SE, the 7.0 BLM changes will not increase engagement. They are completely-pointless.

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Originally Posted by HikariKurosawa

Project harder little guy

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Don't need to I lived through that coping through the first half of Shadowbringers as a Scholar.

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Originally Posted by Galvuu

It's just like the hypothetical I gave you exemplifies- if movement, or a mechanic, or downtime, or just an honest forces you to lose one of your "builder gcds" (your Fire IV), then you lose a very powerful gcd (Flare Star) for the whole fight, with no way of recovering it. It's like losing a Xenoglossy for not casting 6xFire IV. This is the "builder>spender" pattern. People have given good examples and thoughts on this in other posts.
It's really thinking about the problem a bit differently (and more completely) than just "I wanna cast as many Fire IV/Despair as possible".

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I get what you're saying, but if a movement, mechanic, or downtime forced you to lose a Fire IV cast (or, more generally, a high-potency rather than low-potency GCD), then you have also lost that cast forever, and are never getting that potency difference back. In DT, that mistake denies you a Despair Flare Star (oops!), so it feels proportionately worse to make. On the other hand, in DT, that mistake is less likely to happen, because your astral cycle is more flexible; every spell that isn't F4/Despair/Flare Star is an instant cast, and now two of those instant casts rather than one can refresh your Astral Fire. Personally I wouldn't mind if you could cast a lower-damage Flare Star with less than the maximum number of astral hearts or whatever they're called (like maybe Flare Star is only castable at 0 mp, and its damage scales with astral hearts accrued as long as you've got a minimum of 3, or something) but even the maximally-harsh Flare Star design in the media tour doesn't change our basic decision-making. Flare Star is a reward more so than an organizing principle because you'd still be playing the same way at level 89.

Now, obviously, the reason you'd be playing the same way is that F3 and B3 have been significantly buffed (since they now do x1.0 rather than x0.7 listed damage under normal use conditions) and B4 has been rendered absolutely crucial to single target. It's simply no longer a defensible choice to enter Astral Fire at less than intensity III with less than 10,000 MP and fewer than 3 Umbral Hearts. But that's the actual dagger in the heart of nonstandard; Flare Star is just something the death of nonstandard enables the devs to add.

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Originally Posted by Ferrinus

I get what you're saying, but if a movement, mechanic, or downtime forced you to lose a Fire IV cast (or, more generally, a high-potency rather than low-potency GCD), then you have also lost that cast forever, and are never getting that potency difference back. In DT, that mistake denies you a Despair, so it feels proportionately worse to make.

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(Emphasis mine, but I think you meant "Flare Star" there)
The heart of what you're saying is technically true, but in EW you can easily recoup from a "lost" Fire IV (that's the whole reason why you might want to cut your AF short on purpose). Usually, when you do a line like 4xF4>Despair many times, the proportion of Paradox and Despair casts overall increases (well, it depends on the phase/fight duration, but in general this is true). In fact, people sometimes do that to maximize Despairs on short phases. My point here is that the Fire IV you "lost forever" usually means an extra Paradox or Despair when you tally your gcds at the end of that phase. That might be a small potency loss (since Fire IV is more potency than Paradox, and usually you lose 2 Fire IVs for one Despair+Paradox), but it's usually not a big deal.
In DT, since you also lose the Flare Star, it is a pretty big deal. At the end of the day, you can only fit N gcds in a phase, and in EW, if you know what you're doing, the lost Fire IVs will correspond to some combination of procs, Paradoxes and Despairs.
In DT, if this happens, you just lose a Flare Star, period.

I agree with your other general sentiment that this kinda thing should be infrequent in DT... but if they ported TOP p6 as is to a random DT fight, this would definitely become a serious problem. Even if, by burning your ever resource, you managed to keep perfect uptime, there's no way you'd have the luxury of stockpiling Xenos for your 2min burst and force Triple to be used on Despairs/Flare Stars for maximum pps gain. This was already a big issue in some reopeners for EW fights...

To explain to black mage players who don't know this side of the job but are curious why some of us are unhappy.

Basically our play style where we tried to do as much of our highest damage dealing spells seems to be impossible now due to the changes in MP. The new ability Flare Star seemingly also conflicts with this play style.

Idk if there's a simpler way to explain this because I can imagine if you're a BLM who only knows the standard play style these walls of texts might be hard to follow.

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Originally Posted by Galvuu

(Emphasis mine, but I think you meant "Flare Star" there)
The heart of what you're saying is technically true, but in EW you can easily recoup from a "lost" Fire IV (that's the whole reason why you might want to cut your AF short on purpose). Usually, when you do a line like 4xF4>Despair many times, the proportion of Paradox and Despair casts overall increases (well, it depends on the phase/fight duration, but in general this is true). In fact, people sometimes do that to maximize Despairs on short phases. My point here is that the Fire IV you "lost forever" usually means an extra Paradox or Despair when you tally your gcds at the end of that phase. That might be a small potency loss (since Fire IV is more potency than Paradox, and usually you lose 2 Fire IVs for one Despair+Paradox), but it's usually not a big deal.
In DT, since you also lose the Flare Star, it is a pretty big deal. At the end of the day, you can only fit N gcds in a phase, and in EW, if you know what you're doing, the lost Fire IVs will correspond to some combination of procs, Paradoxes and Despairs.
In DT, if this happens, you just lose a Flare Star, period.

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Whoops! Yeah, I meant Flare Star.

