Black Mage Sanctuary - A Guide to DPS

[nugglets]

Posted this on reddit already, but figured I'd post here as well.

The new "Umbral Heart" stacks from using B4 in 4.0 negates the effect of AF on MP costs of Fire spells.

Effectively halving the cost of three F4's per AF phase. Will have to do the math when I have more time later, but essentially two extra F4's per AF phase with a third possible depending on the timings / MP costs and total MP pool.

[NovaLevossida]

Posted this on reddit already, but figured I'd post here as well.

The new "Umbral Heart" stacks from using B4 in 4.0 negates the effect of AF on MP costs of Fire spells.

Effectively halving the cost of three F4's per AF phase. Will have to do the math when I have more time later, but essentially two extra F4's per AF phase with a third possible depending on the timings / MP costs and total MP pool.

And apparently piety is no longer going to be of any use for non-healers, according to the Google doc summary. 4.0 is going to be a wild time.

[Maero]

Thank you for posting that. Was wondering about it and Mr.Happy did not seem to know exactly
And FINALLY we get aoe thunder

[nugglets]

And apparently piety is no longer going to be of any use for non-healers, according to the Google doc summary. 4.0 is going to be a wild time.

He did say that, but I'm actually hoping they didn't remove the PIE party buff from sch/ast because we're going to want that according to my preliminary math on the 4.0 rotation. And if they did, we're going to want some PIE materia.

The full write up is on Reddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/6cqqe2/_/dhy2l61

But the tl;dr is that we could have a clean six F4 rotation if the buff still exists, otherwise we're left with a bit of a mess if we want to do so. It's still workable, theoretically, but it's not very intuitive, relies on transpose(yuck) and lacks the flow of the previous rotations.

I really hope I missed something or am just flat out wrong, though.

[HaroldSaxon]

Don't worry, you missed the 20% Fire 2 nerf and the 7% Fire IV nerf (potencies). We also lose Raging Strikes. Foul looks interesting and nice as well as Umbral Hearts, but it doesn't make up for what we've lost.

AOE Thunder is nice, but it overwrites the Single target thunder, does less potency per tick (by 25% - which is fair) but also procs thundercloud much less. You need to hit it on 10 enemies to get the same thundercloud rate as Single target Thunder III.

Based on the information we know, BLM is likely not going to be competitive at all. No DPS utility. 0 Reason to bring it. Maybe they will buff BLM WD by a large amount, or change things between now and then, and I really hope they do - but I lost faith in SE after they let Casters get into the state they were in during Midas mid patch and then Creator.

[Psycofang]

You gotta remember that blm.is also much much faster than its ever been, that speed increase can easily make up for the small loss in potencies. That and we have Foul which is a great nuke on single target and aoe.

Smn seems to have gotten the -must play faster- update as well.

Also we have utility now

Addle, high pps vs other jobs, mana transfer, our tanking capanility increased with manaward being buffed by 10% so it blocks all damage up to 30% of our hp.

Triple cast and umbral hearts were pur biggest boon as it allows blm to always do 6x f4 which is a net increase.

[Alkimi]

Don't worry, you missed the 20% Fire 2 nerf and the 7% Fire IV nerf (potencies). We also lose Raging Strikes. Foul looks interesting and nice as well as Umbral Hearts, but it doesn't make up for what we've lost.

I'm not really that concerned about Fire 2. I can't see it being used that often now that you can multi-cast Flare with the new Umbral Hearts mechanic. Maybe they considered it too strong at lower levels (which it kinda is).

My main concern is their max MP which seems an awkward amount.

As it stands (please correct me if I'm wrong) to get 6 Fire 4s every cycle you have to wait for a mana tick, and for Fowl you have to either sacrifice a F4 for it or only use it during Umbral Ice phase. Making all spells free to cast under Umbral Ice would alleviate the server side mana tick problem but I dunno if they would go that far.

[Psycofang]

Foul seems to be a situational trade / tool/ ui filler. It really depends on whats about to happen to foul determines when and what we trade places with if it needs to be traded.

Use it in UI 3 unless its going to lapse during AF or right before you go into ui

[HaroldSaxon]

You gotta remember that blm.is also much much faster than its ever been, that speed increase can easily make up for the small loss in potencies. That and we have Foul which is a great nuke on single target and aoe.

Smn seems to have gotten the -must play faster- update as well.

Also we have utility now

Addle, high pps vs other jobs, mana transfer, our tanking capanility increased with manaward being buffed by 10% so it blocks all damage up to 30% of our hp.

Triple cast and umbral hearts were pur biggest boon as it allows blm to always do 6x f4 which is a net increase.

What speed increase? There is nothing that gives us a speed increase that we didn't already have.

Foul is nice, but doesn't make up for the gain we get from Raging Strikes in an opener due to the way it stacks with it.

We do gain out of doing 6 x F4's, however again, we lose Raging Strikes, we also lose 7% from each F4.

Triple cast is a minor DPS gain. Manaward is a buff and a nerf - because you can't separate out magic and physical actions - they have to be used at the same time.

Mana transfer and addle are defensive utility - not DPS utility. We also lose the exclusivity we have before of Apoc.

PPS is not an accurate form of comparing other jobs. Unless SMN or RDM are very bad in raw damage, there's no reason to not bring them over a BLM - maybe if the meta becomes Caster centric (i.e. all 3 casters) but even then running two of the same job could be better - the big if is how much damage BLM can do and there isn't anything thus far (especially with the potency nerfs) that leads me to think they will.

[HaroldSaxon]

I'm not really that concerned about Fire 2. I can't see it being used that often now that you can multi-cast Flare with the new Umbral Hearts mechanic. Maybe they considered it too strong at lower levels (which it kinda is).

My main concern is their max MP which seems an awkward amount.

As it stands (please correct me if I'm wrong) to get 6 Fire 4s every cycle you have to wait for a mana tick, and for Fowl you have to either sacrifice a F4 for it or only use it during Umbral Ice phase. Making all spells free to cast under Umbral Ice would alleviate the server side mana tick problem but I dunno if they would go that far.

Yeah, there are some interesting things you can do with Flare - especially given its heavy AOE buff. But in a raid setting, its fairly unrealistic.

From what i've been told, yes you need to wait for a mana tick (although it may be possible to use Fowl in Umbral ice without waiting). I haven't mapped it out yet. I do agree that casts should not have mana costs in Umbral Ice for the reasons you said.