RDM and the Utility Tax

[wereotter]

One problem with the DPS that come with raise-based utility is that if nobody dies, that utility still gets paid for. Past progression, it obviously ends up with these jobs being left to the wayside.

I'd propose some sort of 'life link' trait or ability for DPS that gain part of their value from resurrection skills. Essentially, so long as no member of the party dies, they should provide a small buff to either personal or raid DPS. Once someone dies, the buff is lost. Fluff it as being able to channel everyone's concentrated aether or something.

That, or think up some other form of raid utility that raise-capable DPS can provide when things aren't strictly going pear shaped.

The main problem I see with this idea is the same problem that comes when working for a construction company. Workers that work on buildings alot of times receive a safety bonus at the end of a job if there are no accidents during the job life cycle. This bonus disappears for EVERYONE on the crew if just one person has to make an injury claim. Alot of times that person is then ostracized by the rest of the crew for costing them their bonus even if the injury was completely unavoidable or was the fault of company policy. The same would happen here. Anyone that died the first time would catch no end of grief for costing the raid their precious damage buff.

I could see this working in a way that red mages gain a stacking buff when they use enchanted redoublement, perhaps a small stacking buff, like 1-2% additional damage as a permanent increase, but using verraise eats up all those stacks?

Also I would add that if you look at rDPS on FFlogs red mages are currently the weakest DPS job in the game, meaning that the penalty for having vercure and verraise is pretty big. One easy fix to this is to change our one damage utility move. Remove the fall off potency from embolden, no other utility skill gets diminishing returns over time, and have it buff other casters, like like devotion does, possibly with a slightly increased duration so that it can actually cover our full burst window. As is, it now falls off before I can finish my second melee combo under manafication, whereas last expansion I could get two verholy casts off under the embolden window.