Thread: RDM 7.4 changes and job identity

Originally Posted by Solilunaris

You are probably the biggest white knight I have seen for these changes.

*rolls eyes*

Originally Posted by RaionKansen

You really shouldn't call people white knights just because they know what they're talking about. Again, you haven't even engaged with the high end content this expansion.

Thank you for understanding. It’s best to just use the ignore function; calling out posters on their incoherence or lies is simply adding gasoline to the fire. They offer nothing useful, seeking only to name-call, rage-bait, and attack the Devs. It’s sad that the most frequent posters are often the same people who are at war with learning. Its' always the same personality, just copied on to another face.

If you try to discuss a specific mechanic, specific encounter, or specific content, their behavior is predictable: they name-call, deflect to PvP, or hallucinate lists of things red mage has lost. It’s a cookie-cutter excuse to apply terms like "class homogeneity" to Red Mage, when it has never applied to Red Mage. I mean at this point I've read them and know what they're about. They claim to play RDM "stationary" now, probably dropping DPS because they never learned to play it, then retreat to echo chambers for social reinforcement.

I don’t give extra credence to experienced players opinions just for the sake of it—I am one, and we all still make mistakes. However, if posters won't accept basic job knowledge during a discussion, they aren't worth anyone's time.

I check in every few months to show that people who actually play the game do not agree with this incoherence. If you want the range restored, great. If you want to discuss the kit, I’m game. But if you call the kit useless, I’ll gladly educate you. A range change doesn't mean the RDM kit or its unique playstyle is suddenly worth crapping on.

In regards to identity
Mobility: Objectively unique and satisfying. Acceleration is boss and the mobility sword combo is fun

Burst: Controlled and in the hands of the player, not on rails.

resource accumulating and spending: Zero jobs are like it; Reaper is the closest in resource spending, but still miles away.

RDM perfectly fulfills the lore of weaving White and Black mana into Red Magic. We have the best balance of swordplay and magic in the game. The job doesn’t need a gutting or a rework—just minor animation and range tweaks. RDM remains the gold standard for design.

Originally Posted by StriderShinryu

Just needed to jump in and give this post some major kudos.

We already did have a "ranged melee attack" that could/should have been buffed to work within Manafication and essentially replace the melee combo when you couldn't get into melee range to perform it. As said in the quoted post, keep it below melee combo potency so that you're still heavily encouraged to do your proper melee combo when you can but you'd at least have a solid enough option to fall back on when you couldn't. Job done.

I do agree with the opinion that some people have that the job as it stands today is not all that different from how it was before the patch, and that, yes, you can "just do it in melee range if you really want." The real problem is what this change will mean for the future of the job. Right now we're actually in an awkward place with the melee combo sometimes being able to be done at range and some times not, and where you can now perform some/most of your burst at range but not all of it (assuming you do use corps and engage for potency)... and we all know that SE doesn't like awkwardness and doesn't seem to embrace any sort of player side decision making or job friction. So while the job may still be "fine" right now, I have a really hard time believing it will stay "fine." I can very easily see the RDM 8.0 changes being "do all of your stuff at any range just like any other ranged class" based almost entirely on this one change and their history of how they make changes, and I just don't see that as a good thing.

Thanks for the kudos, 'finding solutions to SE-made problems' is a side hobby of sorts, though I mostly think about Healers

The bolded part is worth a second look, because thinking about it, this change actually presents a new problem: Casual players might run into the problem of 'they can sometimes use the Melee combo from range, and sometimes not, and identify that as 'feeling unintuitive to play around''. Rather than how it used to be, where it made sense that 'Melee attack is Melee range', we now have 'Melee attack is Melee range, but Ranged range when under the effect of a certain CD', and the feedback SE might get is that the varying range is just unintuitive to play around, resulting in them making the 'forced to be Melee range' combo, Ranged range too for consistency

Imagine you start a Melee combo at 28s of Manafication (so 2s are left), you'd have 2 hits (28s, 29.5s) that are Ranged range, and then you're suddenly forced to be Melee distance again for the last hit (as it'd be at 31s, beyond the duration of Manafication). If you don't happen to have Corps ready (eg, you just used both charges back to back in your burst window), you're gonna have to waddle up to the boss to get that last hit, and you can't even Accel/Swift a filler GCD on the way as it'd break the combo. The mental image is funny, but it's a problem that didn't need to exist (eg by doing the Reprise change I previously mentioned)

Ideally, it's just slippery slope fallacy speaking, but with SE, it's unfortunately a non-zero chance that they might actually do that

Originally Posted by Milkbeard

I check in every few months to show that people who actually play the game do not agree with this incoherence. If you want the range restored, great. If you want to discuss the kit, I’m game. But if you call the kit useless, I’ll gladly educate you. A range change doesn't mean the RDM kit or its unique playstyle is suddenly worth crapping on.

