Please reconsider 7.0 BLM changes

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Originally Posted by Eraden

Is possibles that this just cynical move on part of SE to get more moneys? "Come play DT and become Pictomancer! Can be best DPS character evers (until next flavor comes with next expansion)".

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Don't attribute to malice what can easily be explained by incompetence.

There are a lot of things in Dawntrail that feel like they were built in an environment without enough time or resources or both. Flare Star was an intentional choice to restrict BLM and make it seem more accessible, but numbers are almost certainly an oversight that will be fixed with the new balance patch.

SE gains nothing from having people who already bought the expansion switching from BLM to PCT.

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Originally Posted by koko-on-da-forumz

Don't attribute to malice what can easily be explained by incompetence.

There are a lot of things in Dawntrail that feel like they were built in an environment without enough time or resources or both. Flare Star was an intentional choice to restrict BLM and make it seem more accessible, but numbers are almost certainly an oversight that will be fixed with the new balance patch.

SE gains nothing from having people who already bought the expansion switching from BLM to PCT.

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I feel this way as well, even down to things people love about the game like music (less new tracks). It definitely feels like they got a budget cut or perhaps were overwhelmed by the graphical update. I also think they're working on two other new games. Not sure what SE is thinking when this game being in an optimal state is ideal for their revenue.

Speaking of which , the update is largely very impressive and the map designers have done very impressive work. So if that did suck up resources and time, it came out great.

The most likely explanation for why DT BLM is like this is that they were designing around DT content and didn't playtest it at lower levels at all. Which is a major problem, and the MP regen desperately needs revisiting, but makes more sense than deliberate malice.

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Originally Posted by wildvenonat

The most likely explanation for why DT BLM is like this is that they were designing around DT content and didn't playtest it at lower levels at all. Which is a major problem, and the MP regen desperately needs revisiting, but makes more sense than deliberate malice.

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DT continues the EW trend of mechanics that are disproportionately harsh for casters (even in dungeons, there's a ton of constant movement).
I defo don't think DT design is well-suited for BLM at all, at least so far. Picto has more mobility and even there you can feel the struggle sometimes.
I really think they have no clue what they're doing.

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Originally Posted by wildvenonat

It isn't 1% of BLM players who use nonstandard rotations. There are dozens of reasonably solid nonstandard rotations available and every BLM player uses at least one of them some of the time. The finicky ones extremely tight on timing are not commonly used; however, any time you have to spend a lot of gameplay moving, or the boss goes untargetable, all solutions that involve continuing to attack the boss will be a nonstandard rotation.

Nonstandard is a catch-all for basically all forms of "black mage, adjust".

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I've been reading this entire thread start to finish, and this is my favorite post of the entire thread. As a BLM who meme's "Healers Adjust" Ironically with GREAT frequency (until my hubris precedes me and I enforce the BLM stereotype LOL)

I have some pretext notes here that I think are important to understand.

I am a Game Designer, I design games for a living. I have a formal education in Game Design. The private academy i attended was staffed by instructors and mentors that were actively employed in the industry. Only the directors were not, bu the directors were usually Corporate Dev BigWigs that retired to teaching. I haven't seen anyone specifically mention that this is the case for themselves so I think I may be able to provide some insight into some more technical server stuff that I haven't seen addressed, and if I missed it I apologize in advance. I also have an intimate understand of what roles most job descriptions play within the industry and I think that will be useful too.

The third is that I am over a year into the process of making an RPG, and most of my most recent research into the industry is related to the legal, and business/corporate side of things as my current knowledge base for actual development processes design philosophies hasn't resulted in a massive roadblock that I've been required to research much else. Not yet at least. This is context is to lend credence to the quality of designer that I am. If you want to flatout ignore it or disregard it, that's fine. I've worked at multiple studios and I'm formally credited on games that are on the market. Take it or leave it I'm not concerned too much. I just dont want this to become a distracting troll-point.

The last pretext I want to give you. Because I am a developer I use incredibly comprehensive communication which is a fundamental requirement for all types of game design philosophies. This is commonly interpreted as explaining in autistic details. This is completely normal in a game development context. If you do not explain every single step of something in an incredibly detailed and comprehensive way, it can result in development issues that can cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Simply due to a miscommunication. I want to get ahead of the stupid trolls that I know won't care enough to read the subject in its entirety. If you do not care about the subject enough to read this in full, then just stop talking why are you even here?


One trend that I'm observing is there are a few camps here.

Camp One: F*** BLM, because everything else sucks too, and Yoshi P.'s biases are S****. We're Homogenized so you should be too.

Whilst I am a BLM Main, and I fundamentally disagree with almost all the BLM changes. For most of you, this is just an expression of pain from all your own jobs have suffered. I completely understand these pain points. There was one genuinely insightful post made by one of you that was otherwise mostly rude and condescending the whole time. But I will give you credit on the position that "Job homogenization means that you'll focus less on Job Mechanics and worry more about Boss Mechanics." and that the complexity should be in boss mechanics and not Job mechanics. This is the only reasonable opinion I've heard from any of these people, and it completely disregards the possibility that both can co-exist. When you are designing a game there are infinite possibilities. As long as you are integrating well-thought out, executed, and tested ideas you can have your cake and eat it too. The limitations are the folks who are designing, building, and testing the game. I agree that this camp fundamentally doesn't understand the actual mechanical implications of Non-Standard being things like "Skipping over Blizzard in UI to spam xeno, or using it leading up to a cutscene to restore mana when the fight resumes). These are not significant mechanical changes, these are at absolute best quality of life level scenarios and only in the most minor of circumstances. Most people are talking about a maximum 3% return on perfect optimization and I think that's a fair assessment. This is not a significant enough deviation that if another class brutally missed a Savage tier mechanic or higher, that it could save a run. This is the most fundamental baseline thing to consider when you're assessing something like a DPS imbalance. When you're looking at an 8 man Savage Raid, where 1 Class has a 3% advantage for DPS over the course of a 20-Minute fight. Now for some math to layout some hard mathematical calculations to communicate how incredibly insignificant this is. (1200secs*.03precent)/8jobsinthraid= a 4.5 second difference in a clear that includes a BLM vs one that doesn't. And I understand that these numbers are slight fudges as tanks healers and DPS don't do the same amount of damage, but when you really dsitill the numbers down into their lowest common denominator, it's clear that it becomes insignificant. There's absolutely no possible context in any Savage or above fight where this would have a meaningful enough impact to result in the BLM's superior DPS being able to "Steal a clear" that another party couldn't.

