RDM is great

[Myon88]

This much should be evident from the fact that no one is complaining about it here, but the stars have aligned and red mage has been gifted a cohesive and engaging iteration this expansion. I think this is something worth celebrating given how fickle the fortunes of the various jobs can be.

• Omni-embolden
  The most notable change, no longer are you punished for playing red mage in a party with other casters. Combat raising is strong, and so is black mage, so this is really important as multi-caster raid groups have been a thing for awhile.

• Substantial quality of life changes to aoe
  All verfinishers are able to cleave, and being governed by the new mana stack gauge gives you the option to activate them with enchanted moulinet instead of a melee combo. Veraero/thunder 3 into impact got a mana generation boost too putting it on similar footing to single target mana generation. Red mage aoe feels great now.

• Charges on important skills
  Charges essentially let you overflow a skill's cooldown without being penalized, so putting them on acceleration and the melee cooldowns is a wise choice. These skills provide a mixture of damage and utility, so having the flexibility to defer their usage slightly to better suit circumstances is a significant boon.
  
  Enagement and displacement now have the same potency too, so you can use the latter as a pure utility tool instead of jumping out of heal range and griefing your healers for more damage. A sensible and overdue change.

• New abilities are great
  Resolution. I was worried that yet another tacked on finisher would be a boring addition, but it's surprisingly fun in practice. Being a line aoe, it offers meaningfully different gameplay to verholy and scorch, requiring you to be mindful of positioning and rewarding you by letting you aoe in situations the other two cannot. It's another gcd of free movement on top of the existing melee combo, also it just looks cool.
  
  Magicked Barrier is also an excellent addition to rdm's utility kit. Damage mitigation is always welcome in difficult content, there's a nice symmetry to it being the counterpart to smn's everlasting flight, and it propagates extremely quickly with no server tick memes.

Frankly there are so many refinements and positive changes to the job that I have only scratched the surface and probably missed some of them. A lot of the changes to the functionality of skills like acceleration and manafication have deeper implications in high end play too that I won't go into now. All in all, I think red mage is poised to coast through this expansion in an excellent state of design.

[Andy_T93]

It is soooo well done, agree, the only thing I would like the see added would be a downtime skill which passively generates mana, just for something to do when the boss isn't targetable but otherwise agree, its done near perfectly

[SlickPaws]

Weird, I actually hate the way RDM plays now. I feel like the change to acceleration was entirely unncessary and I'm at the point where I'm going to just take it off my bar because it's useless to me. It's just a glorified Swiftcast that only works on 3 abilities that you were already only instacasting with dualcast anyway, compound that with the decreased mana generation from all abilties across the board and now we have a hellishly slow ramp-up because we're at the mercy of RNG for Verfire/Verstone procs. I have no idea what the rationale behind it was because the last thing RDM needs is more instacasts when you're already instacasting at least half the time.

[Ransu]

Weird, I actually hate the way RDM plays now. I feel like the change to acceleration was entirely unncessary and I'm at the point where I'm going to just take it off my bar because it's useless to me. It's just a glorified Swiftcast that only works on 3 abilities that you were already only instacasting with dualcast anyway, compound that with the decreased mana generation from all abilties across the board and now we have a hellishly slow ramp-up because we're at the mercy of RNG for Verfire/Verstone procs. I have no idea what the rationale behind it was because the last thing RDM needs is more instacasts when you're already instacasting at least half the time.

The ramp up time is practically the same as before...

[SlickPaws]

The ramp up time is practically the same as before...

With regard to the amount of mana you need to generate, you're correct. However, because we had Acceleration to decrease ramp-up time because it gave us three guaranteed procs, the ramp up before the changes was significantly faster despite the mana proportions being the same. As it stands, with Acceleration in its base form from level 50 - level 88, you're only guaranteed one proc every 60s and only if you use it in place of Jolt to instacast something you were already going to instacast with dualcast anyway. Having 50/50 combos instead of 80/80 combos is moot because of all of this your ramp-up is slower. Even at 88+, you can only guarantee yourself two procs, making this new version of Acceleration 33% weaker than its previous incarnation. A 50% chance to proc is all fine and well until it actually become important and that's precisely when it'll fail you - it's just Sod's Law - having something to alleviate that was a lot better than not having it. RDM was in a good place and has been for the last two expansions, this change makes absolutely no sense to me. To top all of that off, because the RNG is now more prominent because it can't simply be bypassed by using a key ability as part of your rotation, we now have more unpredictable mana generation which changes the class fundamentally from one that can do a rotation to one that must now rely on priority assuming that one or more of your procs didn't go off and now you're left with unbalanced mana or less mana overall than you were planning for - which in turn causes a delay in your melee burst phase and that'll impact the whole fight from that point onwards.

[Rongway]

and only if you use it in place of Jolt to instacast something you were already going to instacast with dualcast anyway.

That's exactly what it's for though? Anything that lets you skip jolt is a damage gain.

[SlickPaws]

That's exactly what it's for though? Anything that lets you skip jolt is a damage gain.

Yes, I know that's exactly what it's for which is why I mentioned it. I'm not just blanket complaining about an ability I don't know how to use, and your comment does nothing to address anything I've actually said.. But by all means, cherry-pick a comprehensive comment for the one thing you think you can dispute, that's definitely the best way to conduct a discourse. My greater point here is that the change seems wholly unnecessary and overall harmful to the class' rotation and playability in general and nobody can actually explain the logic behind the decision as they see it.

To put it more simply - Would you rather have 1/2 procs of your 50% proc abilities, or would you have 3? If you're cool with the former, then more power to you, play how you want to play but I'd much rather have the 3 procs and the certainty that comes from knowing your mana will be where you need it to be and abilities will be proc'ing more frequently. If the logic is 'skipping jolt is good' then my counter is that we were already doing that by replacing it with Verfire/Verstone *and* gaining more mana overall as a direct result. The rotation just felt a hell of a lot smoother to me with old Acceleration, now it feels awkward.

[SgtPepperUK]

Agreed, loving RDM this update, even more AoE skills and really come a long way since SB.

Also love that our single target melee combo just needs 50/50 now, not 80/80.

Whilst ramping up mana is a bit slower, once it's up it's possible to launch 3 single target melee / finisher combos consecutively, or 2 AoE melee / finisher combos and close to 60/60 for another.

Will also add, new AF gear is really nice. Been using the level 70 as glamour since SB, the 80 one didn't really do it for me but the 90 one is very nice.

[StriderShinryu]

I'm really loving it. It feels like an extension of the way it worked in ShB but with more little things to do to optimize and spice up the rotation. It just feels like RDM but more active, which is great. I'm still getting used to the new Acceleration and haven't totally gotten the hang of the best times to use it but I like that better than the old way it worked where it was essentially just a press on cooldown type ability. As an already religious user of Addle, Magick Barrier is such a great thing to have. Even Resolution is somehow better than I thought it would be because of the positional requirement. I was worried that Resolution would feel like "Another Ender" but the way it actually feels to use is that Scorch is still the ender and Resolution is sort of a flourish at the end of the combo.

If I had one little nitpick, and it's not even to do with the job play itself, it's the audio cue on the mana gauge. Now that we basically have two gauge levels depending on whether we're AOEing or not, it would be nice if we could have two different gauge sounds instead of just the one for 50/50 and nothing for 60/60.

[DrFlesh]

i really like the new rotation but mobility took a huge hit, im feeling that i spend too much time stuck at melee range at bosses and that is not good if you are using a 2 melee /1 caster / rdps for raids