In regards to identity
Mobility: Objectively unique and satisfying. Acceleration is boss and the mobility sword combo is fun

Burst: Controlled and in the hands of the player, not on rails.

resource accumulating and spending: Zero jobs are like it; Reaper is the closest in resource spending, but still miles away.

RDM perfectly fulfills the lore of weaving White and Black mana into Red Magic. We have the best balance of swordplay and magic in the game. The job doesn’t need a gutting or a rework—just minor animation and range tweaks. RDM remains the gold standard for design.

Good thing I'm complaining specifically about the extended range on the Melee combo feeling like an unnecessary change, that impacts (ha) the Job Identity, and not complaining about the kit. I like Verraise and Magick Barrier as actions, I think they're cool additional utilities. I disagree that they're big enough in their impact to warrant the lower-DPS that the nonBLM Casters all 'enjoy', I think that the 'tax', if there is one at all, should be more like 2% rather than the 6ish% we saw last raid tier. Thinking back to Week 1 M8S and how the group I ran with had a stacked PCT who was gear-fed by a static that later imploded, I have no idea how we'd have cleared with a SMN/RDM, for example, the DPS check seemed designed around the assumption that everyone would just look at the 7.2 BLM changes and say 'oh BLM easier to handle now guess I'll play it because it's more damage than PCT again'

In regards to Identity:

Mobility: Unique is one way to put it, but it is objectively the least mobile of the four Casters now, even with Dualcast procs. Acceleration is cool, and I have no idea what you mean by 'mobility sword combo' except 'the combo that isn't in raidbuffs and can be kinda moved around in the non-burst section of the rotation'

Burst: In the hands of the player, as in, the player has to press the Embolden button, sure. Embolden, however, should be pressed as soon as it is up, aligned with everyone else's 2min button, unless the whole party has agreed on some other plan, whether holding every buff for X GCDs to better align with mechanics (without losing a use), or staggering the raidbuffs on purpose for the sake of meeting DPS checks in multiple phases (eg desynching Embolden from others in TOP P3/P4 to meet both checks, knowing that the downtimes in P5 will realign things). It is very much 'on rails' (source, The Balance), which, once again, speaks to the point of 'the 2min meta looms its shadow over everything', and that includes RDM

Resources: Agreed, zero jobs are like RDM. That's one thing it has going for it, that it has the thus-far unique gameplay of filling two different gauges concurrently, while trying to keep them relatively equal

I don't know who you're addressing with 'the job doesn't need a gutting/rework', but I hope it is not me, because I'm not asking for it to get a gutting or a rework. If anything, JP asking for the Melee combo to be executable from range, turning it from the Ranged-Melee hybrid it had been for 6 years, to be more Ranged and less Melee, qualifies as a rework in my eyes. A minor one, admittedly, but I'd place it in the same camp as 5.1 NIN changing Ninjutsu from OGCD to GCD, and that was referred to as a 'rework' by SE themselves. I'm also not sure I'd call RDM the 'gold standard' for design, but considering how little RDM's core gameplay loop had changed since its inception 6 years ago, the assertion that 'it has stood the test of time' is one that everyone can agree with, I'd think

As a (ex)Bard, its nice to see we’re not the only job in the game whose players will completely cannibalise its own design in some sad, misguided attempt to improve its dps output (let’s be real who actually cares about dps output if they’re all going to be practically 2D in design complexity / effort). Wonder how long it’ll be before they remove Dualcast because ‘it causes undue stress that there’s a minor variation in how this caster uses spells compared to the other two’. I mean Black Mage already has barely any cast times, right? Just make them all Summoner, that’ll be real fun.

So. now we have ‘Archer firing laser beams from the sky with their hands’ and ‘magic swordsman slicing enemies with a slashing weapon from 10 miles away’ (but it’s ok because it’s only 3 combos per 120s or whatever). What’s next, Monks punching the enemy at max range?

Makes you question why in the world they’d even use a sword if they’re going to attack from so far away, but eh, not like devs give a shit about lore and logic anymore lol.