I guess what I'd point out here is that there's a "lost" Fire IV and a lost Fire IV. If you want to skip Fire IVs profitably, you need to know what you're doing and plan it out to an extent, often paying for it ahead of time by skipping a Blizz IV or B3 or both ahead of time. But it's entirely possible to do all the clever nonstandard stuff, screw something up, and end up only casting three Fire IVs before your Despair, or only two, or to cast your four Fire IVs but fail to get your Despair off because you got greedy. More prosaically, you might have to cut your cycle short by casting only four Fire IVs... but, tragically, you were ready to cast six because you'd cast B3->B4 before this astral cycle, so now you're just owned because you forgot about an incoming boss AoE or something.

So, like, mistakes are mistakes. You can sometimes recoup some, but often not all, of the loss, especially not if you manage to overcap Polyglot stacks or fat-finger Convert with full MP or something.

First off, my genuine thanks to Galvuu, Ramiee, and Ferrinus for the friendly discussion. Not only is it very interesting to read, but pleasant as well, at that warms my Umbral Heart.

Part of what I love about reading this is that I have not devoted even half as much of my brain to topping out BLM's damage as y'all have! What I've generally loved about BLM is that instead of doing a static rotation, I instead "push the button that most wants to be pressed at that time." Generally that's the one that does the biggest damage, but sometimes it's the button I need to press to keep Astral Fire up, sometimes it's the button I need to press to do damage while moving, and sometimes it's both! And I love that.

So when I read through these posts and we're talking about how much of a damage loss there is from doing something like missing a cast or doing a Transpose instead of Despair, I haven't really ever gone down that exact road. Naturally I know there is a damage loss and I try to avoid it, but I haven't ever really bothered to try to quantify it. I'm just always trying to do my best while avoiding my perfectionist tendencies. So it makes me wonder...

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Originally Posted by Galvuu

(The crux of it is that you cannot keep the same number of high potency gcds in DT if you "miss" one of your builders- you permanently lose Flare Star. In EW, you can. Swapping one Fire IV for a Paradox on your overall gcds for that 2 min window has no penalty)

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Hmmm...so from reading your entire post, I think I might understand you, but I'll say it in the way that my brain thinks about it. Would I be correct in interpreting that the issue here isn't inherently about the mechanics of building up resources, but rather comes down to the loss of damage and how great that loss is? It sounds like you're saying that some losses feel tolerable because the difference in damage between 2 sequence options isn't that much, but there's an estimated guess that whatever the final potency is for Flare Star, it will be significant enough that choosing the sequence that has fewer Flare Stars will result in a more meaningful difference in damage to a degree that feels significant? I hope I'm understanding that right! Let me know!

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Originally Posted by Ramiee

This along with the MP regen changes has made it that switching to Ice phase and dropping Flare star fails your rotation

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I'm split on whether I'm interpreting this right, but are you saying that switching to Ice phase removes your Flare Star charges? If so I had not caught that aspect and I can see how that would put an serious amount of pressure on players to either have a "perfect" Fire phase or be at a loss. I had thought that the charges would remain until spent.

Anyway, I'm enjoying hearing y'all's thoughts on this and trying to follow along. I like learning about your perspectives, and I'm guessing that I probably won't understand every last bit of the detail y'all are putting out there (at least not right away), but I appreciate your putting yourselves out there to try to help me understand the basic gist of it!

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

I'm split on whether I'm interpreting this right, but are you saying that switching to Ice phase removes your Flare Star charges? If so I had not caught that aspect and I can see how that would put an serious amount of pressure on players to either have a "perfect" Fire phase or be at a loss. I had thought that the charges would remain until spent.

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Yeah this is basically it, it's not like this is something that couldn't of worked in non-standard but it does heavily imply that doing non-standard is now "wrong."
This is a smaller problem next to the MP regen and removal of ice paradox. Though I think it existing is directly telling us that we have to play in a linear way now.

What I don‘t get the most is why they got rid of UI Paradox.
It was a good movement tool, the removal doesn‘t even help with button bloat and the entire fantasy of that action was to be usable in ice and fire.

Also regarding non standard.
Most people weren‘t even aware of its existence so no, that wasn‘t what kept them from playing blm.
The playernumbers were already low before that.
What kept players away was the casting times, fight design and just alternatives to the job, at least that’s what I think.

If Flare Star charges get removed by swapping to Ice, how the hell are you supposed to play around downtimes? You swap to Ice and eat the loss? Or you just stay in fire and let the timer drop? What nonsensical design is this even?

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

So when I read through these posts and we're talking about how much of a damage loss there is from doing something like missing a cast or doing a Transpose instead of Despair, I haven't really ever gone down that exact road. Naturally I know there is a damage loss and I try to avoid it, but I haven't ever really bothered to try to quantify it. I'm just always trying to do my best while avoiding my perfectionist tendencies. So it makes me wonder...
(...)
Hmmm...so from reading your entire post, I think I might understand you, but I'll say it in the way that my brain thinks about it. Would I be correct in interpreting that the issue here isn't inherently about the mechanics of building up resources, but rather comes down to the loss of damage and how great that loss is? It sounds like you're saying that some losses feel tolerable because the difference in damage between 2 sequence options isn't that much, but there's an estimated guess that whatever the final potency is for Flare Star, it will be significant enough that choosing the sequence that has fewer Flare Stars will result in a more meaningful difference in damage to a degree that feels significant? I hope I'm understanding that right! Let me know!

I'm split on whether I'm interpreting this right, but are you saying that switching to Ice phase removes your Flare Star charges? If so I had not caught that aspect and I can see how that would put an serious amount of pressure on players to either have a "perfect" Fire phase or be at a loss. I had thought that the charges would remain until spent.

