Red Mage Rotation Guide - FFXIV

The Red Mage class in Final Fantasy XIV provides a very unique experience for the Magical DPS role. Unlike the other magical ranged classes, Red Mage combines its black and white magic with some flashy melee abilities, allowing it to enjoy some variety as a melee and mage class.

Red Mage is regarded for being a simple job on the surface that also provides an underrated amount of depth. While the fundamental concept to its rotation is easy to learn, the job maintains a fair bit of complexity in order to fully maximize its own damage potential, making it a sneakily tricky job at times.

Alongside of its’ responsibility as a damage dealing job, Red Mage is also regarded for being the “prog job”, as it provides an incredibly strong utility kit, including one of the most coveted and sought after utility actions for end-game content: Verraise. Coupled with this raise ability, Red Mage also brings strong mitigation capabilities with Addle, as well as its unique ability in Magick Barrier. 

The basics of Red Mage

The general concept behind the Red Mage rotation revolves around the design of its Mana Gauge system. Red Mage will generate Black and White Mana upon casting its magic abilities. Some of these abilities even provide a unique interaction, known as Dualcast. By using Dualcast, Red Mage is able to cast any of its abilities as an instant-cast GCD. 

Once enough mana is generated, Red Mage will have access to “Enchanted” melee actions, allowing you to melee attack your target with a combination of various enchanted skills. Once this combo is completed, you will then unlock a second combination of spells, this time with magical abilities. 

Alongside its repeated cycle of generating mana and spending mana to use its melee abilities, Red Mage also employs a variety of oGCDs. Some of these abilities allow Red Mage to do some fun and exciting movements, even allowing you to backflip out of danger!

Red Mage Rotation

Similar to Dancer, a big part of Red Mage’s rotation identity comes from being a “proc job”, with a unique take on proc management in comparison to jobs like Dancer or Bard. Red Mage prioritizes using its Verfire and Verstone procs to more efficiently build its Black and White Mana, while also building as many of these procs as it can from using Veraero III and Verthunder III.

Once enough mana is generated, Red Mage should use its enchanted melee combo, allowing them access to a combo of its most powerful spells referred to as “finishers”. These finishers are the highest damaging spells for Red Mage, so it’s incredibly important to be able to cast these spells as much as possible.

The core rotation cycle for Red Mage is largely based around the idea of burst windows. As Endwalker has emphasized the design of the “two minute meta”, as well as Red Mage itself employing a raid buff called Embolden, Red Mage wants to align as many of its most powerful spells into these buff windows as it can. This means aligning its enchanted melee combo and finisher actions into Embolden windows, as well as other buffs from your raid party members.

Red Mage has additional ways of building mana with an action called Manafication. Manafication not only provides an immediate boost of mana, but also provides another personal damage buff specifically for its enchanted melee combo and finisher abilities. In many cases, Red Mage will try to combine this Manafication damage buff with their damage buff from Embolden and other party raid buffs in order to take advantage of its multiplicative nature.

Red Mage also employs a variety of oGCD abilities that it will repeatedly use as they’re available. These oGCDs range from hard-hitting skills like Fleche and Contre Sixte, as well as skills that allow Red Mage to make some flashy movements. Corps-a-corps acts a gap closer for Red Mage, allowing them to immediately dash to the boss, which can be very helpful if they need to move into melee range to use their enchanted melee combo. Displacement acts in the opposite way, allowing Red Mage to jump and backflip away from their target. Just be careful to not fall off the arena when using this ability, as many veteran players have likely experienced at some point!

Red Mage Opener

The opener for Red Mage is pretty straight forward, with little variation to its overall sequence. In some situations, you may be able to alter the weave timings for some oGCDs, or your Tincture. But, the overall structure of the opener will remain the same, opting for a fast Manafication timing to use the enchanted melee combo and the combo finishers afterwards, along with all of your oGCD abilities during your Embolden window.

