Casters in FL?

[tinythinker]

Skilled casters are often the #1 damage dealer in FL right now, though good DRGs and BRDs are decent competition. What makes casters special is we have spammable ranged AOE, where as other roles often requires proximity and risk for their AOE. This is the #1 feature of our entire role when it comes FL, and our main contribution to a fight. Compared to melee our ability to score actual kills is a mixed bag, but what we are doing is dealing thousands and thousands of damage with every GCD if we target clusters of players. Raw damage count alone is not inherently impressive, but what happens is we exhaust enemy resources: potions, CDs, heals, etc., forcing a retreat or outright getting people killed.

As a caster in FL, your main focus should be getting as much AOE damage out as possible, switching to ST for targeted pressure or to secure kills. Your main target: enemy ranged and healers, who often cluster in the backline, pressuring them to get them out of the fight. As you said, our chase is our biggest weakness. Ranged physical and melee have superior mobility, so let them handle pursuit of targets. As an aside: a single Red Mage can lock down up to four enemy players in rapid succession, though you have to be reeeeaally careful with this since it's very easy to die without the 30% DR melee and tanks get.

Anyway, while Red Mage's CC and SMN's stun is incredible, all that aside you kind of accept that we are much more finicky about who we can target versus our physical counterparts. You are going to carefully balance positioning and change targets often to secure as much damage as you can with every cast.

Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I've found caster gameplay so far in Frontlines to be heavily situational. People in my groups who play BLM (which I'm leveling at the moment), for example, say Fire IVx3 -> Dart -> Xeno for single target but that can be hard to land standing in the back. Most of my casts get interrupted by targets moving out of range or dying, so I only feel slightly useful at mid in Onsal Hakkair when people clump together. Yet even then often there are no tanks or melee dps pushing in a little and giving cover for me to move in a bit, so many clumps are out of range. There is some clumping around other ovoos now and then, but again, if my GC is charging in most targets die or flee before I can finish casts. If they don't charge I have to take a big risk to ilm in to be in range of an enemy clump. During a single cast bar for AoE I can find that the allies next to me now a few yalms behind and I'm getting targeted.

The actual part of being useful (pounding clumps to scatter foes and break enemy lines) doesn't seem to happen often or last long. Being a glass cannon with cast times and a shield with a 45 second cooldown doesn't seem to match the reality of FL play as well as the other combat jobs, but maybe the other jobs just have a lower skill floor in PvP? Mostly I just hit people with Fire when I can't use AoE since it's instant cast and look for ways to try to do AoE on the occasions I can.

I tried SMN a couple of matched this past week as well after queuing in for something else, but it felt similar to what I describe above for BLM. I loved SMN in PvP near the start of Stormblood in those 8 vs 8 training Feast matches. Not the same at all now. So far for the BLM, I've done 11 matches, all tonight in a row, and it feels clunky with the fluidity and movement of the battlefield. Obviously I'm new but I'm not sure what else I can do besides the above.