Quote Originally Posted by wereotter View Post
It's not about cinematics. As was stated, there's a reason things like Manafication reset the Cooldown of Corps-a-Corps. They INTENDED red mage to cast spells at a reasonable distance, dash in for the melee combo, dash out to return to slinging spells.
If this was the intention, dead zones would have been implemented. An actual incentive for the player to move and position in such a way; "if <15y distance, Veraero does 280 potency instead of 310" as an exaggerated example. Instead we have two damaging cooldowns that, as you yourself lament, are not aligned with our melee combos. In the same expansion they introduced Displacement they took the damage off of Bard's jumpback attack too.

I can also make the argument and observation that Manafication resetting CaC means we have some leeway on the cooldown and don't have to pop it exactly on cooldown--we can meander a second or two and the reset will cover us. This forgiveness on the cooldown that Manafication gives is the leeway that makes us not need charges on the abilities, it's just not as evident.

This is shown with how Alisae plays in Trust dungeons
In the trust dungeons where NPCs are basically intentionally playing wrong so that they don't overtake actual players and make DF take too long. She's not even playing to what an optimally programmed RDM could be.

and how red mage plays in all of the job action trailers.
Where all jobs are shown kinda wonky cuz they just wanna show off the cool looking abilities.

So my point stands. For those who chose to use the movement skills primarily to work with the natural flow of the job rather than spamming them like you would Flèche or Contre Sixte, then the fact that changes to Manafication likely will mean red mage generates black and white mana at an accelerated rate while not changing the cooldown of the movement skills for the melee rotation seems a pretty massive oversight.
One could also argue that the changes they're making that push further away from this concept might be evidence that it is, in fact, not developer intent that they be used solely for distance shifting.