Please reconsider 7.0 BLM changes

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Originally Posted by Poppet

>Remove Eye Requirement for DRG's Life of the Dragon buff
>Remove Target Requirement for BRD songs
>Remove Gauge Requirement for DRK's Living Shadow
>Gauge increase tools don't overcap anymore
>Have to Fire IV six times or you don't get to Flare Star at all

????????

All of these great QoL changes then you make one of the worst point of failure mechanics in the game. WHY!? What's worse is this isn't even the worst change. Ice Paradox is one of the most important tools for BLM. It's an important potential movement option with Thunder to delay having to do Blizzard IV until you can stop moving. Transpose Paradox before a boss leaves. Mistake recovery option. It's such a good skill and it's a complete kneecap to the job to remove it.

Flare Star should be a gcd or ogcd that scales with how much gauge you have, (Like BRD's Apex Arrow). For example Flare Star could be an upgrade to Ice Paradox. Where it does Paradox's damage + the gauge you gained during fire. At any rate you shouldn't ever lose gauge and Ice Paradox should exist as a form of its current design.

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They probably removed paradox for the ice phase, because it became obsolent.
When i saw it correctly, do you need only 1 ice attack in the ice phase, to max out your mp, when you has 3 ice souls ready. What you should have, if you used blizzard to enter that phase.
Meaning: It doesnt look like, that whe are more as a few seconds in the ice phase anymore. That make paradox in the ice phase mostly useless (ok, it was 1 attack more). Even, when it was nice for movement phases.

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Originally Posted by Keichi

Question:
Would it be truly dead?
Non-standard was practicly to go into ice, use any spell, except ice (because it to weak), until mp is ready and go back to fire (i never understand, why you wouldnt collect the ice shards).
At last, if the cut wasnt false, does it look like, that ice phase is extremly short.

By the clip of WeskAlber, was the blm in Ice mode with 3 soul marks and 0 mp (mean, he probably used blizard to enter that mode).
After 1 freeze, was the mp allready back at maximum. So, that he was able to go back into the fire mode.

Isnt that even better, as what non-standard had yet? It looks to be faster as before and gives all needes ressources.

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Well, you pretty much answered yourself, the whole point of non standard is to avoid using weak spells(blizzard 3, 4 and weak fire 3(when you change from ice to fire))

It is confirmed that when you use blizzard 4 on umbral ice 1 and 2 it gives you only 2500 and 5000 respectively, making any non standard line non viable as you will only be able to cast a few fire 4.

If this BLM iteration stays like this on release, the only optimization you can do is: use an instant on umbral ice phase(thunder or xeno), transpose into astral fire 1, and then you use fire 3 proc, you would skip the weak fire 3 casted from umbral ice to astral fire. Another one would be do a b4 b1 paradox line but that's just a niche thing to align your gcds with manafont/movement which 0.2% of players will use so.

No MP regen under lv 76 is really dumb, I don't understand how they could have missed that, hopefully it gets fixed before release.

Let's not forget jobs change quite a lot between media tour and the actual expansion, in EW, blm was quite different in the media tour in comparison what we've got nowadays.

Non standard is completely dead, and it's intentional. Now let's see if they can listen to feedback about the rest otherwise it'll feel really clunky.

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Originally Posted by awhitet

If this BLM iteration stays like this on release, the only optimization you can do is: use an instant on umbral ice phase(thunder or xeno), transpose into astral fire 1, and then you use fire 3 proc, you would skip the weak fire 3 casted from umbral ice to astral fire. Another one would be do a b4 b1 paradox line but that's just a niche thing to align your gcds with manafont/movement which 0.2% of players will use so.

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Actually, this is gone. So, the original AF buff was a 40/60/80% buff to fire damage. AF1 is now dropped to 10% and, crucially, fire 3 is now 280 potency. The thing is literally DPS neutral with fire 4 with current known potency values, but saving it for a transpose firestarter will cost you about 100 potency now, assuming numbers stay the same. There's currently what I assume to be a typo in Aspect Mastery 3 where none of the previews say UI3 has a debuff to fire potency, but it's safe to say this could be missing. There's also a possibility that AF1's buff is still 40% but typoed to 10%, seeing as the 2 numbers are right next to each other on a numpad. Regardless, a fire 3 pulling roughly identical DPS to a fire 4 is a much bigger gain than a 70% damage to 110% damage fire 3 on transition. Going from 110% to 180% is just too big an increase now to consider saving it.

I still don't understand the process of thinking behind removing non-standard. If it is not the intended way to play, then what is the intended way then? My tinfoil hat theory is that in the eyes of devs, BLM is never supposed to be this high-damage job. They give BLM such high numbers so it can make up for the fact that the average standard rotation player will fumble and lose uptime during the mechanics they create for the fight. And the damage will be equal to that of other casters in the end. EW was the first time I raided as BLM and some fights felt like no one gave a thought about how BLW would solve that. "Let's make them run back and forth nonstop for a minute! Who, BLM? They will figure something out, I dunno."