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Again, emphasis mine. But that last detail you didn't notice is a big part of the problem- since going into ice with an unused Flare Star, or unused Flare Star charges/"stickers" erases them, whenever that happens, you permanently lose a cast of Flare Star. This detail, and the deletion of ice paradox are, honestly, the real problem, much worse than any "loss of non-standard". The changes to Thunder are also, imho, very bad (because it might force you into overwriting it and, since there's no frontloaded Thundercloud potency like before, you lose a much larger proportion of the overall Thunder damage when you're forced to overwrite it).
If going into UI didn't erase the Flare Star "stickers" and Flare Star itself, and if we had kept UI Paradox, I'd be much less pessimistic about this whole affair.

As an aside (not directed at you, really, just something I've realized while typing this), these changes make crit BLM a bit worse (because that build leveraged the fact that, in EW, you can remove the previously mentioned "weak gcds")... but also might make SpS BLM worse (if you're very fast, you might be forced to overwrite your Thunder, which becomes worse in DT, as I explained). So there's a real chance both builds will become worse.

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Originally Posted by Ferrinus

Whoops! Yeah, I meant Flare Star.

I guess what I'd point out here is that there's a "lost" Fire IV and a lost Fire IV. If you want to skip Fire IVs profitably, you need to know what you're doing and plan it out to an extent.
(...)
So, like, mistakes are mistakes. You can sometimes recoup some, but often not all, of the loss, especially not if you manage to overcap Polyglot stacks or fat-finger Convert with full MP or something.

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Yes, you're completely correct. I just feel that, in DT, there's a chance your mistake costs you a usage of your nuke button with no possible silver lining down the road. That's very punishing.
These changes remind me of the very rigid, very hard-to-execute 4.0 BLM gameplay, where losing a Fire IV after getting your Umbral Hearts was so punishing to your potency that most people ignored Blizzard IV and played the 4xFire IV rotation, since it was much more lenient and resulted in only a very small loss of potency overall if you had to move/made a mistake. Years pass, and XIV's job team never learns...

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Originally Posted by Ferrinus

Whoops! Yeah, I meant Flare Star.

I guess what I'd point out here is that there's a "lost" Fire IV and a lost Fire IV. If you want to skip Fire IVs profitably, you need to know what you're doing and plan it out to an extent, often paying for it ahead of time by skipping a Blizz IV or B3 or both ahead of time. But it's entirely possible to do all the clever nonstandard stuff, screw something up, and end up only casting three Fire IVs before your Despair, or only two, or to cast your four Fire IVs but fail to get your Despair off because you got greedy. More prosaically, you might have to cut your cycle short by casting only four Fire IVs... but, tragically, you were ready to cast six because you'd cast B3->B4 before this astral cycle, so now you're just owned because you forgot about an incoming boss AoE or something.

So, like, mistakes are mistakes. You can sometimes recoup some, but often not all, of the loss, especially not if you manage to overcap Polyglot stacks or fat-finger Convert with full MP or something.

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To add to this, joining the discussion late, I'd describe it as catastrophic losses of fire 4s. This is when you lose a fire 4 in such a way that you also abort out of the timer itself. When this happens, you lose ~3-32s of polyglot at 29.33~ potency per second lost (~1547.8 potency max currently with +30% magic and mend, +23% eno-chan.) You might ask, 'wait, 32s?' If you drop it at exactly 29s, you have to spend ~3.5s casting back in, so that's also lost potency that cannot be recovered. Then you have to spend 2000 mp casting back in, which is a DPS loss since you're likely hard-casting back into the rotation. Let's assume fire 3. That spell is ~415 potency true casting back in at relative 3.5s cast time or 118.8 pps with the highly unlikely 0 spell speed scenario. This costs you 2000 mp and will cost you a fire 4. Well, a current fire 4 is 310 * 1.8 * 1.3 * 1.23 or ~892 potency at 318pps. You're straight up losing both 892 potency from a lost fire 4, and also the difference in pps from the opportunity cost of having to hardcast back in. That MP cost likely is costing you a second fire 4 due to fire 3 costing 2000mp, but it's possible you entered AF3 with exactly 10k mana instead of 9.6k that also can happen if you thunder late and don't get a tic.

There's a lot more that goes into it than this, but there's a reason I often equate BLM losing timers to being equivalent to a NIN casting TCJ and straight up losing the entire thing to accidental movement immediately after. I know way too many people who hate BLM because of this sword of damocles constantly hanging over the head of the class. Especially as the risks get greater and greater.

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Originally Posted by HikariKurosawa

Why would I try to engage in a job that I know I will never play optimally?

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I doubt you have play anything optimally in all your play time.

That's impressive how toxic people can get because they are maladaptive and unwilling to accept that the devs don't like how many people abuse third party addons to optimize a job in an unintended way that is clearly unintentional abuse of game mechanics. Transpose was meant to be used in low levels to keep enochian running, it is not an end game ability. Once we got umbral soul we were expected to take it off our bars just like healers and their base heal.


I will just keep grinding the game and adapting to change until you know your place.

What devs initially intend and what players figure out can coexist. Generally it is a better PR move to support/accept alternate play methods when found by the playerbase rather than punish the "abuse" by nerfing and reworking things to make it strictly worse or impossible to do.

That said, Transpose, even with the old cooldown of about 15 seconds, still had use at Lv50 when created by using Firestarter Fire III for a more bombastic entry into the Fire phase. So no, Transpose wasn't purely a "I need Ice on the run" tool, it was a multitool all the way back then.

That said, I used non-standard in various situation to deal with specific movement and used standard elsewhere. I do not use 3rd party addons/plugins to tell me when my MP comes back and I still can use non-standard. It's not rocket science to use it and it's grossly exaggerated how "unintuitive" people claim it to be, especially when the difference between it and standard BLM is so miniscule, all it does is provide movement to movement heavy fights without relying on your teammates (either by proc/Paradox management or shortening your AF/UI cycle once or twice)

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Originally Posted by HikariKurosawa

Transpose was meant to be used in low levels to keep enochian running, it is not an end game ability. Once we got umbral soul we were expected to take it off our bars just like healers and their base heal.

