Please reconsider 7.0 BLM changes

I largely disagree. I understand that Non-Standard is important to a select few players but I think these changes to Black Mage will benefit many players who like the idea of playing Black Mage but feel alienated by how complex it can seem / feel to play. The changes make the rotation clearer and more fun for more players.

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Originally Posted by Voidmage

Timing our casts to the last second will no longer be needed because we always have the safety net of two instant casts to refresh the fire timer.
The flow of the firephase will be gone because of the wait times after the instant casts (at least on low spell speed).
UI Paradox is gone so that emergency tool is no longer there (and the worst thing is that with the removal the of that spell the "flare" of it is gone)
There is no thunderprog to manage any more as far as I can see.

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I think that last-second casts are always going to be a thing, just because of the fundamental contradiction between having cast times and bosses forcing you to move. They'll be rarer, since we have more mobility in fire phase (and less in ice) than before, but you're still only going to have a triplecast approximately once every other fire cycle, but I feel confident that I'm going to find myself under enough pressure + have made enough mistakes to occasionally need to sneak in 1s-left-on-the-timer Despairs.

There's still going to be a pressure on BLM to refresh Thunder as it falls off (this I think is going to be functionally identical to EW use of Thunder, since if you're on top of Sharpcast you are also just casting it at instant speed for 0MP every 30 seconds) and to not overcap polyglot. On average, you'll need to use one Thunder and one Xeno every 30s, and if save them up or put them off you can still find yourself in awkward situations in which you literally can't fit all your overdue Xenos and a Thunder alongside your F4s unless you cheat some stuff out using Swiftcast. (And of course instant-cast Xeno and Thunder were already breaking up the flow of watching cast bars fill in EW).

I'm going to miss UI paradox, though! It's possible that it's gone because, with it, BLM would literally have too much free movement. Also, since Paradox is IIRC slightly lower in potency/second than Fire IV, it's possible that it'd end up optimal to skip UI Paradox even if it was available (but they could fix that with a potency buff)(but they would have to make sure it doesn't accidentally become optimal to just maximize Paradox casts by transposing rapidly).

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They managed to make fire 2 good in EW only to almost make it useless now in DT.

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I wouldn't say useless so much as the equivalent of Fire 3; you use it to swap, because it does more damage on 3+ targets than Fire 3 would. I can sort of get why; it's difficult to create a Fire II that's worth casting ahead of Flare purely based on the math (even if you pick the exact right damage, mp cost, and cast time that it's better than F4 but worse than Flare on 3+ targets, players might still just start skipping it in order to get to Flare faster), so the designers pretty much have to just put in a special trait that causes F2 to buff Flare in order for F2 to get used at all. But that feels kludgey, and also makes Flare itself weaker by default, which means it's less exciting to learn at level 50.

What they could do is make F2 generate Flare Star pips while Flare generates less; like you get 1 pip per F2, and 2 pips per Flare, or something. But that's also kind of a heavy-handed order from above rather than an organic result of potencies and cast times, so it feels a little less appropriate to BLM's general design.

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Originally Posted by StrangeIove

I largely disagree. I understand that Non-Standard is important to a select few players but I think these changes to Black Mage will benefit many players who like the idea of playing Black Mage but feel alienated by how complex it can seem / feel to play. The changes make the rotation clearer and more fun for more players.

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After 2 weeks after launch BLM will be optimized and those that miss the old stuff will have to suck it up or play different job.

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Originally Posted by Ferrinus

I wouldn't say useless so much as the equivalent of Fire 3; you use it to swap, because it does more damage on 3+ targets than Fire 3 would. I can sort of get why; it's difficult to create a Fire II that's worth casting ahead of Flare purely based on the math (even if you pick the exact right damage, mp cost, and cast time that it's better than F4 but worse than Flare on 3+ targets, players might still just start skipping it in order to get to Flare faster), so the designers pretty much have to just put in a special trait that causes F2 to buff Flare in order for F2 to get used at all. But that feels kludgey, and also makes Flare itself weaker by default, which means it's less exciting to learn at level 50.