Of all the changes in DT, I only welcome Fire Paradox being instant and always giving Firestarter. Everything else is horrible.

I'm sure this has been said by some but I highly doubt non-standards existence hurts the vast majority of BLM players and FFXIV players as a whole who don't want to engage with it or don't know of it's existence.

The changes feel targeted towards limiting skill expression and it's very frustrating feeling like this game and it's community don't welcome players who are into that kind of thing. If someone was being a toxic elitist about optimization in the past that, in my opinion, is an issue with the toxic person not job design. The vast majority of players who like to optimize aren't toxic, and no change to job design will change how a toxic individual treats others.

I can understand the pressure to streamline for past decisions that made raiding scenarios difficult to engage with as a new player like aggro management, and TP management. This change however is targeted toward a personal optimization for the BLM player that is optional and there if they want to explore that aspect of the job. It in fact can help players be more consistent with handling mechanics like Pantokrator and the final phase of TOP.

While I'm sure job balance is something that could rise as a concern, the DPS gains from non-standard have never been so big that the job drastically outperforms it's intended, standard version. It's a very minor gain.

The death of non-standard feels very pointless and I fail to see anything positive come from it.

Also, the changes made to kill non-standard feel very clunky and not very thematically consistent.

The smoking gun to me is the paradox changes. The spell is aesthetically both ice and fire yet it has now become exclusively a spell used in fire to kill non-standard.

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Originally Posted by Bloody_Kenny

I still don't understand the process of thinking behind removing non-standard. If it is not the intended way to play, then what is the intended way then? My tinfoil hat theory is that in the eyes of devs, BLM is never supposed to be this high-damage job. They give BLM such high numbers so it can make up for the fact that the average standard rotation player will fumble and lose uptime during the mechanics they create for the fight. And the damage will be equal to that of other casters in the end.

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The intended way is to maximize fire 4 use. Nonstandard is a consequence of a decision made back in HW where the devs wanted to: Reduce the amount of spam of any 1 button you did on a class (SMN was a huge offender of this in ARR,) and 2, co-opting old design elements to achieve this, in this case the timers (and fire 4 not refreshing them.)

ARR had nonstandard due to the fire 1 rotation, bad netcode, and server MP tics. HW had no nonstandard. The only thing nonstandard about SB is that the BLM community couldn't agree on if you should sharpcast thundercloud or firestarter. Thundercloud was more damage, firestarter safer. The first instance of nonstandard creeping into the class again is from Shadowbringers with the discovery of hypermeme. Hypermeme became a thing because the classes rotation is structured around the timers. And unfortunately, because of the timers needing to finally be 15s from SBs 13s and HW's 10/11s durations, it enabled this exploit's eventual discovery. Fun fact, the original timers for thundercloud and firestarter were something like 8 and 12 seconds. They kept extending it to make it more user friendly, and accidentally re-enabled an ARR nonstandard once firestarter hit 30s.

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EW was the first time I raided as BLM and some fights felt like no one gave a thought about how BLW would solve that. "Let's make them run back and forth nonstop for a minute! Who, BLM? They will figure something out, I dunno."

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This is why I think EW is the worst expansion the game has had since heavensward. They designed the fights with this high-octane 'move move move!' fight design that wasn't even really seen in UWU. I ended up roughly estimating the raw amount of movement done in all of TEA during boss uptime, and found that you literally moved less during all 18 minutes of TEA than you did during a 2 minute stretch preceding and including purgation. I could go on and on about how Endwalker basically reversed the difficulty.

Before EW, difficulty was mostly "Hard telegraph, easy solution." The solution typically didn't require a lot of movement to get into a solved state. EW has been mostly "Easy telegraph, hard solution." You know what to do very quickly, but executing on it is absolutely awful. I have had more mechanics fire out of order, or failed mechanics because I didn't react fast enough because the entire expansion has been absolutely awful with even 100 ping if it's slightly unstable. The tolerances are too tight, even on the so-called 'easy' fights.

Here's hoping the devs remember that there's an entire role in the game that wants to actually sit still, and cast, and that movement is anathema to what makes this playstyle fun.

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Originally Posted by Bloody_Kenny

I still don't understand the process of thinking behind removing non-standard. If it is not the intended way to play, then what is the intended way then? My tinfoil hat theory is that in the eyes of devs, BLM is never supposed to be this high-damage job. They give BLM such high numbers so it can make up for the fact that the average standard rotation player will fumble and lose uptime during the mechanics they create for the fight. And the damage will be equal to that of other casters in the end. EW was the first time I raided as BLM and some fights felt like no one gave a thought about how BLW would solve that. "Let's make them run back and forth nonstop for a minute! Who, BLM? They will figure something out, I dunno."