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You do realise you have to be in umbral ice first to use umbral soul and that you did that with transpose more often then not after a fight?
Or if you have to move suddenly and change to umbral ice quickly for paradox to keep enochian going. It was literally the saving tool for more casual players also.

Transpose was not meant to be taken of our hotbar.

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Originally Posted by HikariKurosawa

yeah you're right but it's definitely not meant to be used for the reasons people use it for in non-standard. If it was, blm wouldn't have received the changes it did.

This topic is a dead horse anyway. It's going to be another case of "bring back kaiten". Longstanding thread on the forum of a vocal minority crying for something that is better off gone.

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I don't have the same opinion but ok. Just wanted to clear the Transpose-point.

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Originally Posted by Voidmage

You do realise you have to be in umbral ice first to use umbral soul and that you did that with transpose more often then not after a fight?
Or if you have to move suddenly and change to umbral ice quickly for paradox to keep enochian going. It was literally the saving tool for more casual players also.

Transpose was not meant to be taken of our hotbar.

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yeah you're right but it's definitely not meant to be used for the reasons people use it for in non-standard. If it was, blm wouldn't have received the changes it did.

This topic is a dead horse anyway. It's going to be another case of "bring back kaiten". Longstanding thread on the forum of a vocal minority crying for something that is better off gone.

You skip around, post, and act like a jack ass then when people call you a jack ass you call them toxic? What an actual animal of a person. For the record since you clearly have no idea that these changes actually hurt the casual line making black mage harder to play as well as killing non standard, people aren't just mad non standard is gone there's a lot of stuff wrong here. As well as the fact non standard was a different way to play the job not the end goal, if you actually looked into non standard it is not the "ok you want to start optimizing BLM learn non standard" it was after you perfected standard and wanted to learn just a different way to play the job, non standard was such a small DPS gain that just playing standard better and crits could easily out pace a non standard BLM, you could be in the top 99% of BLM's playing standard. I can tell you don't know that though because you heard something was hard then let it live rent free in your head until they got rid of it without doing any research.

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Originally Posted by HikariKurosawa

Why would I try to engage in a job that I know I will never play optimally?

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This is a fair question, and I'll do my best to answer it in detail.

Assuming you're talking about players in general and not just yourself, the first thing to remember is that most FF14 players are casual. These players tend not to go on forums, tend not to watch guides, and tend to play at a "good enough" level. And broadly speaking, "good enough" is enough for them.

Unlike the average casual player, I do like pushing myself a bit further. I like thinking about the finer details of game systems and trying to optimize in some ways. But what matters to me more than my own skill level is fun; that's why I play this video game in my spare time, because I want to have fun. So while I do like to go a bit further than a casual player, at the end of the day, being "good enough" is good enough for me. And for me, BLM gives me the most fun.

Sure, I can play SMN where being optimal is a cakewalk, and I'll have an easier time with combat and do significantly more damage. And when I'm feeling low energy, I do that and it's fun. But most of the time, SMN can't engage me. It doesn't take long for me to get tired of its almost-entirely linear 2-minute rotation, and it's almost entirely instant-cast kit make me feel like my rotation is detached from the mechanics of the fight I'm playing.

BLM's non-linear structure keeps me engaged. I will never be as good with BLM as I am with SMN, but that's a small price to pay for fun. And every time I play BLM, I get to have fun. BLM presents me with challenges that make me think and react in ways that other classes don't. When I do pretty good with BLM, that is so much more satisfying to me than when I play a perfect game with SMN. I will never be optimal with BLM, but that's what makes it fun: every time I play, there will always be room to improve, I will always be able to play better than I have before. And that's engaging for me.

Of course, we all have personal preferences. If one of your preferences is to be able to play optimally, that's valid! If that's the case, then I'd just say that BLM won't be your cup of tea. Luckily, there are a plenty of other classes in the game where optimal play is a much more realistic prospect for your average go-getter. So I'd recommend those for you; BLM is for players who want something different than you. And that's the beauty of a class-based game like FF14: even though we want different experiences, we can all play the same game together.

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Originally Posted by HikariKurosawa

abuse third party addons to optimize a job
Transpose was meant to be used in low levels
I will just keep grinding the game and adapting to change until you know your place.

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You gave up before you even try. You blame for a lack of tool to get better at the job. Your arguments are made up. Yeah I'd like to see you try greenboy.

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

Of course, we all have personal preferences. If one of your preferences is to be able to play optimally, that's valid! If that's the case, then I'd just say that BLM won't be your cup of tea. Luckily, there are a plenty of other classes in the game where optimal play is a much more realistic prospect for your average go-getter. So I'd recommend those for you; BLM is for players who want something different than you. And that's the beauty of a class-based game like FF14: even though we want different experiences, we can all play the same game together.

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That's the thing though, they made it so BLM does work optimally for everyone who cares enough to learn the job now and not just the people willing to research all the non-standard lines. At the end of the day, it was bad design and abuse of game mechanics. It's pointless to argue about it since it's gone. If you can't see why it was removed and isn't coming back, it's fine to keep throwing a fit on the forums. I'm not going to try to help you understand why your perspective is bad or wrong anymore.

I couldn't care less either way. If they keep non-standard in game, I will continue to avoid blm, if they remove it, I will engage with it and try to get good at it. BLM is for people who want to explode stuff with fire magic. The essence of the job is making sure you get out all your fire casts before enochian shuts down. That's all the identity of it is. It was never about non-standard and hopefully never will be again.

