How To Improve As Red Mage — Endwalker 6.55

Using our procs well is an important part of playing Red Mage optimally. However, many players overrate procs due to their prominence on our user interface. Overwriting or ignoring Verfire or Verstone procs is not ideal, but the cost of losing GCD uptime, overcapping Mana, drifting our melee combo out of raid buffs, or misaligning oGCDs from poor Acceleration and Swiftcast usage is often significantly more punishing.

While we can unleash a melee combo once it’s available at 50|50 mana, there is no inherent gain to doing so. It is often better to keep casting spells, as long as we don’t “overcap” (exceed 100|100 mana), and then use a stored melee combo for movement or raid buffs instead. Note that this does not apply to Manafication melee combos, only normal ones built up from casting.

Raid buffs should always be aligned with the party, even if it may not always align perfectly with our own melee combo. Most jobs are designed to be able to do burst damage every two minutes, and seven players’ damage will far outweigh our own, especially when multiple buffs are used at the same time to enhance everyone’s damage. As Red Mages, we should be adjusting our own melee combo timings for the group’s raid buffs instead.

A common misconception by newer players is that Manafication should always be held for raid buffs. Depending on an encounter’s killtime, however, it is often better to use it on cooldown to ensure we gain an additional 5% buffed melee combo that we wouldn’t have gotten if we held it every time. The key thing to understand is that desyncing Manafication and Embolden does not necessarily mean losing a melee combo under raid buffs because we can simply store mana to do normal melee combos under raid buffs instead.

While we want to avoid using Enchanted Reprise due to its mana cost and mediocre potency, do not be afraid to use it during progression or boss kill attempts if the only alternative is dropping a cast. You can review how to keep uptime better later. In most situations, you won’t necessarily lose a melee combo from doing so, and even if you did, the potency loss would be lower than doing 0 damage for extended periods of time.

It is not uncommon for players to think DPS should focus on damage and see party protection as for healers and tanks to worry about. While doing damage is indeed our primary responsibility, it should be noted that many DPS mitigation tools can be used at no cost to damage, and they may even be required for clearing some of the harder content in this game.