Shadowbringers RDM Wishlist

[Sylvain]

First thank you for reading the skill set I proposed and leaving feedback

I like the idea of upgrading Vercure to affect the party (or at least targets around your target), but... I have a few concerns.

1) If Verblizzard and Verwater both deal the same damage as Jolt II and have a faster cast time, what's to stop them from simply replacing Jolt II so you can spam instants? Combined with Improved Dualcast and uninterrupted movement, it's easy to see that as being a total throughput upgrade.

Well first off, Jolt2 has a potency of 240 and grant 3/3 mana whereas the proposed VerBlizz/Water has 210 and 4mana. You're overall loosing 2mana and 30 potency.
This spell is intended to be your "movement spell" but never something you spam randomly, consider it like Ruin2 on the SMN. It's only 20 potency difference but at the end of a fight it can make a significant difference.


Note that it's only instant, it is not a ogcd. It still triggers the gcd and can be considered a regular 2.5s cast (except that you can do it while moving and weave 2 ogcd after)

So technically in an ideal scenario, beside for a few dual weave (like on pull I suppose or for Embolden + Manafication), you would never want to press those skills. They're simply weaker than Jolt2.

They are here to counter the loss of mobility due to the enhanced dual-cast.

2) Why change both Verholy and Verflare into Vermilion Blade, rather than Enchanted Moulinet? Why allow Vermilion Style to stack to 3 if the effect only requires 2 stacks? Is Vermilion Blade intended to be an AoE? The description just says it does heavy damage.

Simply consider Vermillion Blade as your "AoE finisher", in single target you do your melee combo and end with Holy/Flare, in AoE you do moulinet and end with Blade.

The reasoning for changing skill is to prevent skill bloat.
There is no need to add a whole new skill for that. (Like for Medica basically)

Then I allowed to stack to 3 for 2 reasons.

One, we can effectively do 3 Enchanted Moulinet. With Manafication you can quickly do with 90/90 do Moulinetx2 V-Blade, Manafication (30/30 -> 60/60), Moulinetx2, V-Blade and I thought that would be cool and people would enjoy doing that sort of wombo combo in dungeon.

Second, Ver-Holy/Flare turning into Ver-Blade is to have a finisher but that stack both mana because RDM AoE rotation is only based on Scatter which is a "red" spell. If I were to simply make "Holy/Flare now deal AoE" you'd end up having unbalanced mana during your AoE (like you'd start with 23/3) which, imo, would be more annoying than anything else.

3) Wouldn't Improved Acceleration encourage holding Acceleration's buff to get more mileage from Impact? Would it be consumed by Vermedica?

Maybe, sometime I do have the feeling "Impact" doesn't have enough... well impact on our gameplay. Maybe it's too strong for impact but the goal was simply to make acceleration a bit more interesting to use. You're not just triggering something, you're also generating a lot of mana so depending on your current state a wrong choice could make you have too much of either.

And yes it is consumed by Vermedica. When you press acceleration Ver-Cure becomes Ver-Medica and can only be used once every 20s. I do not want to RDM to be able to spam Ver-medica, (I'm afraid we could end up with some 1heal1rdm meta if it could). But even if I would want that, I do believe SE wouldn't allow it.
They clearly made so that RDM is a dps and they don't want any hybrid (I mean Y.P is annoyed by healer dps so... I don't think he'll allow "proper" dps heal), so instead of doing wishfull thinking, I'd rather go with what we have and see what could be added. (I'm still extremely skeptical regarding the addition of VerMedica tbh)

Obviously this is a huge loss of dps loss so this is purely intended to be used as an emergency skill.

4) Is it intended for the change to Enhanced Scatter to encourage players to hit Enchanted Moulinet as soon as it comes up to keep below 50 MP?

The goal is to make your mana generation faster so you can moulinet more often.
It could be a 100% proc (but it'd be boring), so here the idea behind the dynamic proc rate is to, as you thought, having a proper milestone where you would want to start using moulinet.
It's meant to be more engaging. Technically I think the ideal scenario for fast AoE would be Scatter until 30/30, then Moulinet, then again, then Verblade.

The problem I have with the 30% is that it feels very slow and too random, sometime you're lucky and will proc it non stop, and sometime the PLD can end up doing more than you do.

5) If your overall concern is button bloat, why not advocate for the compression of existing skills, like our melee combo or proc-exclusive spells (a la PVP)?

I would advocate for this but I have a very strong feeling they won't do it.
So my goal was to add the least amount of button.

In the end, only one button has been added for a total of 5 new skills,
Ver Blizz
Ver Water
Ver Medica
Ver Blade
Ver Splendor

The overall gameplay hasn't changed all that much but RDM would now be a much faster paced caster with, hopefully, a more engaging AoE rotation.