Yoruko wrote:
Gimp the melees so you can look better, WTF? The more a rdm casts the lower their melee damage, and there's nothing religious about it, other than the melees who refuse to believe the numbers. If you have equal gear a rdm will not keep up with a melee. If cures are what makes rdm melee great all melees need to be subbing whm then. You have to imballance the gear in favor of the rdm in order for them to keep up with DDs and at that point I could say a whm is an uber melee with a wand if they dd against a nakid war. If you want to be a melee, play one for god's sake there's like 11 of them.
/sigh
I've purposely kept out of this argument for a while. I'd really like to be able to have "equal gear" on my RDM that I do on my mnk. Haidate+Osode would be killer on RDM, and if black belt wasn't MNK-only, that'd probably be the only belt I'd be wearing on all my jobs except for WSes.
I'll just list an example of why I believe melee RDM to be practical. Let's say you have 3 good DDs that each do 1% damage to a mob every second. Given equal damage distribution, basically the mob goes from 100% to 0% in 33.3 seconds with each DD doing 33.3% of the damage (makes it easier to calculate).
Let's introduce Joe RDM. He likes to melee. He's god-awful too, and parses at 10% of overall setup (3DD+Melee RDM). So the other 3 DDes are competing (equally) for the slice of the other 90% and the mob dies at roughly 30 seconds from start to finish (I've completely ignored delays introduced by switching mobs between kills, etc.) because they are doing 30% damage each over 30 seconds.
Let's upgrade Joe's equipment a bit. Now he's doing 15% overall, which means he's an okay melee RDM. He's nowhere close to the other DDs, but at least he isn't being outparsed 3-to-1. Now the ratio is closer to 2-to-1, because the other DDs are doing 28.3% each over 28.3 seconds.
Joe learned his lesson, and decided to upgrade his equipment a bit more. Now he's doing 20%, which I'd see expect out of a good melee-mage type (aka BLU). Overall killtime is now down to 26.6 seconds. Joe is still being outparsed by about 33% compared to "pure" DD, but equipment-wise his is about equal to the other DD.
Joe's been doing this for a few years, and now he's got the ultimate setup. Morrigan's Robe, Suppa, the whole 9 yards and then some. He's parsing equally to the other DDs (because he's still chosing to self-buff), so they are all doing 25% each over 25 seconds. Unfortunately, this shows that even if you go from good to cream-of-the-crop equipment, the overall effect of doing this are pretty small in a 4-DD party - overall kill time is influenced more by what the other members in your parties are doing.
What's the point of this story? All it took was a melee RDM that is doing 75% of the damage compared to a "pure DD" to shave off 6.7 seconds off each mob kill, and this mage can self-buff (one less spell for the back-line mage) toss cures and probably make sure that Dia is landed on first thing (aka before the mob reaches 80%) compared to "regular" mages where I've seen them cast at 30% mob health... and of course someone WSes 2 seconds later and the mob is dead.
Compare this to the 4DD RDM BRD combo where the RDM is responsible for minimum 4 hastes and a self-refresh (more if the "DD" is magic-based like, say, BLU or lo
ldrk), cures for everyone, enfeebles, and the whole notion of 4DD fad. As I said, given good equipment, each DD is doing 1% over 1 second, so the difference between that and a 3DD RDM-Melee (also good equipment) is 1.6 seconds per mob. Is lightening the load off the backline mages worth the tradeoff for 1.6 seconds? I think so. Given 80-90 mobs/hour, that's about 2 min lost in an hour, or 3% overall, and that doesn't even take into consideration dia and dispel being casted asap, or having to rest because the sole RDM ran out of MP in a 4DD setup.
If you invite me (or I invite you) and I play melee RDM, I will toss dia2 and cures, self-buff (or two refreshes and you haste me), and act as cure bitch if the RDM disconnects or dies (has happened a few times). My main concern is how do I maximize my damage and the party's while averting disaster (ie if a melee is in the orange, you will see me cast Cure 4). When I play MNK, I've done parties where I was doing 50% overall damage in 3DD setup and tanking about as much too. I'm more concerned about keeping myself hate-free (and alive) with that kind of setup than doing DD.
As I have regurgitated elsewhere, my golden rule for melee RDM is the 80-20 rule, I spend 80% of the time meleeing and 20% of the time casting. You can see that this is a pretty good approximation of the "good" melee RDM scenario where he is doing 75% compared to other DD. With better equipment and say pierce-weak mobs like Colibris using Blau/Joy, is when you see melee RDM that can outparse other "good" pure DDs. But even if the melee RDM loses the parse wars, it's quite possible that he is contributing to the party by doing the aforementioned things in addition to meleeing.
Just as an aside, if said top-notch RDM were to go pure DD (forgoing self-haste and self-refresh) and completely ignoring cures or enfeebles, he'll be doing rougly 33% and the "good" pure DDs doing 22% provided that he was spending 20-25% of his time casting spells before. I cannot recommend doing this unless you are a relic-holder with the best of the best equipment - ie, rules me out completely.
-- Starfox
