What makes RDM an easy DPS?

[Lunalepsy]

I main NIN and DRK, before EW comes out, I decided I will play caster jobs for side content and grinding. And so I get into RDM, and I find myself on akhmorning look at the rotation and the opener.

First is, damn, caster is so much more hardcore than melee jobs because of all the cast time and thus the "weaving" is different.
Second is, because the job is designed around balancing black and white mana, there's always two variations of the same skills, keybinding is painful. I'm days in and still moving skills around action bars to find a smoother keybind.
Third is you have to focus on changing your dualcast sequence depends on the proc to maintain mana balance.
Finally, I don't get the purpose of scatter, true it's 20 potency higher than thunder II and aero II, but if the goal is to keep up your 8080 as frequent as possible, why not thunder II in aero II or vice versa?

Overall it feels very overwhelming compared to my mains. And that makes me wonder how do people find it one of the easiest jobs to play?

RDMs have lots of utility.

[Iscah]

Hit 40 white/black, manafication

You do this til your mana is 80/80 black and white

You don't actually want 80/80 though – you want over 80/80 and slightly uneven, ideally with a proc active for the higher element and (more importantly) not for the lower one, because you're about to trigger that with your Holy/Flare finisher.

[MilkieTea]

You don't actually want 80/80 though – you want over 80/80 and slightly uneven, ideally with a proc active for the higher element and (more importantly) not for the lower one, because you're about to trigger that with your Holy/Flare finisher.

That's definitely better, but it doesn't make too much of a difference outside of finetuning things, considering you can safely be at 0/20 and simply roll back into the rotation without edging into the blue. There's a bit of leeway there, so that kind of stuff kind of just comes with knowing the rotation better and getting more comfortable with the job. But if it helps, (though it'll be useless come EW until updates come along), Akhmorning recommends being >=80 on both black and white, so it's easier to say "use your melee combo at 80/80"

[Iscah]

Akhmorning recommends being >=80 on both black and white, so it's easier to say "use your melee combo at 80/80"

It's still better to say "over" or "at least 80/80" for clarity, I think.

[MilkieTea]

It's still better to say "over" or "at least 80/80" for clarity, I think.

You're right, that's an oversight on my part

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

It's still better to say "over" or "at least 80/80" for clarity, I think.

Or tell the learner to read the tooltip. Verflare/Verholy tooltip tells players how to get a guaranteed proc to Verfire/Verstone and that alone should tell players which finisher would be preferred.

[Iscah]

Or tell the learner to read the tooltip. Verflare/Verholy tooltip tells players how to get a guaranteed proc to Verfire/Verstone and that alone should tell players which finisher would be preferred.

If you're going to push the learner off to read the tooltips instead, that's your business. But if you're going to talk about how to play then it's better to give more accurate information.

In any case the tooltips can be difficult to put together sometimes, following bits of information across several different skills.