I'm not trying to argue either, I am just expressing why I think the changes are good and the logic behind them. I am enthusiastic about the changes because it makes me want to really get into the job. I couldn't care less about what was lost, and it's pointless to dwell in the past.

That said, I don't care if you don't move on. The world will move on regardless of whether you can cope with change or not.

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Originally Posted by Ramiee

Their mindset is literally because players had a unique playstyle that did like 5% more damage than the standard rotation that the fact it existed means that they can't possibly ignore it because they would be "throwing" by not doing it, depsite the fact standard BLM had the highest damage of all ranged attackers and half the melee dps

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No way it's 5%, it's like 2.5ish% tops if you do everything right and get a good kill time.
In theory, some lines do yield a 4% gain, but those are very expensive (need a lot of procs/Xenoglossy/Lucid Dreaming) and you eventually run out of resources to keep using them and need to fall back into weaker lines (that do less than the standard) and then back to standard until you can stockpile resources again.
This isn't aimed at you, more of a general sentiment, but you also definitely don't need the mana tick tracker- you need to be a bit less aggressive at the start, but you can mentally time your ticks fairly well after a while for slower gcds and 75% of the lines don't even need precise tick tracking anyway, esp if Lucid is off cd.

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

...

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From a job balance perspective, do you think that 'simple' and 'complex' jobs can co-exist in the same space?

At the end of the day, everyone wants to do more damage. That complexity label gets leveraged mid-expansion to argue for dps buffs, and Endwalker was no exception to this. You now have a massive sub-subrole Caster schism where BLM can't even be seen to associate with the others anymore. It's a fantastic feeling to play a job that is viewed as high-skill and you can invest your time into getting better over a few years, sure. It's deeply unsatisfying to try to do the same on a job whose aesthetics you prefer but the community dismisses as 'easy' (and in many cases, consensus doesn't automatically align with what's actually right).

The dev team knows this as well. When you argue for dps buffs on a 'complex job' mid-expansion, you'll get them, sure, in the short term. It's hard to change job design mid-expansion. But it creates a role imbalance. And what do you think subsequently happens when the dev team can actually change up job design during the expansion transition? You could have called this back in 2022. I did.

In an ideal world, job complexity is something that would exist internally within every job and reward you naturally as you became a better player. In an ideal world, nobody would try to argue for artificial dps advantages over other players, and differences in performance would unfold naturally from the layers upon layers of complexity built into every job. In practice, people are rarely satisfied with what they have and will look for ways to wrangle more of a competitive advantage against the others through terms like 'easy' and 'complex'. Which is why jobs go through cycles like this.

I'll also say that it looks like the dev team thankfully anticipated most of the 'that's so easy!' dismissals that get aimed at new jobs, this time around, probably because they wanted PCT to be a credible contender for BLM's spot.

Maybe it's just me, but I always thought one of the draws of Black Mage *was* the difficulty. In a game where positionals are becoming braindead, some casters barely have castbars, and even mana being a borderline suggestion, black mage actually has shit you need to worry about, with the reward being big damage. That's a thing in other games, too. No one's ever accused Ivy as being easy to learn in Soul Calibur.

I think that's a wonderful mindset if everyone gets on board with it. Give all DPS jobs the same average rdps, irrespective of their individual challenges. Build different levels of nuance and optimization into different jobs. Create an atmosphere of mutual respect for what everyone does. I personally would be perfectly fine with playing a difficult job purely for the challenge of it, without a thought of any further reward beyond that.

In practice, though, it would never last. Literally every expansion cycle we see the same wrangling over dps advantages based off of job 'complexity' and 'utility'. Rather than designing for an ideal that pretty much nobody lives up to, it's better to expect people to be people and set design expectations on how they actually behave, rather than how they ought to behave.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

Give all DPS jobs the same average rdps, irrespective of their individual challenges.

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If "the same average rdps" here means DPS as a metric for the potential of a given job to provide DPS to the party (what is now known as cDPS), then I agree this should be the goal when balancing the damage output of jobs.*

On the other hand, if rDPS is used here as the specific metric of the same name provided by the FFlogs webpage, then no, jobs can never be balanced around rDPS only due to the selfish/buffer dichotomy.

A "selfish" job can never do the same rDPS as a buffing job, because for them rDPS is equal to nDPS, or their personal damage without taking external buffs into account. This means that if they did the same rDPS as a buffing job, they'd also enjoy extra benefit from others' buffs on top of that, even if this number wasn't reflected in the rDPS metric itself. That's why other metrics such as aDPS or cDPS exist.

Additionally, a buffing job would require way more effort to reach the similar rDPS number due to the way damage profiles of jobs work: some of them abuse buffs better than others due to how strong or weak their burst is. Therefore, there has to be a correlation between the different metrics: a job with higher rDPS has to have lower aDPS and/or personal damage and vice versa.

*Content mechanics must also be taken into account here. Clearly, the gigantic hitboxes of many duties in Savage have not challenged melee when it comes to keeping uptime.

However, Criterion dungeons have been a very illustrative piece of content when it comes to job balance. The strongest jobs there are the ones whose damage profile is more personal such as BLM, SAM, RPR, MCH or even SMN, while the contribution of buffing jobs is quite lower even with the hidden party buff, since it still benefits the "selfish" group more by virtue of affecting the entire party and not the buffing job itself.

Several of the melees are equal or just barely above some of the ranged DPS like SMN, even though said melees do have to work for their uptime, unlike many Savage fights in EW. And this situation also manifests in the other roles: AST is at a disadvantage compared to SGE, not only due to the damage situation I just described but also the lower amount of mitigation tools.