What they could do is make F2 generate Flare Star pips while Flare generates less; like you get 1 pip per F2, and 2 pips per Flare, or something. But that's also kind of a heavy-handed order from above rather than an organic result of potencies and cast times, so it feels a little less appropriate to BLM's general design.

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Tbf Fire 3 at least has the firestarter thing going for it.
Sure these are all things to make it useful but the easier way would have been to just not get rid of enhanced flare tbh.

The more I think about it the more I wonder i the new fire finisher was even needed. We already had flare and despair.
It all seems (minus the manastuff) to be changes just to adjust to that new ability.

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Originally Posted by StrangeIove

I largely disagree. I understand that Non-Standard is important to a select few players but I think these changes to Black Mage will benefit many players who like the idea of playing Black Mage but feel alienated by how complex it can seem / feel to play. The changes make the rotation clearer and more fun for more players.

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I don't understand some players' aversion to a skill ceiling. Standard gives you 97% of the job's power in a very straightforward, simple way to understand. How does nipping the last 3% help them?
You can literally do top 3% damage just doing standard stuff. The new standard is just a downgraded version of the current standard, so how does this alienate them?
This would be like me playing some rapid chess games and going "I feel alienated because I'm 1k elo points below Magnus Carlsen on chess.com". Here it even makes less sense, because it's more like 300 elo difference and your opposition is only 500 elo bots (pve content is really easy in this game, except for some TOP/Dragonsong phases).
People legitimately somehow feel invalidated because you can practice to be good at something, even when the gain from hundreds of hours or practice is a meager 2% or 3%. No, we must all be the same skill level after playing for 3 hours -.-

I am interested and excited about the Black Mage changes, but I think they need to address the level of Umbral Soul

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Originally Posted by StrangeIove

I largely disagree. I understand that Non-Standard is important to a select few players but I think these changes to Black Mage will benefit many players who like the idea of playing Black Mage but feel alienated by how complex it can seem / feel to play. The changes make the rotation clearer and more fun for more players.

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the people who can't play BLM still won't be able to play BLM, nonstandard has nothing to do with it, if you're bad at BLM it's because your fundamental skill on it needs work, not because you can't memorise a bunch of rotations that'll buff your dps by 3% at most

If Paradox is no longer available in Umbral Ice and that is the absolute intention I would suggest that Paradox removed entirely. The whole design of the tooltip, particle effects, and cast animation suggest that Paradox is a spell that can be cast in either phase. Restricting the spell to Astral Fire simply does not make any sense from a visual design perspective and will only serve as a reminder of what once was.

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Originally Posted by Voidmage

This I don't understand or maybe my english is to bad. Normaly Blizzard 3, Blizzard 4 and Paradox is enough to regen all mana. Even if I use nonstandard I sometimes cap my mana. May I ask where you refresh thunder? That was also able to give time.
I'm not doubting you just trying to get what you mean.


If i interpret the changes right then spell speed should be far better now then crit (a bummer for me who goes crit). I am against lowering spell speed. Its one of the few things that makes blm fun and in my opinion its identity. I also like slow cast times because it gives me time to look at the fight and think.

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I was probably simply to fast in the ice phase.
I was in the 75er dungeon and had it multiple times, that i used B3, to switch from fire phase to ice phase and used then b4, to obtain the 3 shards. And switched than allready back to fire with only 6k mp (i didnt played much of attention, because it was only with "side at side" to lvl up the npc). I was probably allways 1-2 seconds to fast with the switch (because the mp regenerated over time and not with action).

The mp change should be positiv, because that scenario shouldnt happen anymore (maybe only in the very first lvl areas, when you only have 1-2 ice soul ready).

