Red Mage is one of Final Fantasy 14’s most exciting DPS classes, giving players the chance to wield both offensive magic and a few healing spells together with stylish sword maneuvers. This class takes inspiration from the Red Mages of other Final Fantasy games, allowing players to deal high amounts of damage whilst also offering valuable utility for supporting other members of the party.

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Red Mage has a flexible set of skills that when optimised in a rotation can make them a formidable opponent. To play optimally, Red Mages must be confident in weaving their two types of magic together in the right order, then proceeding into a long melee combo after building up their Balance Gauge. Like many other DPS classes, Red Mage is easy to learn but difficult to master, offering a rewarding and unique play style.

How To Unlock Red Mage

As a job associated with the Stormblood expansion, Red Mage is one of the Jobs that cannot be played from the beginning of the game. In order to play Red Mage, players must first get any other Disciple of War class to level 50. In addition, you must also be playing on an account that has paid for the Stormblood expansion.

Once you’ve fulfilled these requirements, you can speak to the NPC Distraught Lass in Ul'dah - Steps of Thal (X:14, Y:11.7). This will begin the first Red Mage Job Quest: completing this will unlock the Red Mage job stone as well as a starting set of gear. From this point, Job Quests for the Red Mage will be available every few levels until level 80 from the NPC X'rhun Tia in various locations (see ‘job quests’ section below).

How To Play Red Mage

The key to playing Red Mage is balance, both literally and figuratively: Red Mages must strike the correct balance between damage, utility, and mobility whilst also managing the two types of mana on their Balance Gauge: White Mana and Black Mana. By alternating between their two types of magic, Red Mages can eventually trigger an enhanced state that allows them to deal a punishing flurry of blows with their sword, culminating in high potency attacks.

The primary goal of Red Mage in group content is to achieve this state of burst damage as frequently as possible, whilst also staying consistent with the regular spells needed to build their Mana. In addition, Red Mage is one of few DPS jobs with access to a basic heal and the ability to resurrect party members.

To play Red Mage effectively, the Balance Gauge, in addition to the timing of activating various off-global cooldown skills are the most essential elements to consider, which we’ve explained below.

Balance Gauge

The Balance Gauge is the Red Mage’s unique Job Gauge, which shows how much White Mana and Black Mana you have. The meter on the left shows White Mana. The meter on the right shows Black Mana. These meters correspond to a number that increases depending on which skills you use during your basic rotation of damage-dealing spells.

The most important aspect of the Balance Gauge is to keep the two halves of the gauge as close to each other as possible: it’s a Balance Gauge after all. If one of your mana types falls more than 30 below the other, it’ll become harder to generate, so make sure to keep the mana types balanced.

The objective of monitoring the Balance Gauge is to increase both Mana types and then spend the Mana on enhanced ‘enchanted’ versions of the Red Mage’s melee combo, which can then be chained into a final finisher attack.

Recommended Skills and Rotations

To build up the Balance Gauge, you’ll want to make sure you’re using skills in the correct order to gain mana efficiently whilst also avoiding too much ‘hard-casting’. ‘Hard-casting’ is the act of casting spells for their full cast time. This should be minimised where possible, as the Red Mage has access to the buff Dualcast, which allows for the instant casting of spells.

In order to gain Dualcast, however, we must first ‘hard-cast a spell. Therefore, to build the Balance Gauge efficiently, you’ll want to alternate between using damage-dealing Black Magic and damage dealing White Magic (with occasional uses of Jolt) in a way that prioritises using spells that would normally have a long cast timer with Dualcast instead.

In doing this, you need to be aware of the value of each spell in your toolkit, so that you can choose the spells that will maximise your damage and mana regeneration. At level 50, you’ll only have basic forms of each spell, but as you level the class, you’ll unlock more powerful forms of each high-damage Black or White spell, such as Veraero III and Verthunder III.

An example of a very basic single target rotation based on this idea would be to start with Red Mage’s unaspected spell Jolt as the initial hardcast, then cast either Verthunder II or III or Veraero II or III under the Dualcast buff. Then continue in the same manner, each time using Verthunder to raise Black Mana and Veraero to raise White Mana respectively. Alternate between the two Mana types to keep the Balance Gauge balanced. In AoE situations, you can begin engaging the attacks Scatter and Moulinet.

Casting Verthunder III and Veraero III both offer a 50 percent chance of becoming the spells Verfire and Verstone respectively. This is another element to consider in the Red Mage rotation, and spell selection in circumstances where your Mana is already balanced should be based on receiving the Verfire Ready or Verstone Ready buff respectively.

At the higher levels, the gauge building rotation becomes marginally more complex as you weave in more off-global cooldown abilities. Red Mage has a few valuable off-global cooldown skills that can all be used in different circumstances:

Once you’ve filled your Balance Gauge sufficiently using your weapon skills, you can start spending the mana on your melee & finisher combo. You should only start this once you have at least 50 of both types of Mana, when your sword skills become their ‘enchanted’ versions (their icons will change to a purple colour).

You can begin the melee combo with Enchanted Riposte, continue it with Enchanted Zwerchhau and continue again with Enchanted Redoublement. After this, you will have gained three red crystals at the bottom of your Balance Gauge. These can be used to extend the combo even further and perform finishing spells Verholy or Verflare. These two spells do a massive 580 potency each and give 11 mana of their respective type.

Once you’ve performed Verflare or Verholy, you can do two more actions to finish the combo. You can continue with the unaspected spell Scorch, which combos into the level 90 spell Resolution for a huge 750 potency.

Job Quests

As with all other Jobs, Red Mage has to complete some Job Quests to unlock all their necessary skills. There will be a Job Quest every few levels between levels 50 and 80.

In addition to unlocking some skills, these quests will also provide some gear and teach the fundamentals of how to play the class. For this reason, it’s essential to complete the Job Quests while you’re levelling.

Gear and Materia

When it comes to gear, Red Mage is pretty simple. Whilst levelling, you'll want to obtain Casting gear, which usually offers bonuses to Intelligence, Vitality, Critical Hit, and Determination. When it's time to meld your gear with materia, you'll want to focus on materia that improves overall weapon damage, namely materia that increases Critical Hit as a priority.

In addition to Critical Hit, as a secondary focus you can also choose to meld materia that increases Determination and Direct Hit; all of these will contribute to Red Mage's overall damage output, so when you reach the maximum potential of a piece of gear with one of these stats, begin focusing on one of the other two.

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