Of course, I personally think this shouldn't be taken as a call for homogenization but Criterion dungeons are a poignant example of how balance is not exclusively about numbers in full uptime fights that don't challenge melee.

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Originally Posted by Galvuu

No way it's 5%, it's like 2.5ish% tops.

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Wouldnt suprise me, I never really kept track of the logs because parsing doesn't interest me. Still its funny because the difference between standard and non-standard being only 2% adds more to the absurdity of the excuse of feeling like you're sandbagging. Lol do gunbreakers feel like they're sandbagging when double down doesn't crit and they lose 1% of their damage?

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Originally Posted by HikariKurosawa

That's the thing though, they made it so BLM does work optimally for everyone who cares enough to learn the job now and not just the people willing to research all the non-standard lines. At the end of the day, it was bad design and abuse of game mechanics. It's pointless to argue about it since it's gone. If you can't see why it was removed and isn't coming back, it's fine to keep throwing a fit on the forums. I'm not going to try to help you understand why your perspective is bad or wrong anymore.

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I wish you a very merry leveling roulette. May you queue in the Aery as BLM with these changes.

Black Mage op in dungeons with long hallways and many cutscenes, please nerf.

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Originally Posted by Galvuu

This isn't aimed at you, more of a general sentiment, but you also definitely don't need the mana tick tracker- you need to be a bit less aggressive at the start, but you can mentally time your ticks fairly well after a while for slower gcds and 75% of the lines don't even need precise tick tracking anyway, esp if Lucid is off cd.

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I don't think this scans. If you don't need precision 75% of the time, then you do need precision 25% of the time, and doing something "fairly well" is worse than doing it "automatically". I barely used nonstandard lines (I'd skip B4 and just cast solid F4s->Despair if I knew that Hephaeustus was about to do his mixology mechanic or something) but a high enough Spellspeed actually made it important for me to worry about mana ticks anyway, especially if I wanted to do the Transpose->Firestarter trick consistently. Sometimes I'd shift into ice mode with an enemy those Thunder DoT still had a lot of time on it and no polyglots, which meant that maybe I could, or maybe I couldn't, gain ~0.15 of a Fire III by transposing between Paradox and my next spell. Should I do it? Sometimes I guessed right and sometimes I guessed wrong and sometimes I chickened out of taking the risk and sometimes I actually hung for a second, watching my MP, to see if I could get away with it, which I'm sure cost me DPS on its own. If I'd just installed a simple third-party utility, I could have gotten these questions right every time.

The analogy I would make is to a hypothetical BLM that does not actually show you how many seconds you have left on your Astral or Umbral timer. Could you play without that information? Yes, you'd still develop a pretty good feel for how many things you need to cast relatively quickly. But you'd really be feeling around in the dark if you wanted to do the most basic tricks and optimizations, like using Swift or Triple to cheat out a Despair when you had like 1 second left on the clock.

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Originally Posted by Ferrinus

I don't think this scans. If you don't need precision 75% of the time, then you do need precision 25% of the time, and doing something "fairly well" is worse than doing it "automatically". I barely used nonstandard lines (I'd skip B4 and just cast solid F4s->Despair if I knew that Hephaeustus was about to do his mixology mechanic or something) but a high enough Spellspeed actually made it important for me to worry about mana ticks anyway, especially if I wanted to do the Transpose->Firestarter trick consistently. Sometimes I'd shift into ice mode with an enemy those Thunder DoT still had a lot of time on it and no polyglots, which meant that maybe I could, or maybe I couldn't, gain ~0.15 of a Fire III by transposing between Paradox and my next spell. Should I do it? Sometimes I guessed right and sometimes I guessed wrong and sometimes I chickened out of taking the risk and sometimes I actually hung for a second, watching my MP, to see if I could get away with it, which I'm sure cost me DPS on its own. If I'd just installed a simple third-party utility, I could have gotten these questions right every time.

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If you map the fight, you can make it so you only use non-standard when you have three instant casts (Xeno/procs) or Lucid up- that's the 75% you're guaranteed to pull off correctly even without looking at the MP bar or trying to keep track of the ticks at all. The remaining lines are standard if you wanna play it safe, or "gamble" on those last 25% by following your "feel" for it. That's what I meant. In practice, this means that, usually, out of like... 8 AF cycles, you do one less non-standard than someone with the MP tracker. It also means your overall planning for a phase/fight will look slightly different from that of someone with the MP tracker, but that one non-standard you lose is literally negligible (we're talking 0.5% or less dps here).
At that point, your opener/reopener crit rate is a much more impactful factor.

The issue with your analogy is that you cannot avoid the AF clock at any time. Like, you can't "ignore" AF (I guess you can... spam Fire). Here, when your tools to guarantee non-standard safety are down, you just do standard at a negligible cost. Since 3/4 of "powerful" non-standard use those tools, you really only miss out on a very small amount of non-standard usage with nearly insignificant gain. A more apt analogy is that you can always see the AF clock unless, for a period of 15s out of a 2 min interval, you decide to "gamble" on knowing the clock by heart to gain 0.5% dps. Also, fwiw, the mana tick precision is much higher than just counting how many AF gcds you do (I don't look at the clock at all, for example).

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Originally Posted by HikariKurosawa

That's the thing though, they made it so BLM does work optimally for everyone who cares enough to learn the job now and not just the people willing to research all the non-standard lines. If you can't see why it was removed and isn't coming back, it's fine to keep throwing a fit on the forums. I'm not going to try to help you understand why your perspective is bad or wrong anymore.