• Prepull GCD: Veraero (begin casting with five seconds remaining on the countdown)
• GCD 1: Verthunder III  → Acceleration  →   Swiftcast
• GCD 2: Verthunder III  → Grade 8 Tincture of Intelligence
• GCD 3: Veraero III  → Manafication  →  Embolden
• GCD 4: Enchanted Riposte  →  Fleche
• GCD 5: Enchanted Zwerchau  →  Contre Sixte
• GCD 6: Enchanted Redoublement  →  Corps-a-corps  →  Engagement
• GCD 7: Verholy  →  Corps-a-corps  → Engagement
• GCD 8: Scorch
• GCD 9: Resolution
• GCD 10: Verfire
• GCD 11: Verthunder III (Dualcasted)
• GCD 12: Verstone
• GCD 13: Veraero III (Dualcasted)
• GCD 14: Jolt II (If you have Verfire/Verstone procs, use in place of Jolt)
• GCD 15: Verthunder III (Dualcasted)  →  Fleche

Burst Windows 

For later burst windows, the ideal Red Mage rotation requires some setup to optimize its damage into their own Embolden buff, and the raid buffs from other party members. We can break this down into some easy to follow steps that should align your rotation in an ideal way:

1. Make sure you have at least 50 black mana and 50 white mana prepared before your Embolden is cast.
2. Begin casting your first melee combo (starting with Enchanted Riposte) when Embolden has roughly five seconds remaining on its cooldown. This will require you to have awareness of the cooldowns on your hotbar.
3. After you cast your Enchanted Redoublement, Embolden should be available by this point. Double weave Embolden with your Manafication to ensure your finisher abilities (Verflare, Verholy, Scorch, and Resolution) are buffed by your Embolden, as well as any other raid buff.
4. Once you finish casting your Verflare/Verholy → Scorch → Resolution, immediately begin the next melee combo by casting Enchanted Riposte again. Finish the second melee combo, and the corresponding finisher abilities afterwards.

If timed properly, your rotation throughout the duration of your Embolden window should look like this:

Verflare/Verholy → Scorch → Resolution → Enchanted Riposte → Enchanted Zwerchhau → Enchanted Redoublement → Verflare/Verholy → Scorch → Resolution

It’s important to note though that your mana management for ensuring this burst window to be consistent can change, depending on how you choose to align your Manafication cooldown. In situations where you opt for a complete two minute alignment with Manafication, you can directly follow the instructions above. 

An additional burst window for Red Mage is the setup for your 30-second Tincture window. In this scenario, you want to have your mana gauge nearly completely full, with your Manafication cooldown becoming available within the next few seconds. You will begin the first melee combo as normal, and should weave your Tincture immediately following the first Verholy or Verflare that you cast. After this, you can finish casting your Scorch → Resolution, leading into your next melee combo immediately after. Ideally, you should be able to cast two entire melee combos + the corresponding finisher abilities that come afterwards, as well as the Scorch + Resolution from the first combo you were starting before weaving the Tincture.

Managing Procs and Mana Gauge

Outside of your specific burst windows, Red Mage’s rotation will revolve around setting up and utilizing their Verfire and Verstone procs, as well as properly balancing their mana to assist with building procs in the future. Red Mage has the chance to generate Verfire and Verstone procs in a few different ways:
 

1. Each time Veraero III or Verothunder III are cast, you have a 50% chance to proc Verfire or Verstone. This goes up to 100% if you have Acceleration activated. 
2. Each time Verflare or Verholy are cast, you have a 20% chance to generate a proc. This goes up to 100% if the proper mana balancing is achieved:
   1. Casting Verflare if White Mana is greater than Black Mana
   2. Casting Verholy if Black Mana is greater than White Mana

In the building mana stage, your goals are to utilize procs properly, avoid overcapping the procs you’re currently holding, as well as giving yourself the best chance to build procs in the future. Remember, for each additional Verflare or Verholy that you generate is a 20 potency gain over needing an additional Jolt II cast. A few helpful tips for achieving this:

1. Any time you don’t have a Verfire or Verstone proc ready, you can use Acceleration to guarantee yourself a proc on the next Veraero III or Verthunder III cast.
2. You can also use Swiftcast to instantly cast Veraero III or Verthunder III, to try and “fish” for a proc as well.
3. If you have procs ready while your melee combo is ready to be used, be sure to balance your mana according to the procs you may already have. For example, if you currently have a Verfire proc ready and enough mana to use your melee combo, make sure your Black Mana is greater than your White Mana, so you can guarantee a Verstone proc after casting Verholy.
4. Avoid any unnecessary overcapping on your procs. If you already have a Verstone proc for example, do your best to avoid casting another Veraero III or Verholy until the proc is consumed. This may also apply to using Acceleration. Of course this may not apply to every single circumstance. Sometimes the need to maintain uptime or break the mana threshold to unlock your enchanted melee combo may be more important.

