FFXIV x D&D - Red Mage as a Bard Archetype: College of Flair

This is part of a series of posts I'm making in prep for a FFXIV x D&D sourcebook I'm writing. Other related articles are:

• Astrologian
• Bard
• Black Mage
• Dark Knight
• Dragoon
• Gunbreaker
• Machinist
• Monk
• Red Mage
• Scholar
• Summoner
• White Mage

Here's a copy of the unfinished product if you want to see it in a coherent form: https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/S1VZ0k2FN

Red Mage

The FFXIV Red Mage is a jack of all trades. It swaps between going in close with melee attacks and casting spells at a distance. It can cast healing spells as well as explosive spells, and it can buff party members as well. And it does all of this in bursts and with flair.

This description makes it pretty obvious that the Bard class should be used as the base for this concept. If we look at the basic Bard's toolkit, it does almost all of what a Red Mage does already. In fact, one could argue that you could make a College of Lore or College of Swords and call it a Red Mage, but one lacks the blade flourish aspect, and the other lacks the ability to cast flashy explosive spells, respectively.

The mission behind the Red Mage subclass (called College of Flair) is to merge the best of the College of Lore and College of Swords in a cohesive way to come up with a result that truly feels like a Red Mage.

At level 3, they gain three features. The first one is an evocation cantrip from the Wizard spell list and the ability to select evocation spells from the Wizard spell list when they learn new spells. This way, they get all the flashy spells they want, without stepping on the Wizard or Sorcerer's toes too much.

The second one is their Fighting Style; I made a new Fighting Style called "Spellslinger", which allows them to reroll their damage dice from their cantrips. This should more or less average out in a damage increase from their cantrips, similar to the +2 damage bonus from the Dueling Fighting Style.

The third and last ability they gain at level 3 is Battle Flourish, which is inspired by the College of Swords' Blade Flourish. This grants them a +2 bonus to AC when using the Attack action, effectively granting them the same bonus that a shield would, which Bards are not proficient in. The Battle Flourish options are mostly there to give the Red Mage options to swiftly get in and out of combat.

By the time the Red Mage reaches 6th level, they would have access to Font of Inspiration, which allows them to recharge their Inspiration points every short rest. This would encourage them to use their Battle Flourish abilities more often, and so it seemed fitting to give them an extra attack at this level. By now, the Red Mage should be very good at using flashy spells and entering melee combat for a short time.

An ability that seems to be a staple for Red Mages, is the ability of Dualcast, which allows them to cast two spells at once. That's why, at 14th level, I gave them the ability to cast a cantrip as a bonus action after they cast a lower level spell (4th level of lower). I felt like this was balanced because, at these levels, 4th levels spells or lower were still used and were still useful, but were nowhere near as devastating as the current 7th level spells that they could cast. Plus, the number of spells they could cast under this dualcast feature was limited. I would like to test this ability out, since it could be the case that it needs to be changed to only include 3rd levels spells or lower, or even 2nd level spells or lower. 

I'm very satisfied with how this subclass turned out, and I'm eager to see more of how it works in actual play. Perhaps in the future, I might have to make adjustments to the Dualcast feature.