Red Mage "better"??

[Duelle]

To put it into perspective. The old acceleration gave you three charges every 105 seconds. The new acceleration gives you three stackscharges every 55 seconds. Sometimes you need to park on acceleration (and you did with old accel) but in this specific case, in order to lose charges vs the old regime you would have to sit on that acceleration for 50 seconds. Meaning, you pretty much have to decide not to use it for its entire cooldown before you start to lose vs the old system.

The thing is that with old Acceleration I had least had some leeway on when to use it, since I tended to use it as oGCD filler provided I was missing either Verfire or Verstone Ready and Fleche/Contre/Engagement were on cooldown. Since Yoshida mentioned charges, that in my mind translated to "we're making Acceleration work like Intervene/Plunge/etc".

My "issue", if you could call it that, is that instead of being able to use it as filler, now to get the most out of this new Acceleration requires Manafication to be on cooldown (unless you're starting at 0 mana, which only happens at the start of a fight) and having less than 60 mana on either bar. It just feels kinda "meh" to me from a design perspective.

If dev intent was that the movement abilities were to coincide with the melee combo, then Corps-a-Corps would be locked behind 80/80, Displacement would have no damage at all on it, Engagement wouldn't exist, CaC and Engagement would have the same cooldown, both would have cooldowns that coincide with the speed it takes to get 80/80 mana within a reasonable tolerance, and fights would be designed such that a ranged character standing 15 yalms away from a boss at all times would dovetail with the boss's mechanics, rather than put one at a disadvantage vs cones and out of range of the most common heals.

Corps and Displacement were designed to deal oGCD damage because that's how the devs saw players were using jobs (see MNKs with Shoulder Tackle, BRDs with Repelling Shot), and that those two abilities determined where the RDM is standing on the battlefield is no coincidence. If they were supposed to be just movement skills, then Displacement would indeed have no damage component and Corps would have a deadzone to make it inconvenient to use as anything but a gap-closer. Stormblood's RDM happened to be very intuitive with its design to show how it was supposed to be played (spam spells => Corps => melee combo => Displacement => spam spells; if you weren't you're missing out on that sweet sweet extra potency from Corps and Displacement, which I'm sure in the long term would make a difference to DPS contributions). Hence my beef with the job's gameplay.

Seeing as we live in a world where Melee-phase gain was increased without increasing these cooldowns, where Displacement had damage added, not taken away, where Engagement was added so that you could use it wherever it was convenient rather than merely as your melee-out, and no change was made to make CaC and 'gagement line up at all, the latest boss is yet another 'fuck you have more cones' boss, and Cure III and AoE ground heals are still short range, we can safely assume their intent is not for us in 5.x is not for us to slavishly use them solely as transition abilities between standing away from the boss with spells.

I don't quite buy this, because if Displacement is supposed to be used only when convenient, Engagement and Displacement would deal the same amount of damage. Notice that the trait that adds damage to Displacement is gained at the same level Engagement is obtained, which to me is dev speak for "you're still supposed to prioritize Displacement if you want the sweet 200 potency instead of the poverty 150 potency". I see no other reason as to why Engagement would deal less damage (unless the devs are factoring RDM auto attacks, though that is such a ridiculous notion that it's not worthy of further thought).

On the topic of fight design, I agree that a good number of fights don't really support that sort of gameplay (and I've read it was an issue during Stormblood as well). We can't really deny the numbers in the tooltips, though.