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Originally Posted by Keichi

I was probably simply to fast in the ice phase.
I was in the 75er dungeon and had it multiple times, that i used B3, to switch from fire phase to ice phase and used then b4, to obtain the 3 shards. And switched than allready back to fire with only 6k mp (i didnt played much of attention, because it was only with "side at side" to lvl up the npc). I was probably allways 1-2 seconds to fast with the switch (because the mp regenerated over time and not with action).

The mp change should be positiv, because that scenario shouldnt happen anymore (maybe only in the very first lvl areas, when you only have 1-2 ice soul ready).

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Most likely yes. In that area you tend to keep Foul for ice phase if you want to max Thunder dot duration and only use it in fire phase, if the next Polyglot charge is approaching completion - essentially Stormblood gameplay.

Below Lv70 it is actually okay to Blizzard I, Blizzard IV twice or ice Scathe if you don't want to overwrite Thunder dots early.

Simply going to add my voice in agreement with the poster. I'm a BLM main since ARR and endwalker was the most fun I ever had playing the job. What made the job so fun was the adaptability of the rotation giving you a puzzle in a sense during each new encounter, having to figure out the best rotation to fit the timeline and movement of the fight. +1

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Originally Posted by Galvuu

I don't understand some players' aversion to a skill ceiling. Standard gives you 97% of the job's power in a very straightforward, simple way to understand. How does nipping the last 3% help them?
You can literally do top 3% damage just doing standard stuff. The new standard is just a downgraded version of the current standard, so how does this alienate them?

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Because the game rewards you for doing nothing and when you have a job that requires a couple of working braincells suddenly it's too hard and they whine that they're not easily top damage like they are when they play SMN. The funny thing is, if you manage to cast 4 Fire IV in an Astral Fire cycle you're already better than most BLM's in Roulettes (these people are not gonna step out of that) so worrying about non standard is about as legitimate as having anxiety over healing in a videogame.

But as usual SE caters to players who DON'T play the job rather than the ones who do.

Honestly I'm a subjob BLM player and not the kind of player who tries to dig the job to the deepest, and I never systematically learned the theories about non-standard versus standard. From such a non-top player's view, I have no idea how deleting ice paradox and forcing players to do the standard make this job more popular. （Contents below are some of my own opinions, might be wrong.）

I can understand that Yoshi'P the Producer wants BLM to be accepted by more players, yet from what I know so far, the reason people refuse to play BLM in raids is not those theoretical differences among rotation structures, but the fundamental-skill requirements/the over-high penalty of Gcd losses/frustrating Enochian suspension.

If the producer expects more players are trying to play BLM in DawnTrail, a good direction could be working more on mistake-solving! Every rookie BLM makes huge amounts of mistakes when practising. Simply limiting the rotation to standard will not benefit them, but on the contrary lower down the flexibility（the best part of BLM）.The new FireIV gauge in Dawntrail seems to trigger the player to finish the standard perfectly, if failed, the frustration grows even stronger compared to Endwalker.

One typical BLM mistake is that the player incorrectly starts to cast a spell (Fire IV，Despair， Flare， or whatever) when the fire phase duration isn't enough. In such cases when the player needs to interupt, a Endwalker BLM can use either a firestarter(if available) or a Transpose-Ice Para as a good way to avert the potential loss. Ice Transpose can both hold up enochian and provide extra instant cast skill to do mechanics, even though it might not be good enough and might change the whole rotation, but those feedbacks of adjusting successfully are truely positive. For a Dawntrail BLM, player can only use the firestarter provided by paradox, if not available, any other solution(either casting low pot Blizzard Ⅲ for mp recovery or transpose back to fire with unfull MP) brings strong penalty and frustration.

It's easy to understand when you really think about it, people who master non-standard have optimized the punish out of the job. When you know how to adjust your rotation for every situation you will no longer feel any urgency ever. This defeats the entire purpose of the job design, which is for fire to feel really desperate and urgent to get all your potency out in the limited window of time you have. This is why astral soul was added and made necessary on top of getting deleted if you leave astral fire. You now have forced urgency. This is by design and a good thing.