Of all the changes in DT, I only welcome Fire Paradox being instant and always giving Firestarter. Everything else is horrible.

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The intended way is simply: shoot up all your mp in fire Mode, switch to ice to recover it, and than shoot it away again in fire Mode.

They added than some extra in the ice phase, for increasing the fire phase (ice shards).
The big problem was only, that aside of that, was ice spells more or less useless. Because the mp came over time was it possible, to fill up your gauge, and still had only be 6k mp (happens to me sometimes, that i was ready for fire phase switched, and noticed than, that the mp wasnt full yet).

This weekness is now removed. Ice spells gives the shard and it looks like, that you need on higher lvl only 1 ice spell to be ready again.
They improved the wanted way and choiced the most logical way (let ice spells recover the mp). Its even stronger, as I tought (at last, if they dont change the number to release).

It looks now, like it should have been the whole time.
Why should illogical playways, who want to ignoring half of the setting of the class, be the wanted way of the class?
That it was probably the better way, was mostly a "mistake" from the system.

So, I've personally identified 4 actual pain points in BLM going into DT, some have already been discussed.

1. Button Bloat
2. Timers still existing
3. Manafont having no overcap protection
4. No on-the-move MP recovery before 76/umbral soul.

By my best count, assuming current tooltips are actually correct on all available buttons, BLM is currently at 27 job buttons. This is raised to 32 if you add in all role actions, and to 36 with food, pot, limit break, and sprint, which are reasonable things to have quick access to. No comment on macros since that's open ended.

We can safely remove lucid dreaming (mostly,) sleep, blizzard 1 (if you don't do duty roulettes) and Scathe (ignoring duty roulettes/TEA.) 32 buttons is an extremely large amount of buttons for any class. This is the same territory as SAM, AST, and PLD and needs addressing.

Timers existing is, once again, a holdover of the old ARR design slowly co-opted into future expansions. Now that all nonstandard lines, including transpose firestarter, are dead, this should just be removed as a thing. No one can do anything but the intended solution because that is the best DPS at-a-glance. Paradox and fire 3 are a DPS gain over (or neutral with) fire 4. AF1 is 10% instead of 40% bonus fire damage so transpose/firestarter loses damage. Obviously mana tics on casting ice spell. There is no reason for these timers to still exist, just remove them already.

Manafont having no overcap protection means it's either going to waste a lot of DPS from clipping mana, or drift like absolute mad. Unless you take the third option of, you know, having very precise spell speed builds to cleanly loop such that there's always a flare star when manafont comes off cooldown, which would truly be the death of BLM's gear variability.

Please look forward to manafont breaking BLM's itemization and showing up in 7.1 as something rush-patched because it's going to be a very, very big problem for the class.

And, finally, as discussed, not having umbral soul before 76 will make low level dungeons feel awful as you run while the tank is building a pull but aren't damaging yet because of the movement, and using triplecast while moving is just not worth it.

Honorable mention for Alzadaal's Legacy and having timers get force dropped because the devs wanted fun vignettes but forgot BLM exists. Again. Woo. Can't wait to see how bad that will be with blm post DT.

I took a careful look at Rinon's Youtube video about the Dawntrail Black Mage and noticed that Fire III deals ~13k damage when cast from neutral state, and then that Blizzard III deals around 13k damage when cast to swap from AF3 to UI3, and then that Fire III deals around 13k again when cast to swap from UI3 back to AF3.

This indicates to me that the Aspect Mastery III tooltip is probably not misleading, and once you're level 35 or above, you don't actually suffer a damage penalty for casting opposite-element spells. This means that Transpose-Firestarter isn't a damage gain (or a damage loss) compared to just using Firestarter procs in the same astral cycle that you generate them. I have to assume there's still some sort of typo or accidental deletion in the base Aspect Mastery tooltip, though, because it'd be very silly for AF to be all-downside until level 20 or whatever it is.

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Originally Posted by Taranok

And, finally, as discussed, not having umbral soul before 76 will make low level dungeons feel awful as you run while the tank is building a pull but aren't damaging yet because of the movement, and using triplecast while moving is just not worth it.

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The funniest/saddest part of this is that Triplecast is ... a level 66 ability, which appears to be unchanged! In all content through ARR and HW, Black Mage has their single use of Swiftcast and nothing else, which is now going to need to be used for MP regen in dungeon pulls.

Black Mage having no MP in Baelsar's Wall and St Mocianne's Arboretum and Dun Scaith. Absolutely brilliant.