Shadowbringers RDM Wishlist

[Archwizard]

As I explained, you're currently penalised for having perfect balance, a very common scenario when the goal is to balance your mana levels.

I wouldn't really call it a "penalty". It's not like you lose out on 600 potency if you balance -- you just go from 100% chance to proc a spell that's 1 mana stronger than Impact, to 20% (and that's not even considering if you already had the corresponding procs active going into your combo, which is arguably just as common as going into melee with a perfect balance). The fact that there's still a chance to get the proc anyway shows the devs fully expected exactly the scenarios you mentioned.
To call that a penalty is a matter of perspective; I'd argue it's more of a reward for going into it slightly unbalanced (bearing in mind that with a 100 cap and an 80 buy-in, any imbalance is still within the red territory), especially as each Verfinisher gives you the bonus for rebalancing.

Okay, sure, you lose out on damage if you overcap, but managing and controlling resource generation is a key part of gameplay for any resource. If anything I'd argue if that was truly so out of hand for us, there's more cause for another ability that shaves off some mana than a redundant finisher.
But either way what you're really asking for is a safety net against bad procs (or just bad play), which already is fairly mitigated in our design.

[Archwizard]

So, with regards to the discussion of MP:

The way I see it, there are four different ways to accomplish a unique MP recovery skill.

1) On-demand generation. Either a new spell (such as Osmose) or a trait on an existing, underused ability (ie non-Enchanted melee) that gives us a small amount of generation each time it's used, encouraging us to spam the ability as often as we need MP.
Positives: Easy to use after death, or when running out of MP as a result of Verraising. Aesthetically, a new spell could provide a Black equivalent to Vercure.
Negatives: Spells of this variety that already exist (Blood Drain, Energy Drain) are never optimally used within the core rotation, primarily because the tradeoff for generating MP comes at the cost of damage or alternative resources; if the primary intent of MP generation is rotational upkeep, then forcing the user to venture outside of it to maintain it is counter-intuitive and rewarding bad play. Plus the existing versions have painfully low generation, forcing long breaks from the rotation for a modicum of recovery.

2) Passive generation. Either a weak Refresh buff we can use on-demand, or a trait to increase our base MP recovery in-combat.
Positives: Can be slipped into the rotation opener so we can pay off upkeep, and can pay off Verraise costs at a staggered, easily-tuned rate. May not require a target.
Negatives: Boring. Slow. Literally passive. If in the form of a Refresh buff, forces maintenance within the rotation not unlike a DoT. Allows you to completely forget about MP outside of Verraise or death.

3) Burst generation. Take a strong, infrequent ability within the rotation (ie Enchanted melee/Verfinishers) and add substantial MP gain.
Positives: Already within the rotation allowing for easy maintenance, substantial MP gain can quickly (albeit infrequently) charge another use of Verraise.
Negatives: Requires us to perform a substantial portion of our rotation just to regain MP, which can be difficult if we're running low and need to regain MP.

4) Off-GCD Cooldown. Aetherflow, Convert, Assize, Ewer, another Lucid Dreaming. Either add MP gain to an existing CD (Fleche, Contre Sixte) or create a new one.
Positives: Dependent on potency. Can easily be used after resurrection or pooled for Verraising. Could be traited to dynamically reduce its recovery time during the course of combat, allowing idyllic rotational upkeep. Could inflict damage to become a part of the rotation or potentially be used without a target; broad possibilities.
Negatives: Dependent on cooldown length (though most outside LD are short; Convert is 3m but belongs to a class with innate recovery anyway). From experience with Lucid Dreaming, recovery via CD is limiting, particularly when that CD has already been activated. Plus, everyone else has one, and we already cycle like 3-4 oGCDs in our rotation.

Conclusions: Any type of MP generation needs to evenly weigh the ability to recover from a low MP state against the ability to maintain our core rotation. Every type of MP recovery known to us prioritizes one but imbalances the other. As long as we can rotate with Lucid Dreaming, pick your poison, not everyone will be happy regardless.

[Llugen]

Thread is tl;dr but what I would like to see most for RDM is more damage utility for the group. Embolden alone is embarrassing and as we all know the rezbot meme gets less and less useful the further into prog the group gets.