You shouldn't be able to break the core identity of the job design and be more optimal by avoiding to play it as intended. I can see why people are uncomfortable around the changes, because they are used to not being punished as a black mage player. They are used to feeling comfort in adaptibility to avoid ever wasting, and on top of this they are playing in the most effective way possible from a potency perspective.

You act like people like me really care about where they stand in the skill level hierarchy. I care about what I am trying to aim at, and if non-standard is the meta then that would be what I am aiming at even if I currently play really poorly. I am a relative beginner to this game and will be for a long time. Non-standard destroys all urgency in black mage and replaces it with calculated adaptability. It's not harder once you learn it, it's actually easier. Which is why people are struggling with the changes. They will have to actually play BLM the hard way and deal with being punished for misplay. You will have to deal with not being able to get out astral soul all of the time. You will have to deal with the job design for once.

If you don't like the job design of blm, just play pictomancer or something else. BLM has always been about feeling really pressed to get all your potency out before your fire burns out. Non-standard removes this entire feeling from the job. It'd be fine if non-standard wasn't the meta, but the meta shouldn't destroy the core identity of the job.

You can throw a fit all you want and get as mad as you want to get at me, say whatever insults you want to say. At the end of the day I am correct and the devs are too.

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The real benefit of nonstandard was the freedom to adjust how long your lines were and to move instants around to wherever you'd want them. It's incredibly liberating and with enough skill you can run circles around RDM. For a lot of people nonstandard is straight up easier, across all skill ranges. It doesn't take a postdoc in statistical thermodynamics to pick up the basics of double transposes or recovery lines. All these changes will do is compress the skill range and BLM does not need a higher skill floor than what it already has.

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^^^^^^
I played non-standard to get the most out of my damage when I had to move I didn't do it because it did 2% more damage.

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If you don't like playing a punishing job, just say so. Non-standard is not how black mage is supposed to feel.

I seriously hope SE reconsider. Non-standard is just so damn fun.. I can't believe I'm not going to be able to do it any more in a few weeks :/

I play wizards/mage in every game where I can and 6.0-6.5 BLM is probably my favourite iteration of a mage across any game. There's just something so satisfying about using your tools to adjust when and how you move and to me that's exactly the kind of decision making I want on a mage.

Rather than giving abilities that restrict the length of a line, SE could lean into it this dynamic by making ice spells more mobile and/or allow all spells in ice to give mana. Would even be fulfilling gameplay to have multiple fire abilities to consider which adjust the length of a fire line more significantly.
Making adjustments to line length more accessible for new players would probably make the job more approachable for new players to get through mechanics honestly.

There are so many other ways that BLM could made more approachable but for some reason they chose to focus on removing the fun optimisation aspects which are very heavily enjoyed by some of the community? I don't understand why this was their priority?

I could be wrong but it doesn't seem much more approachable either anyway? Transposing out to Ice Paradox was comfy compared to a slow B3 and forcing 6F4s in a fire phase seem likes a decision which opposes this?



The number 1 complaint about BLM I hear from people not used to it is that levelling it is an awful experience. Watch any new content creator start the game and a lot of the community actively recommends starting on any job except BLM.
Make it more enjoyable in lower levels so people use it more in dungeons and become more comfortable for later content. Why not make give the first stack of triple cast earlier and let the level 66 ability be the second stack? What about adding a weaker F4 for low levels to be consistent?
Another common complaint which affects desirability: the inconsistency of caster raise.

Thanks for reading.
PS. Make Scathe 0 MP. At level 100, you won't have mana for Flare Star if you use it.
Also: Umbral Soul at lower level please - having no mana at the start of packs in DT is going to feel horrible.

