Make BLM more useful.

[Questaru]

Make BLM more useful.
This jobs been dead for years.

[Alhanelem]

No it hasn't been?

A post like this isn't useful either, if you think BLM isn't useful then say what you think it needs in order to be useful. Otherwise, there's no point.

[Zenion]

if you think BLM isn't useful then say what you think it needs in order to be useful.

Okay.

Right now, the only places black mage see any play are situations where players have literally no choice but to rely on magic bursts: monsters that heavily resist, or are flat immune to, physical damage of all types. This is largely an issue with how damage scales; melee damage dealers can be pumped up with a lot of performance-enhancing status effects, but magic damage gets left in the dust.

A job trait or ability which would allow magic damage to scale in some way with attack would help to ease this. Maybe add 10% to 20% of attack to the int comparison for damage and possibly resistance. Direct magic attack bonus and magic accuracy songs would be nice instead, but word is we're running out of space for new spells, so that's not really viable.

Magic burst wall really hurts since situations where you need to rely on magic bursts, you need to be able to cram as much damage as possible into that narrow window of opportunity. It would be nice to see this changed to be more in line with the weapon skill wall, where it's repeated uses of the same spell, not just any spell, that get penalized. This would allow a single black mage to operate at full potency, while still preventing a full party of them from dishing out massive magic burst damage for unintended kills.

Access to staff weaponskills would be good to have. I'm not sure how you can justify Paladin having access to Cataclysm over Black Mage.

In general situations, anything that isn't a melee damage dealer is just too slow to be worth having; the advantage of magic has historically been its ability to push out bigger numbers than melee using things like magic bursts, but these days that's just not there any more. When any weaponskill can be 99999 damage, what use is a 99999 magic burst? So, adjustments that can make black mage faster might benefit it too. Possibly a stance-type job ability which consumes TP to add a Fast Cast II effect at the cost of TP consumption? That would make occult acumen a little more important, force the player to choose between speed and sustainability (or sustainability and raw damage, if they're using spaekona's coat for MP recovery), and help the black mage keep up in damage races. Maybe make it add 10% to 15% to elemental magic damage as well, at the cost of losing the ability to magic burst while the stance is active?

[Sp1cyryan]

Make BLM more useful.
This jobs been dead for years.

Hi, somewhat of a career BLM here. You are just a bad BLM if think the job is dead.

[Alhanelem]

Access to staff weaponskills would be good to have. I'm not sure how you can justify Paladin having access to Cataclysm over Black Mage.

Well summoner needs them more than BLM if I'm being honest with you, because some summoners actually use them. A BLM isn't going to do so unless it's to do WS procs on a voidwatch NM or something similar. The only WS BLM really needs in a normal party situation is Spirit Taker or Myrkr. Anything I do solo and whatever party content I can get away with it in, I'll use staff to do darkness and magic burst it with the avatar.

And I rather disagree about the lack of ability to enhance elemental magic, a GEO can dramatically increase magic damage with magic defense down and MAB.

I don't like the artificial walls in specific content for spell damage, but that's been discussed to death in another topic.

[Zenion]

Well summoner needs them more than BLM if I'm being honest with you, because some summoners actually use them.

Just because summoner could use the weaponskills, doesn't mean black mage couldn't. Cataclysm would open up a whole new role for the job as a supertanking crowd clearer, something that the job just can't do right now because of multi-target magic damage penalties. It would be nice to be able to share that niche with blue mage.

And I rather disagree about the lack of ability to enhance elemental magic, a GEO can dramatically increase magic damage with magic defense down and MAB.

I was working on a big long analysis here with numbers and examples, but really I can say it faster with just this: Melees get bard songs, which stack with the percentage bonus granted by corsair and geomancer buffs; mages do not get songs that directly enhance their damage in the same way. Melee buffs enhance attack and lower defense by straight percentages; mage buffs raise magic attack bonus and lower magic defense bonus by fixed values. For the same value of buffs, melees get to hit weaker targets harder than mages do, and they don't have to just settle for just the same value of buffs. It should be telling that there is a physical damage limit, but we've yet to see any need for magical damage limit equipment.