This will be a nonissue in 5.x but I was SO confident they were going to give piercing resistance down to RDM in 4.x. It would have made so much sense. That being said I'd like to see some kind of damage up associated with the melee combo for the party similar to Radiant Shield.

The class also deserves more in terms of party buffs, I would propose haste although I don't know exactly how I would put it in.

I also know that a lot of people would like Vermedica, and if I were to implement it I would probably make it a cooldown that expands Vercure on a 45s+ cooldown. I think that would be a reasonable balance. Perhaps this proposed expansion buff would also work for Haste which would otherwise be single target. The difficulty here is that the DPS role should (in my opinion) be focusing mostly on its damage and not on having to use full GCDs to buff/heal the party and being the only DPS that can do so making it even more invaluable than it already is.


I'm not going to lie, the novelty of RDM wore off for me fast and I do not enjoy playing the job currently, but it still deserves to be a viable and competitive option outside of just rezbot for prog. I hope to see them do something that will be satisfying, enjoyable, and helpful to the group.

[Archwizard]

I'm still of the mindset that RDMs should embrace their ability to combine the strengths of both white and black magic into new forms. (Beyond just having a Yin-Yang Bomb limit break anyway.)
Rather than just copying the entire WHM and BLM arsenal wholesale, they should be able to come up with effects fitting for either that neither one has a place for.

En-elemental spells or other damage buff effects wouldn't necessarily be a bad way to go about this. Black Mages are destructive but selfish with their powers, White Magic is beneficial but abstinent from unnecessary violence, Red Mages have none of those qualms and all of the same knowledge. My only concern would be figuring out how to justify having just one element or balancing more than one, particularly when elemental damage types are pretty meaningless post-2.0.

Haste in particular would not only be universal in its aid to a party (Embolden limiting itself to DPS non-casters), but also could be justified as an extension of Dualcast and fitting with RDM's use of rapiers; few things in nature are as quick as an Olympic fencer's blade. I think my only concern with giving RDM some type of Haste effect would be that Time Magic verges on the Astrologian path... but if limiting Summoners to 3 Egis can be given a lore explanation then I don't see why letting RDMs play around with other disciplines can't be too. (We all know the next time we see X'rhun Tia he'll say he found some lost ancient art anyway.)

Or perhaps something entirely new for RDMs. Could you imagine if we had some 2-3 minute cooldown that, say, let everyone around the user cast while moving for a brief period?

[JunseiKei]

My only complaints with RDM, really, are:

• No MP recovery outside of Lucid Dreaming. My suggestion to offset this is to have the melee combo restore MP in the same fashion as PLD's Riot Blade; must be combo and each move restores MP. Can be enchanted or unenchanted. Think of it as cutting into the enemy and leeching off their aether.
  
• Displacement moves too far while also dealing damage. I find this at odds of removing damage from utility skills, like BRD's Repelling Shot and WHM's Fluid Aura. SB also brought a larger number of fights with wall-less stages that you could just fall off of and die. They existed previously to SB, but few with stages small enough that you really had to fear Repelling Shot off (Titan EX's stage being the smallest with more than 15y distance; ARR has 8 fights, HW has 8 fights and SB has 10 fights).
  
• RDM has a great deal of mobility, but it's not enough outside of dualcast, swiftcast or melee. They need at least one instant cast spell to use when they need to move so their DPS doesn't completely tank. They don't have the sheer firepower of a BLM (that still have triple-cast as well as swift) and SMN is even more mobile than RDM (everything in DWT is instant, Ruin II is instant even if it is a DPS loss unless Bahamut is out).
  
• The optimal time to use Embolden for the raid is well before the optimal window for RDM's opener. I'd love to see the window extended or keep a flat buff of 10% rather than 10, 8, 6, 4, 2.
  
• I personally don't see a need for a DoT, but if people want it, I suggest adding a DoT depending on which finisher you used. Wind, water, earth or even a new light one for VerHoly; fire, ice, lightning or darkness for VerFlare. Or just add in a generic bleed because it was just off of a melee combo. I don't see the need of making it so annexed from the rest of the kit, like how Fracture and Scourge were.