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Originally Posted by HikariKurosawa

[nonsense]

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a few things;
- you're more likely to be punished for doing nonstandard wrong than standard
- standard can perform essentially equally to nonstandard for dps
- nonstandard comes with just as much urgency if not more than standard, standard doesn't put you into situations where you have literally 0 seconds of free time to waste, your procs matter less and your timers matter less than they do in nonstandard
- nonstandard is still about maximising your fire casts, it's just maximising the amount you do compared to everything else too
- nonstandard isn't the meta, standard is, hence why it's called standard and not non-standard; meta things are the standard, that's what a meta is
- nonstandard is more in the spirit of BLM because the job has always been about optimising your freeform rotation to match a fight, standard is not optimising your rotation and is putting it on rails
- nonstandard can also optimise your damage when stationary, and even render you LESS mobile than standard depending on the line you're doing, it's not something that suddenly turns you into a ranged physical dps necessarily

- finally, you're talking complete and utter nonsense here, i can only be astounded by your sheer confidence in your own opinion and how persistently you can keep pushing it despite you being the only one who thinks it's reflective of reality, if this isn't bait you are a marvel of ego

hope this helps :)

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Originally Posted by HikariKurosawa

It's easy to understand when you really think about it, people who master non-standard have optimized the punish out of the job.

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I'm fascinated by your movement from how non-standard was impossibly hard to now that it's too easy and people just don't want to learn BLM.

Get thee to leveling roulettes as BLM with neither inherent ice regen nor triplecast nor Umbral Soul. Certainly you're the only person who claims to want this.

I really feel replying to Hikari just derails the topic and will never add anything of importance.
If we reply, they sometimes go on a flurry of incoherent responses, but if we just ignore them the posts are limited to one per day or so...
(Yes, the 180 spin on their opinion of non-standard is dully noted, but they don't actually understand how the job works anyway, so that's granted- they just piece random tidbits from what people are discussing, spin it together in a post and shed negative light on the whole thing)

I'm just going to throw in my 2 cents here as a decent enough BLM player:

- Thunderhead is a stupid system. Delete it and just make Thunder instant because the proc system is a huge noob trap.
- Ice Paradox had 0 reason to be removed as what killed non-standard was the MP changes and because it's gone clipping transpose after B4 for an AF1 F3P is now optimal.
- Despair needs to give Astral Souls as if you drop a F4 you just don't get access to the new capstone.
- Fire Paradox being instant makes the later half Astral Fire window tighter unless you play at a faster GCD.

Overall I dislike the changes but if I had to offer some immediate fixes it would be these.

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Originally Posted by wildvenonat

I'm fascinated by your movement from how non-standard was impossibly hard to now that it's too easy and people just don't want to learn BLM.

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It's almost like they don't actually stand behind any of the garbage they spew over every topic they touch, but are instead just trying to aggravate all of you? I don't know, do people truly go on the internet just to revel in that kind of behavior?

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Originally Posted by wildvenonat

I'm fascinated by your movement from how non-standard was impossibly hard to now that it's too easy and people just don't want to learn BLM.

Get thee to leveling roulettes as BLM with neither inherent ice regen nor triplecast nor Umbral Soul. Certainly you're the only person who claims to want this.

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when did I say it was hard? Ever? I said it was complicated and it does require a lot of research, but this doesn't equate to it being hard. Everyone who uses it does so because it offers more freedom of movement. Once you learn what you need to do it's not difficult. It's not punishing. It's just extremely contrived.

Is it hard to understand the difference between inherent difficulty and prerequisite knowledge?

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Originally Posted by JoshiKousei

I'm just going to throw in my 2 cents here as a decent enough BLM player:

- Thunderhead is a stupid system. Delete it and just make Thunder instant because the proc system is a huge noob trap.
- Ice Paradox had 0 reason to be removed as what killed non-standard was the MP changes and because it's gone clipping transpose after B4 for an AF1 F3P is now optimal.
- Despair needs to give Astral Souls as if you drop a F4 you just don't get access to the new capstone.
- Fire Paradox being instant makes the later half Astral Fire window tighter unless you play at a faster GCD.