[Alhanelem]

Cataclysm would open up a whole new role for the job as a supertanking crowd clearer

BLM has had a clear purpose across the entire Final Fantasy series, and this.... well, this ain't it. The difference with BLU is it is actually designed to be on the front line. BLM is not. I'm not sure how an AoE WS suddenly makes BLM a supertanker (feel free to clarify), but from where I stand, BLM has little to facilitate this.

BLM doesn't really need new roles (Disclaimer: Obviously I engage in a lot of non-meta stuff myself and I absolutely encourage people to thin outside the box and find new ways to use stuff. You'll find me on SMN/SAM all the time doing solo skillchains with avatar magic bursts), at least not in a meta sense. There are some adjustments they should look at, but I have to agree with Spicy that BLM is a perfectly useable job already, even if it isn't in the spotlight.

[Zenion]

I'm not sure how an AoE WS suddenly makes BLM a supertanker (feel free to clarify)

Oh, no, the weaponskill isn't what makes black mage supertank. It's just what lets it fulfill its role as the job that makes people fall down. Mana Wall is where the tanking side of it comes in. But the job lacks tools to do anything with a crowd of monsters once they've been gathered up - sleepga or breakga will quiet them down for a minute if you're lucky, but it's a race against the five minute timer and all they have to do is survive 301 seconds to win. As the job with all those -ga and -ja spells, this sounds like it's right up the black mage's alley... but those are effectively useless in a big crowd, multiple target penalty. Which I guess would be okay, if that were simply the way the game operates, but then you get blue mage that can do arbitrary size groups, and area weaponskills that aren't penalized... so. An area magic-based staff weaponskill, for the staff-toting area magic wielding job? Nah, nah, crazy talk.

BLM doesn't really need new roles

Well, no, it kind of does. Bard has pretty much taken mass crowd control from it, with lullaby being just as good as sleepga in most situations, with the added benefit of, well, everything a bard does. For single-target magic damage, magical weaponskills are a faster solution that keep a melee option in the party for when magic isn't the play. Aeolian edge makes any dagger job a better area clearer than a black mage. Magic bursts are nice, but spamming savage blade is just so much easier and just as effective if not more so. Everything a black mage does is either done better by something else, entirely redundant, or requires the party to shift its playstyle to accommodate - which they aren't going to want to do unless there is literally no other way to do things.

For black mage to be viable as more than a niche job you keep in the closet just in case, it needs to be able to do something that can just drop into a party and be useful with no setup, no support. It just doesn't have that.

I mean, the alternative would be, like, making magic bursts great again, raise the damage cap above 99999 or make monsters with much lower HP totals that take massively reduced physical damage and full magic burst damage so that huge spike damage is impressive again. Completely upend the last five years of design philosophy. Somehow, though, I just can't really see that happening either.

[Alhanelem]

Bard has pretty much taken mass crowd control from it, with lullaby being just as good as sleepga in most situations, with the added benefit of, well, everything a bard does. For single-target magic damage

The problem with this argument is you don't just take a BLM for sleep, and you don't just take a bard for sleep either. It is just once facet of what either of those jobs do and there is plenty of reason to have both- they are not mutually exclusive in any way. Bard is a support, a black mage deals damage. Having one does not suddenly make the other useless.

[Zenion]

The problem with this argument is you don't just take a BLM for sleep, and you don't just take a bard for sleep either. It is just once facet of what either of those jobs do and there is plenty of reason to have both- they are not mutually exclusive in any way. Bard is a support, a black mage deals damage. Having one does not suddenly make the other useless.

... you know what, this is going in circles. Please, do explain. If there is plenty of reason to have a black mage, what is it? What do you see a black mage bringing to a party of six that is not being more adequately provided, or simply invalidated, by more viable jobs? What does a black mage provide that's worth not having an extra bard, corsair, geomancer, red mage, or scholar instead? What can it add to a cookie cutter savage blade spam setup? Outside of Odyssey Gaol, if you please, we're all aware that "you need to use 18 of the 22 available jobs" is a compelling argument for nearly anything.