Shadowbringers RDM Wishlist

[Seraphor]

As I explained, you're currently penalised for having perfect balance, a very common scenario when the goal is to balance your mana levels.
This is very disruptive to your rotation and flow of battle, when you'd like to jump into your melee rotation you'll find yourself discouraged at the risk of losing DPS, so you have to cast another spell before you burst, which delays your burst and again reduces your average DPS.

There's no reason to penalise having a perfect balance. It wouldn't lead you to ignoring the balance gauge altogether, because you'd still need to know if one was higher than the other, or if they were equal, to know which finisher you'll need and which follow up spell will proc.

As it stands, you're paying too much attention to the balance gauge, because you're not just thinking "which one is lowest" you're thinking "which one is lowest, and which spell will not put me in perfect balance, I can either add 9 or 11 and need to ensure the diference between levels isn't exactly 9 or 11" you're forced to do constant arithmetic, which is distracting.

Having a viable option for either scenario doesn't remove any difficulty or result in less attention being required, too much reduction in attention rather, because which of the three options you find yourself using still affects how your rotation progresses.

[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.