we agree on that point.

I'm still playing a BRD because of our party's mana concerns and I find MCH too frustrating to play, however, it's not strong atm. It's personal DPS is the biggest contributing factor, because of its variance. They need crit/raid buffs to get enough procs to be viable. Without it you're more likely to never get procs when you need them in order to contribute meaningful damage during your RS window. Before Bard could pull its own weight with cooldown management, but that was completely gutted as part of the 4.0 changes. Minne and Troubadour are good in specific situations (Tank busters/preys for Minne, Back to Back AoE situations if you can get WM to line up) but Dismantle is better overall since it's a Reprisal that also stacks with Reprisal.

Hypercharge is objectively better than Battle Voice, and whether Crit buff is good or not depends on whether you're running DPS classes that have defined peaks/troughs or maintain constant DPS. Sure, Crit's always on and it's a small bit of value (less than a percentage point over the entire encounter), but it's at complete odds with the kind of classes BRD wants to be paired with. BRD needs piercing and Battle Litany to actually shine. It wants TA the same way MCH does, because it can fit all its peak damage into that window. I'm in a comp that's full of sustained dps classes (MNK/SAM/BLM) atm, but none of those classes really have a way to catch up on damage from a death the way a BRD/NIN/DRG/MCH can when combined. Buffs are an all or nothing kind of deal because of the multiplicative way they stack up. It's why SE completely obliterated all of the cross class DPS cooldowns from ARR/HW in the first place. If we had all of those abilities now people would be pushing close to 10k DPS spikes on bosses. Given a choice, I'd much rather see bard lose the damage bonus on Raging Strikes.

MCH puts out enough numbers on their own that they don't need NIN or DRG to buff them at all, though they certainly benefit highly from it because of their narrow burst window, just in a far more reliable fashion by comparison. They work better with Embolden than BRD does, and they can use all of the phys only buffs just as reliably. If not for their clunky kit atm i'd say they would be played more.