I'll admit I haven't played in tiers above Savage, but if there are experienced raiders in the tiers above savage I would defer to you to contest this if you genuinely believe this 4.5 seconds in a 20-minute raid would have a significant enough impact to result in a clear or not. Bear in mind that this is only in ideal perfect execution circumstances for all party memebers invovled as well. There's also the idea that because of the "Server Tick Based Timers" are fundamentally a bad thing because most other classes have moved on from this design philosophy. There's absolutely no reason to not include at least a single class that is based around this type of system design. Not all the classes need to play the way you think they should. All this idea serves to do is alienate players who prefer this playstyle, and the timer based gameply integrates better into a low mobility class because positionals are irrelevant to the situation. This is how mages DPS classes should be designed to feel distinct from other DPS classes. Staying in place shouldn't be too comfortable, and you should need to squeeze every last drop out of each timer in order to compete at a high level, and you should be rewarded for that complex mechanical execution. Entire IP's die because of a lack of complexity in gameplay.

The next camp I see trending is: The changes are good because BLM has more options for OGCD's and isn't rooted in one place and has more movement options.

I agree with this to an extent. You're correct that BLM doesn't have a lot of movement options, and this is what makes the class unique to other classes. It's a turret caster, and a good one at that. Fundamentally I disagree with the job homogenization. Even though my run at EW Savage raids was stopped specifically because of this movement issue. I was unable to clear P3S due to the pace of the movement of the fight. Even bearing that in mind I still don't think the particular set of changes executed in my professional and educated opinion are the way to solve this problem.I think that options to improve aetherial manipulation to have a conditional where it could be reset upon perfect execution of the main F4 rotation could allow BLM's to act as teleporting turret casters rather than trying to disturb the smooth flow of the ShB F4 rotation that was flexible and had positive-feedback loops for being practiced rewards distributed in a reasonably measured manner.A change like this would also play into the "Voidsent" Nature of the BLM class being able to phase in and out of the void to move short distances instantly with more frequency. As you gain power and achieve a "Zen" like state, so too does your level of attunement with the void allowing you to take advantage of it a little more frequently.

The last camp I see trending is the "These changes are fundamentally bad" Camp and I think it's obvious by now that this is the camp I am in.

I really think that the addition of this new flare spell is a little redundant with the xenoglossy mechanic. It operates in a similar, but much more restrictive way, and doesn't really add anything new to the class, but only exists to take away from previous options the class had. I think the addition of another xenoglossy crystal was a natural progression which I don't mind much. A big pain point for me is the Paradox Removal as well. It really did allow for BLM to have a little bit of movement options that it really struggles with as a turret caster (even if I wasn't able to master it), I have seen plenty of YouTube and Discord stream clears that took valuable advantage of it. It was tough, but fair. One last thing I think that's worth mentioning on the Yoshi P. Favoritism. Nobody seems to have considered WHY He likes to play BLM over the other classes. For the fact that BLM seems to have always been the highest skill ceiling class, it seems to me that it would be his favorite class to play because he is a high-skill ceiling player. So he would naturally gravitate towards playing the most high skill ceiling Job in the game. Either that or he just prefers to stay in one place rather than fumble about with positionals and play a different style of game. Both types of gameplay are completely valid, with different challenges, and outcomes. Having more of these multiple styles of gameplay will ultimately result in the game running better as a business because it will retain more players actually playing the game who have wider interest in styles of gameplay, and simply shoving those players for the sake of "more people playing a class" is a fundamentally anti-thetical business decision. Yoshi P. is formally a Producer at sqenix, and not a game designer. Whilst I understand, he is an incredibly talented game designer. Ultimately his position is dependent on his ability for the game to make money. Whilst I understand a fair amount of this is speculation, for these reasons I think that the design choices made that resulted in all the non-standard rotations getting completely axed are ever so slightly in favor of unintended consequences. Because Yoshi P. is a producer not a game designer formally.

One final note that I think may be worth addressing, is with the tick timer system. There is an issue of ping. Because if timer's are client side, code injection and other hacks can mess with things like creating infinite cooldown situations so all data regarding timers needs to be server side, and with server side timers ping becomes an issue. I personally have experienced a rotational break that I genuinely lost to ping, but that's also a flaw of the required design philosophy of an MMORPG that you sign up for by playing an MMORPG. it cant be entirely lagless.

This all took me a few hours to write and I couldn't fit it in less than 4 posts due to over 10k characters. I was only able to lightly proofread it so there may still be grammatical errors as well. If there's anything I overlooked I'll go back and double check it using this reply as a reserve.

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Originally Posted by J3WD4Z

This all took me a few hours to write and I couldn't fit it in less than 4 posts due to over 10k characters. I was only able to lightly proofread it so there may still be grammatical errors as well. If there's anything I overlooked I'll go back and double check it using this reply as a reserve.

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You can edit posts after to get around the character limit.