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With respect, you won't be able to convince anyone of anything if you don't actually listen to their perspectives. And your reply to me suggests that you're not actually listening to what I said, because you put a whole bunch of words in my mouth:

• I've played BLM since 2.0 and never even heard of the phrase "non-standard" until a few days ago, and I most certainly never researched them. I just play the game, and I enjoy what BLM has to offer.
  
  
• I haven't been throwing a fit on the forums; quite the opposite - I've been saying that overall the changes look interesting and that I'm eager to try them out.

If you want to genuinely engage with me, I'd appreciate it if you take this into account, take a few deep breaths, and give my previous post a re-read with a fresh head and a good faith attitude. Then we could probably have a productive discussion. I'll leave the ball in your court.

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Originally Posted by Galvuu

If you map the fight, you can make it so you only use non-standard when you have three instant casts (Xeno/procs) or Lucid up- that's the 75% you're guaranteed to pull off correctly even without looking at the MP bar or trying to keep track of the ticks at all. The remaining lines are standard if you wanna play it safe, or "gamble" on those last 25% by following your "feel" for it. That's what I meant. In practice, this means that, usually, out of like... 8 AF cycles, you do one less non-standard than someone with the MP tracker. It also means your overall planning for a phase/fight will look slightly different from that of someone with the MP tracker, but that one non-standard you lose is literally negligible (we're talking 0.5% or less dps here).
At that point, your opener/reopener crit rate is a much more impactful factor.

The issue with your analogy is that you cannot avoid the AF clock at any time. Like, you can't "ignore" AF (I guess you can... spam Fire).

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You can avoid the AF clock by just always playing it safe. Knowing the AF clock gives you the freedom to play risky for more dps. Like, right now I could put some tape over my computer monitor to hide my AF/UI timer and still never drop it by always making sure to go like F4 F4 (paradox), F4 F4 (fire), or something like that. But if I want to never cast Fire and only cast Paradox, I need more information.

Likewise, if I want to cast Blizzard III and Blizzard IV less often, I need more information still. If 75% of the nonstandard lines are guaranteed without a tracker, then 25% of the nonstandard lines are risky unless you've got a tracker. If you only miss out on a 0.5% DPS gain by eschewing a tracker, that means a tracker can increase your DPS by 0.5%.

Now, you're right; 0.5% is not very high. That is, in fact, why I never installed a tracker and just stuck to standard lines when playing Shb and EW BLM (whereas if a tracker could increase your dps by 10% or something I'd have quit the job in disgust). However, I think using a third party information utility should be able to increase your DPS by 0%, not 0.5%, so I'll support any change that either adds that information to the standard UI or renders it irrelevant.

There's probably an alternate world in which BLMs stopped depending on server mana ticks and instead had a unique gauge-based "mana tick" that was visible alongside the polyglot tracker or something, and that would also be fine for me so long as they found some separate way to make ice spells actually feel good to cast. But just removing the relevance of the mana tick all together is a perfectly fine solution, especially since we still have the Fire/Ice and Thunder timers to manage.

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Originally Posted by Ferrinus

There's probably an alternate world in which BLMs stopped depending on server mana ticks and instead had a unique gauge-based "mana tick" that was visible alongside the polyglot tracker or something, and that would also be fine for me so long as they found some separate way to make ice spells actually feel good to cast. But just removing the relevance of the mana tick all together is a perfectly fine solution, especially since we still have the Fire/Ice and Thunder timers to manage.

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The default gauge has a pulse on it; no reason it couldn't have been timed alongside MP ticks. It isn't, but it could have.

I personally only play Black Mage in Bozja, which meant my spell speed was such that even with the standard rotation I often needed an extra spell in Ice to hit max MP even with Lucid up and not using Transpose F3, so if they design a good method to reduce the reliance on MP ticks, I'm in favor. Unfortunately, they do not seem to have quite done that.

A lot of this discussion has been about micro-optimizations in savage raid reclears, and those do matter, but that's a tiny percentage of how much the playerbase plays any given class. There's a lot of omni 90s out there and most don't bring most of those classes into Savage at all. The way the MP tick gameplay worked feels pretty good on Black Mage until your spellspeed gets too high/your gcd too low, and at that point there's optimizations available and possible to perform without third party tools though it's harder, much like trying to play without being able to see exactly now many seconds remain on the AF/UI timer.

In the service of reducing the desire for third party tools for micro optimizations, they currently have made all ARR and HW, and a lot of Stormblood, content janky as Black Mage. That's not a worthy tradeoff for reducing jank at the top level of play.

I just don't agree that low level content is going to be any jankier now, even including dungeons in which you won't be able to recover any more MP than a healer does between monster packs. Indeed, I think it's kind of the opposite, where it becomes more clear what you're supposed to be doing in places that used to feel like weird lulls where you had no good options.

Consider level 50. Right now, if you're synced down to 50, and have just cast Blizz 3 after emptying your mana, you're now sitting there twiddling your thumbs and waiting for between 3.1 and 6 seconds to pass before you can go back to spamming Fire. You might be able to profitably refresh Thunder on your target, but you might also have thrown a Thundercloud proc purely for its up-front damage like two GCDs ago. You might, also, have a Firestarter proc from your last Fire cast back in Astral, which means you can't even count on your MP refilling in the middle of an F3 cast! To be safe, you'd have to cast two or even three Blizzard spells in a row.

In DT, a level 50 black mage can swap to umbral with B3, cast Blizzard a single time, and immediately swap back to astral with F3 no matter how fast their GCD is. They don't have to sit there wishing they had B4 or Xeno or just something, anything to kill the dead time while they wait for their MP to come back.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

From a job balance perspective, do you think that 'simple' and 'complex' jobs can co-exist in the same space?

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Absolutely. There are plenty of both PvE and PvP games where characters/jobs/etc that require different amounts of skill exist in the same competitive space.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

At the end of the day, everyone wants to do more damage.

