Ideas for simulate Red Mage's double cast

[Vanya]

Pay the sum MP, wait the sum CT.

You're getting two Actions for the price of one as it stands, anyone who understands tempo should get how huge this alone is.  If anything, even like this, it's probably busted-ish.

That's why I'm saying it should have a penalty to the spells' power. Otherwise there's no real advantage to just having Black and White skillsets. Just combining the CT & MP cost creates no advantage for the player except to insure both spells go off at the same time. That's really only useful for casting say Raise ans Cure together to give the target a better chance of not getting killed in the next turn. By taking the average CT & a power loss it balances out and makes it more useful. Otherwise it gets pwned by Black/White Magick + Short Charge.

[doriantoki]

Once you throw Reflect in the mix, as in reflecting it off your own characters, charge times also become largely irrelevant.  But I guess the reflect magic strategy is pretty rare, as is most people's understand of how it works.   But if used properly, get two powerful reflect-able spells, and throw them at the enemy off your ally, while you wait for the enemy to come to you.

On that same note, what will happen with Quick reflects?  Would the target be interrupted after the first spell, or would dual-cast continue?

[Vanya]

I think it would be kinda broken to allow Quick into the Dual Cast repertoire.
If I understand the way FFT does things using Quick on a unit during the dual cast phase wouldn't give them their turn until after the Dual Cast is done.
Casting 2 Quicks on the same target would probably be useless.
Then there's the issue of casting on multiple targets, which would work fine I suppose.
However, this would again be broken as with two dual casters in your team you could have your units skip ahead of the enemy over and over.
So definitely you'd have to be particular about which spells you allow to be Dual Cast.

[Kaijyuu]

Yeah I wouldn't let Quick be used with this either. FF6 let you use it with x-magic, and you basically could have an unlimitedly long turn, casting quick every other spell.

Then there's the issue of casting on multiple targets, which would work fine I suppose.

This is something I hadn't thought about. Nothing else in the game to my knowledge allows you t chose 2 targets; hacking that in would probably be a gargantuan task. Both always hitting the same target brings another question: if two spells have a different cast range, which do you use? The smallest? What if a crazy hacker uses something like the earth slash targeting?

[Vanya]

Ideally you'd convolute the Math Skill menu type to allow both phases to do a targeting routine. Actually while on the subject of ideals, I'd prefer to try to build a new menu type based on Math Skill and link it to one of the many unused values. That would probably be gargantuan for sure, size wise.