Suggestion for: RDM improvements

[Archwizard]

Except for one thing that irks me enormously: the Red Mage's new AoE spells VerAero 2 and VerThunder 2, followed by either Scatter or Impact. Gone is Scatter+Scatter. Now it's VerAero 2+Impact or VerThunder 2+Impact.

...And it annoys me to no end. I get how they tried to implement something similar to the single-target process... but I appreciated how simple (how braindead) spamming Scatter+Scatter was.

I would have loved Scatter+Scatter to become Scatter+Impact (Scatter was augmented on second cast, so, that would have been cool).

I thin it would have been better if Scatter just got a trait that made the next single target spell following it hit all targets in the area. Same end result without the feeling that you got cheated this expansion.

The problem I have when I keep seeing this argument, is that the "basic" nature of the AoE rotation in the first place was that it provided room to be built and expanded upon. They did that, and I expect will continue to in the future. Even if they hadn't expanded anything, we'd be practically begging them to next expansion, since we'd be behind the AoE changes to other damage/tanking jobs every expansion.

If the complaint is we didn't gain a means to just toggle existing spells into AoEs to save bar space then, well, you could make exactly the same complaint about literally every other DPS job. It seems irrational to single RDM out in this case when you could do the same for, say, BLM, or any number of melee.

I'm also not sure how one could feel "cheated" about that when it didn't even come at the loss of any of our upgrades, since it was all added retroactively. I get that it's the most impactful (hah) thing they changed about RDM this expansion, but that's not mutually exclusive with our actual 72-80 upgrades being mostly underwhelming, particularly when the sum total of our changes was less than just the impact of upgrades given to several other jobs.

[Kabooa]

The problem I have when I keep seeing this argument, is that the "basic" nature of the AoE rotation in the first place was that it provided room to be built and expanded upon. They did that.

We're gonna disagree here. There were plenty of ways to build upon the previous iteration, and this one was at best a side-step. If it's meant to mirror Red Mage's single target system, then seeing as that hasn't changed either doesn't do much.

And I say cheated because the Red Mage's kit expansion this expansion is awful. You can't help but look at jobs who just got an aoe progression instead of an AoE revamp and look at their shiney if buggy toys and not feel like someone didn't get cheated in the long run.

[Archwizard]

It's more that I felt Scatter+Scatter wasn't something that was broken, so, why fix it? The fix, so far as I'm concerned, lessens the Red Mage experience rather than enhance it. I get that the addition of Aero 2 and Thunder 2 means that there's a choice to make for the Red Mage's player to choose what mana color to raise... but did that really need to happen? If Holy Spamming is fine, why wasn't Scatter spamming fine?

Holy Spamming may be "fine", but healers aren't made to be particularly concerned with the process of inflicting damage, since they're expected to drop it at any time to do their real job -- that's how they get their fill on variety. If I wanted my AoE spam to be one button, I would probably just queue as a healer; meanwhile, RDM explicitly is made for damage, and can expect a little more demand on AoE like BLM.

At any rate, one of the big critiques of healing right now is the lack of variety in the damage rotation, so your mileage may vary.

We're gonna disagree here. There were plenty of ways to build upon the previous iteration, and this one was at best a side-step. If it's meant to mirror Red Mage's single target system, then seeing as that hasn't changed either doesn't do much.

And I say cheated because the Red Mage's kit expansion this expansion is awful. You can't help but look at jobs who just got an aoe progression instead of an AoE revamp and look at their shiney if buggy toys and not feel like someone didn't get cheated in the long run.

I don't disagree that there were other ways to expand it -- any of which would involve either adding new spells or significantly changing Scatter. I too had very different ideas on how I expected our AoE to change.
However, I find it a moot point to argue that having a one-button toggle to turn our single-target skills into AoEs is any more progressive than what we gained; if anything your proposal is an extra GCD of setup in which we can't just Vercure up a Dualcast at the start of an add phase, while this way we netted a game-able heavy AoE spell, more reliable Mana generation, a fringe 2-target rotation, a means to reliably imbalance our MP between bosses, and new modular skills the devs can tune/trait separately from our single-target in the future.

Nor do I disagree that our "new toys" feel awful this expansion, and that we ultimately went largely unchanged -- but as I said, that's not necessarily caused by our AoE revamp. It's not like the devs said "Hey, you can either get more diversity and expansion in your single-target from 72-80, or a complete rework to your AoE pre-70 and one new nuke at 80, but you only get one." That's frankly just an irrational way to look at it when it wouldn't be true for anyone else.
The devs looked at the new job they released, decided to focus on adding missing tools or those that would smooth the gameplay out before building off the base, and "Rework Scatter Spam" ended up on that list. You may disagree with the method or dislike how it turned out, but it was there by popular request, and many of us are quite happy not to press one button for half the dungeon.