Doesn't RDM's AoE Seem Backwards?

[Archwizard]

Fact of the matter is this exchange gave Red Mage slightly better AoE at the cost of hotbar efficiency. Bleh. Feels awful.

Not really? I mean, it's an increase of two buttons in AoE, when we already lost 6 role actions and Tether, and merged Impact and the Verfinishers into other skills, so "hotbar efficiency" isn't a remote concern.

Further, part of the problem with your suggestion is that we would be continuously proccing Fire and Stone which we wouldn't be able to use in AoE since we would always be using Impact in its place.
(And that's before you get into numeric inefficiencies like the 25% longer cast time interfering with slide-cast timing, or further loss in Mana generation.)

And honestly, it would just make the rotation more boring? Not quite "spam Scatter for most of the dungeon" boring but 1:1 substitution of the single-target rotation with even fewer buttons.

[Duskane]

Fact of the matter is this exchange gave Red Mage slightly better AoE at the cost of hotbar efficiency. Bleh. Feels awful.

Red mage hotbar was pretty empty in SB it was 30% role skills

and its pretty much the same with less role skills and Verholy/flare on ver aero and thunder + scorch being on Jolt

[Archwizard]

It's a bit odd yeah, though mostly I'm sad they went with these spells and not VerBlizzard and VerWater to give red mages access to all six elements.

I could see them adding Verblizzard and Verwater (or Verfreeze and Verflood) as our versions of Foul or Afflatus Misery -- procs or generated skills with high on-target potency in single-target and some peripheral dropoff for AoE.

Probably not near 650 or 900 potency of course, but it would only need to be more than 310 potency and 11 Mana to be worth a GCD, which is a pretty reasonable range before it reaches the Verfinishers.

[JohnnyDevo]

Just wanted to add some further evidence for using Impact over just repeating aero II and thunder II.

Aero/thunder (from now, "short" casts) both deal 120 potency per target and give 7 mana. Impact ("long" cast) deals 220 potency per target and gives 6 mana. A short-short dualcast therefore gives 14 mana and deals 240 potency per target, and a short-long dualcast gives 13 mana and deals 340 potency per target.

By doing a short-short dualcast, you are trading 100 potency per target to gain... 1 mana.

An enchanted moulinet costs a total of 40 mana. Since a dualcast takes 5 seconds (not accounting for spell speed), you are spending 200 seconds (3 minutes and 20 seconds) to accumulate enough mana to gain an extra enchanted moulinet. You've given up 4000 potency per target to gain... 200 potency per target. That you have to spend another 1.5 seconds to use.

It is an incredibly bad idea to dualcast aero/thunder instead of impact.

[Mansion]

I'd rather have Scatter Spam back.

And get Impact back in the proc fishing rotation. Me too.

I would have actually prefered something like a second combo for AoE after Moulinet that would proc a VerAero/ VerThunder AoE finisher to make things a bit more dynamic.
In dungeons I see a lot of people a bit unsure about what to do in AoE. Get to 100 Mana for 5 Moulinets ? Get to 20 Mana for one Moulinet ? Push shiney buttons to make pretty spells ?

[Nicodemus_Mercy]

Know what might have been nice? For Scatter to be the short cast and for there to be a Veraero Impact and Verthunder Impact (same animation as Impact currently has but colored appropriately for each spell).

[Maeka]

-snip-

Whaaat? Why would you wanna do that?

Veraero II/Verthunder II gives 7 of one mana, while Impact gives 3 of both.

It works out perfectly.

Veraero II = 7/0
Impact = 10/3
Verthunder II = 10/10
Impact = 13/13
Veraero II = 20/13
Impact = 23/16
Verthunder II = 23/23
Impact = 26/26
Veroaero II = 33/26
Impact = 36/29
Verthunder II = 36/36
Impact = 39/39
Veraero II = 46/39
Impact = 49/42
Verthunder II = 49/49
Impact = 52/52

At this point, you could use Manafication and get 100/100 Mana (you'd be wasting 4 of each which isn't that bad) for your 5 Enchanted Moulinets, or you could go through the whole process again, reaching 100/100 with the last Impact not necessary (do the 5 Moulinets and then spend your Dualcast).

And as other players pointed out, Impact has a greater potency so you might as well use it rather than only casting Thunder/Aero IIs.

EDIT: If you don't wanna waste 4 Mana, you could instead, stop at 49/49, use Manafication and then throw the Impact but I feel there's not really any difference in doing that to be honest. Unless you used one of your Moulinets and then threw the Impact. You could perhaps do that.

[Atamis]

Never understood why they even wanted scatter or jolt. Everything would flow better if the cast time on fire/aero was just the same as jolt/scatter and just remove those two spells. Sure managing white/black bar would be slightly more interesting unless they tweaked those also. Just seems like uneeded button bloat and the wrong place to make the job complex or interesting.

[Maeka]

Never understood why they even wanted scatter or jolt. Everything would flow better if the cast time on fire/aero was just the same as jolt/scatter and just remove those two spells. Sure managing white/black bar would be slightly more interesting unless they tweaked those also. Just seems like uneeded button bloat and the wrong place to make the job complex or interesting.

They wanted to get away from 1-button AoE. If you noticed, they gave Tanks a two-button AoE combo where they usually only had 1 AoE.

[TankHunter678]

Whaaat? Why would you wanna do that?

It came from feeling like I was generating too little mana, and the fact that even when I was doing it properly in normal dungeons my MP was getting outright devoured while I was doing my melee AoEs less. A stark difference from before ShB where the proc rate on the 11/11 enhanced scatter was good enough that I was usually doing the melee AoE combo rather often.

Throwing out the spell AoEs gets monotonous really fast, on top of it feeling completely backwards, and the melee stuff is supposed to break up the monotony. It is not like with the ST combo where you have procs to help alter what you do during your casts as you build up to your melee stuff.

I fully understand that it is less damage, less efficient. Which is why my suggestions remain to increase the mana gain of impact if they are going to keep this backwards AoE rotation. Otherwise I would rather mirror the ST rotation and introduce a couple more AoE spells so that our AoE rotation flows like the ST one. It also would have been nice if they brought over more elements to work with so that our AoE rotation was very visibly distinct from our ST instead of just more lightning and the old WHM Aero 3 animation.