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This is absolutely not true, at least not to a meaningful degree. Remember, casual players are the majority of the player base. For many of these players, all they'd have to do to deal more damage is look at their tooltips or watch a 5-minute video on YouTube...but they don't. Because as long as they aren't explicitly failing, that's good enough. Any desire they have to do more damage is so meager that it isn't worth the effort of doing a short read or a quick watch. I honestly don't know if there's a way to want something less than that without not wanting it at all.

And I'll also use myself as an example. Sometimes I want to do more damage, but a significant amount of the time I want to do less damage. Because to me it's not about speed-running an encounter; rather, I want to enjoy the encounter. An encounter that goes on for too long is less fun, and an encounter that doesn't last long enough is also less fun. I want that sweet spot. The damage done by all of my abilities? That's just a contrivance. The purpose of the game is to have fun doing the things the game asks you to do, and all the numbers in the game are a mathematical attempt at providing an experience where the player gets to do things that are enjoyable for an enjoyable amount of time. When the numbers are too low, I want them bigger. When the numbers are too high, I want them smaller. Because what I care about is fun.

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

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Games where there's a variation between 'simple' and complex' are often designed such that the reward is not in the performance output itself. The reward is entirely in having mastered a character or job that few others can play. In this game, that's not possible, because players expect 'complexity' to translate into more damage, which then determines what jobs are preferred in content clears.

One of the first things that new players ask when trying to decide what job to pick is 'which job is the most powerful/strongest?' It's all about getting value for effort, and damage is central to that on every role. Perceptions about what's 'meta' pervade all skill levels, regardless of whether you even know what optimal is, let alone being able to execute it. That's why discussions linking 'complexity' and 'damage' are such a problem.

You can say that this is not important to you, and that's fine. But we cannot pretend that these topics don't come up all the time in job balance discussions mid-expansion.

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Originally Posted by Ferrinus

Now, you're right; 0.5% is not very high. That is, in fact, why I never installed a tracker and just stuck to standard lines when playing Shb and EW BLM (whereas if a tracker could increase your dps by 10% or something I'd have quit the job in disgust). However, I think using a third party information utility should be able to increase your DPS by 0%, not 0.5%, so I'll support any change that either adds that information to the standard UI or renders it irrelevant.

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I mean, I don't use a mana track either (purist at heart). I just do 2/5 non-standard/standard lines instead of 3/5. It's really not a big deal, and it's a tool you can still use consistently 100% of the time without any tracker- you just use it a tiny bit less.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

Games where there's a variation between 'simple' and complex' are often designed such that the reward is not in the performance output itself. The reward is entirely in having mastered a character or job that few others can play. In this game, that's not possible, because players expect 'complexity' to translate into more damage, which then determines what jobs are preferred in content clears.

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With respect, I don't think the fact that players complain, argue, or feel entitled to things should move the needle on this. Any designer worth their salt knows that players are frequently their own worst enemy; they advocate for what they want, often oblivious to the fact that if it were implemented it would result in a less enjoyable experience. It's the job of a capable game designer to collect player feedback and not take it at face value; rather, it should be scrutinized and considered alongside more objectively measurable data such as analytics, as well as the designer's understanding of human psychology. If any changes are made, they should be based not on what would cater to the whims of vocal players, but what would actually be best for the game experience.

If you don't trust that the devs of FF14 can do this, fair enough. But that's a very different proposal than "can complex and simple jobs exist in the same space".

I disagree. I am also not a Black Mage main but I have tried to be in the past. I like the long casts and planning out the rotation (the use of instant skills etc.) what turned me off Black Mage was always thinking that if I didn't learn Non-Standard play that I wasn't playing the job to it's full potential. But when I went to the balance to learn non-standard it was like a brick wall of a massive document. This turned me off ultimately.

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Originally Posted by StrangeIove

I disagree. I am also not a Black Mage main but I have tried to be in the past. I like the long casts and planning out the rotation (the use of instant skills etc.) what turned me off Black Mage was always thinking that if I didn't learn Non-Standard play that I wasn't playing the job to it's full potential. But when I went to the balance to learn non-standard it was like a brick wall of a massive document. This turned me off ultimately.

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My apologies but here i finally have to agree with the other posters in this forum and have to get a bit sharper in tone.
No one ever forced you to play non-standard, it was never needed and if that was what turned you away from the job that's on you.
I'm slowly getting annoyed by this narrative and I'm normally quit the chill person who tries to respect others opinions even if I don't agree but all this talk about "the job had a skill ceiling I couldn't reach and now I'm happy that it was lowered" is quit... it's just arrogant. That's not directed at you per se (you formulate it as just your opinion) but on the others. I just use this post here to piggy back.

Nothing was forcing you back then to play anything other then standard and nothing changes really for you now either. There are no big changes for you but lots for nonstandard players.
If mana ticks had been the issue then giving every spell in UI mana recovery or at least UI paradox with recovery would have changed absolutely nothing for you and wouldn't made other blm players mad.

I just don't get, why not reaching the skill ceiling of a job is such a big deal. I also didn't reach it and was far from one of the best players, I just looked in awe at the number crunching and skill the top players showed and was happy with that.

Rant end

It is pretty tragic that the wow parsing culture is reflected in XIV so much as well.
People really should know that outside of the race to world first with ultimate raids there really isn't any great reward or renown by having a top parse, I doubt most people who even browse FFlogs religiously can tell you who did the top parse of any job without going to look it up. The only thing that matters is clearing, the first person who cleared TOP, the group who cleared TOP without a healer and someone who just cleared it 5 minutes ago with a grey parse all got the same reward.