RDM is great

[Myon88]

I think embolden's in an okay place, pretty much all buffs in the game are in that ballpark now. Gone are the days where we had ridiculously powerful buffs like og trick attack or hypercharge. I suspect this watering down across the board is part of a larger effort to weaken the compounding effect of synced up burst windows - and so reduce the discrepancy in performance between groups of different skill levels. Embolden going to 5% is just collateral damage from that, but it's very much on par.

As for the acceleration thing, personally I don't see how our ramp up is any slower than before. You can now literally melee combo on the 1st gcd if you so wanted due to manafication giving you the 50 mana needed, it is objectively faster. There are other factors that contribute to this, like having an additional finisher on top of verholy and scorch (resolution) giving you more of a refund after each combo, and manafication giving you more mana relative to the cost of a melee combo than it did in the past. I suspect that if you were to compare fights of similar duration between current and past expansions, you would find the number of melee combos red mage performs now to be similar or even improved.

There is one other benefit of acceleration acting as a swiftcast to consider, and that is its ability to let you fine-tune which gcd intervals you dualcast on. In order to optimize damage, high performing red mages aim to maximize the number of casts of ogcds like fleche and contre sixte. This entails using them as often as possible, as quickly as possible the moment they are off cooldown. To accomplish this, it's important that they come off cooldown on the gcd you are dualcasting so that they can be weaved immediately, and not the gcd you are hardcasting to set up dualcast. The latter would cause them to sit unused for 2.5s longer than necessary, slowing down their usage over the fight.

There are many cases where your dualcast tempo may be shifted into this less favourable alignment. The odd number of instacasts you perform in a melee combo now for instance, or unplanned usages of reprise/swiftcast for movement purposes. In cases like this, new acceleration performs the useful function of letting you realign your dualcast window.