I have a personal gripe of RDM 'only being wanted for instant, fast raises.' I say that as having mained RDM for Delta and Sigmascapes before going back to my main job since ARR, WHM. It's one thing to have the RDM raise someone because there's a mechanic coming up that either needs everyone (like ExDeath's blackhole merry-go-round + fires) or Omega's blue and yellow fists (gets awkward when it goes to MT and Mustard Bomb is coming up), but I view it as rather lazy to make the RDM's DPS suffer because a healer doesn't want to raise. Especially when they get the 3 to 4 DPS casts off without needing to move (slow raising is a little over 2 casts and is affected by lightspeed, fey wind and presence of mind). My personal fix to this would be to change VerRaise into a CD that takes no MP. However, some would argue this takes away RDM's 'identity' of being a raise-battery. An identity I'd rather the class be without.

That would be to fix the current RDM. I'm really interested to see what the dev team comes up with for SH RDM.

[JunseiKei]

I know I could edit my other post, but seeing as someone liked it, didn't want to sneakily add something to it.

To add onto the DoT / finisher idea:

• It doesn't stack, use VerFlare or VerHoly and it's replaced by the new one.
• However, it leaves a buff/debuff that only effects the RDM that placed it: if VerHoly was the last finisher used, the next VerFlare will deal additional damage and/or a more potent tick.
• Even with RDM's RNG nature, when I was paying attention to the last finisher I used, I found it wasn't too hard to keep white and black mana balanced to be able to have the correct mana to use the other finisher.

[Grimoire-M]

To be honest in my experience as a SMN with an RDM in a triple caster no ranged DPS comp is that it's better for me to raise, even hardcast raise if I can get away with it, most of the time. Unless I'm in the middle of Bahamut I'm almost always the one person who can afford to do it in terms of GCD value and MP constraints. RDM's raise utility is essentially worthless outside of extremely specific scenarios where you need a healer up and and topped off in time or it's a wipe, especially if you have a SMN in the same comp or they could play SMN to a reasonable level instead. If they're only good at RDM then not having a BRD or MCH is a big issue for them. I'd like to see RDM get more MP for that reason. It's why one of my suggestions early on in the thread gave them an MP cooldown that restored more MP based on how much they had missing in order to account for how their DPS is affected by on-demand fast raises.

Otherwise I feel RDM just needs Embolden to affect everyone and that they need their rotation expanded upon with Black/White Mana Spenders that make waiting for Manafication viable.

[JunseiKei]

[...] If they're only good at RDM then not having a BRD or MCH is a big issue for them. I'd like to see RDM get more MP for that reason. It's why one of my suggestions early on in the thread gave them an MP cooldown that restored more MP based on how much they had missing in order to account for how their DPS is affected by on-demand fast raises.

Otherwise I feel RDM just needs Embolden to affect everyone and that they need their rotation expanded upon with Black/White Mana Spenders that make waiting for Manafication viable.

Ran a savage comp that was RDM/BLM and no ranged physical. Only raised for prog, but once we started hitting enrages, didn't raise. MP wasn't an issue as both the BLM and I pretty much kept Mana Shift on CD. Even with just Lucid, you'll slowly gain MP over the fight. The problem is definitely raising eating 25% of your max MP, having one refresh tool and cutting into your DPS to raise (SMN can oGCD a raise - RDM essentially has to eat a GCD to raise) AND has a pretty lackluster raid utility buff (seriously, scaling from 10% to 0 every 4 seconds is terrible as you'll always want your DoTs/hardest hitting moves in those first 4 seconds and pretty much ignore the rest of it) that I think makes the class suffer the most. It's not really any one thing so much as the overall kit is too mundane.

[Lauront]

I mean that would all be forgivable if its dps was decent... but it isn't. They definitely need to consider how to give it better utility.

[Kurando]

I know it's ShB wishlist, but would anyone be against RDM getting a finisher at level 60 as opposed to getting two nearly identical ones close together? (Verflare and Verholy only have differing mana gains and procs) Can reduce the potencies or trait something if necessary, but could be a nice little quality of life to the job perhaps.