Casters in FL?

[Esmoire]

If you're in a small skirmish, you're fine, anything outside of that (and given that they are few and far in between) and you are gimping yourself playing RDM vs any other range option. Actual melees are better than you in melee range, and some of them even range better than you do as well (hey Dragoon). "Yeah but CC and we have the option of both, also vercure!" - yeah 4 vercures is an entire mana bar and heals for less than a ranged HP bar if you use all 4 outside of Battle High; which by the way, is the lowest hp pool in the game further strengthening the case to just not play it unless you're content casting scatter/impact and enchanted reprise all game, removing your two biggest nukes from the equation in the process.

That's a bit reductive. I think it is better framed at RDM having good healing, but bad sustain. That is to say, dropping a very fast burst of 6k+ healing is huge, and powerful, since that is often all that's needed to get someone out of a sticky situation. It's obviously not a job that is going to keep the whole alliance topped off, but considering they have a lot of the fundamental benefits of a DPS while having this capability, that's not bad. It is tempting to want to frame it as only having 12k HP on a full tank, but in practical terms that's usually not what's important. You usually don't run out of MP since you are usually done healing before that happens, since you are fundamentally a DPS and you are usually only healing when you really want to help out one of your battle highs that have over-extended or something. If a RDM is having to use their full MP bar in Frontline regularly, they are not playing their job right.

RDM for what it's worth probably has my favourite of the raw GCD AOE options since it's easy to proc the conditions to land those juicy Impacts. I think they are looking a lot better than the way they looked when they tried to streamline their CC. That said, while there are some really great RDM unicorns on Primal and Aether, I would agree with the overall idea that they are the weakest of the mages in Frontline right now, due entirely to their lack of good damage on the move and the inability to regularly access their melee kit. I wouldn't try to knock on their utility since that's the one area they seem to be doing alright in. They could probably use some oGCDs and more instant casts, but adding oGCD attacks to RDM would make their burst in Feast broken, since they share kits across environments.