Aside from proc management, you will also be managing your mana gauge for using additional melee combos when you’re able to afford them. Since you will generally build more mana gauge than what’s required for your burst windows, you will periodically have “free” melee combos that can be used outside of your Embolden buff windows. These melee combos provide a lot of flexibility, as they only need to be used to avoid overcapping mana. You do not always need to use these melee combos the moment you reach 50/50 mana. Consider holding them for a few seconds if you wish to use the additional instant-cast GCDs more efficiently (for the sake of maintaining uptime, or providing additional weaving space).

oGCD Management

Alongside their mana building and ability combos, Red Mage also juggles a few different oGCDs to manage as well:

• Fleche
• Contre Sixte
• Corps-a-corps
• Displacement (shares cooldown with Displacement)
• Engagement (shares cooldown with Engagement)

Managing oGCDs can get a bit tricky for Red Mage, as different oGCDs require different priorities for how they’re managed.

For Fleche and Contre Sixte, these oGCDs are generally prioritized to be cast as soon as they become available. However, due to Red Mage being reliant on dualcasted GCDs and instant-cast GCDs provided by melee combos and finishers, this will sometimes cause issues where the next Fleche or Contre Sixte won’t align with your Dualcast GCD timings, thus causing them to “drift”. Drifted oGCDs could potentially lead to losing casts by the end of the encounter.

To alleviate this issue, you can use Acceleration or Swiftcast to immediately cast another Veraero III or Verthunder III, which will offset your Dualcast timing by one GCD. Doing this will realign your Dualcast window to your next oGCD coming off cooldown. Keep in mind that this realignment will need to occur periodically. If you have extra mana to use a melee combo without compromising the required mana you need for Embolden/buff windows, you can also align a melee combo to provide the necessary weaving space for your oGCDs.

The Corps-a-corps, Displacement, and Engagement oGCDs are on the charge system, allowing you a maximum of two charges to be held at any given time. These oGCDs provide much more leeway for when they need to be used and do not require any dualcast realignment. Ideally, you should still try to prioritize weaving as many of these oGCDs during your Embolden buff windows as possible, so long as it won’t force you to sit on your maximum cap of two charges for too long.

Since Displacement and Engagement share a cooldown, you only need to cast one or the other. In almost every situation, you should use Engagement. The character movement from Displacement is usually unnecessary and can also be risky in encounters that limit the amount of “safe” arena space (for example, the Titan phase in Ultima Weapon: UItimate).

Red Mage Utility

While the utility actions for Red Mage aren’t necessarily a part of its core rotation, we can still discuss the basics as to why they are so good and should be used as often as possible.

Vercure 

Not only is this spell unique for the DPS role, as it allows Red Mage to cast a targeted healing action on anyone, but casting it will also proc Dualcast. This means Red Mage can exploit this interaction for personal damage gains in some specific scenarios. For example, during downtime in a fight, a Red Mage might cast a Vercure just before the boss becomes targetable again to have a Dualcast proc ready for Veraero III or Verthunder III.  There may be other situations where this trick proves useful, but this example is the most common.

Addle and Magick Barrier

Red Mage has access to two mitigation abilities. The first of these abilities is Addle, which is available as a role action for any Magical Ranged DPS. Addle provides mitigation for your party. 

The second mitigation ability is Magick Barrier. Magick Barrier provides mitigation against magic damage, while also providing a boost to healing actions during its duration. 

Both of these abilities should be used as often as possible, and can make the difference between surviving versus dying to raid-wide damage from the boss.

Verraise

Verraise is a unique and very useful action that can resurrect any dead party member. Verraise can also be used with a Dualcast proc, allowing the Red Mage to cast this ability instantly. Utilizing Verraise correctly allows Red Mage to have amazing recovery potential, since it can help save from a wipe.. 

Red Mage Tips

A few helpful tips that can make you a much better Red Mage player:

1. Practice and get comfortable with Red Mage’s staggered mobility around Dualcast windows. It can feel a bit tricky at times when bosses decide to vomit out mechanics at you while you’re hardcasting your Jolt or Verfire/Verstone actions to proc Dualcast. 
2. Prioritize your GCD uptime. The most important aspect for dealing damage properly is to keep your GCDs rolling at all times. This may also be referred to as ABC = Always Be Casting. While making the smaller optimizations with proc management or shifting dualcast windows to avoid oGCD drift is cool, ensuring you’re able to continuously cast GCDs is more important. Don’t be afraid to use Acceleration or Swiftcast to ensure you can keep up your GCD uptime, even if it causes you to overwrite procs.
3. Be sure to practice your rotation to build muscle memory. Practice makes perfect.