Overall I dislike the changes but if I had to offer some immediate fixes it would be these.

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I think you're right about Thunderhead; if they just made the spell instant and free by default the usage pattern wouldn't change. It'd be nice if maintaining a Thunder dot for a long enough time built up the charge you needed to cast a special Burst spell or something like that.

The transpose-F3P isn't optimal any more, though, since it looks like (true to the published tooltip) AF3 and UI3 don't reduce the opposite element's damage at all. This means that you get the same average damage using F3P in astral vs. saving your proc for the umbral->astral swap (and therefore that choosing to do one or the other is the main way to adjust the length of your astral cycle over the course of a fight).

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Originally Posted by Ferrinus

I think you're right about Thunderhead; if they just made the spell instant and free by default the usage pattern wouldn't change. It'd be nice if maintaining a Thunder dot for a long enough time built up the charge you needed to cast a special Burst spell or something like that.

The transpose-F3P isn't optimal any more, though, since it looks like (true to the published tooltip) AF3 and UI3 don't reduce the opposite element's damage at all. This means that you get the same average damage using F3P in astral vs. saving your proc for the umbral->astral swap (and therefore that choosing to do one or the other is the main way to adjust the length of your astral cycle over the course of a fight).

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I'm reminded of old PVP thunder where you had to fit X potency into it to get Thundercloud for both a burst and refresh.

That'd be neat if Thunder instead of a dot was a compiler, but then, they really hate Wildfire.

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Originally Posted by Ferrinus

The transpose-F3P isn't optimal any more, though, since it looks like (true to the published tooltip) AF3 and UI3 don't reduce the opposite element's damage at all. This means that you get the same average damage using F3P in astral vs. saving your proc for the umbral->astral swap (and therefore that choosing to do one or the other is the main way to adjust the length of your astral cycle over the course of a fight).

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https://i.imgur.com/LHuptc4.png

>A spell of the opposite element can be cast at no cost but will deal reduced damage

This is taken straight from the media tour build so transpose f3p is still optimal.

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Originally Posted by JoshiKousei

https://i.imgur.com/LHuptc4.png

>A spell of the opposite element can be cast at no cost but will deal reduced damage

This is taken straight from the media tour build so transpose f3p is still optimal.

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The AF3/UI3 tooltips fail to mention any damage penalty even though the ones for 1 and 2 mention 10% and 20% respectively. This might just be a mistake (the basic Aspect Mastery tooltip fails to mention that AF1 increases fire damage at all, but presumably the 40% increase remains) but I watched Rinon's video closely and noticed that Fire III did ~13k damage on hit out of neutral aspect but that it and Blizzard III continued to deal ~13k damage when used to swap aspects.

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Originally Posted by Ferrinus

The AF3/UI3 tooltips fail to mention any damage penalty even though the ones for 1 and 2 mention 10% and 20% respectively. This might just be a mistake (the basic Aspect Mastery tooltip fails to mention that AF1 increases fire damage at all, but presumably the 40% increase remains) but I watched Rinon's video closely and noticed that Fire III did ~13k damage on hit out of neutral aspect but that it and Blizzard III continued to deal ~13k damage when used to swap aspects.

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UI3 lists -30% dmg to fire spells in the JP tooltips.

https://i.imgur.com/c7CHzTf.png

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Originally Posted by JoshiKousei

UI3 lists -30% dmg to fire spells in the JP tooltips.

https://i.imgur.com/c7CHzTf.png

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Ah, then you're right. This means transpose into F3P is still a gain, and we'll be choosing between using the guaranteed Firestarter for safety in astral phase or for damage coming out of umbral phase (and this second thing also requires being able to profitably cast Xeno or Thunder).

The more I think about BLM changes, the more I find these choices weird and strange.

Flare Star - the more I think about the whole Astral Heart thing, the more it gets weird, cause why it is for the Fire phase? Blizzard 4 gives Umbral Hearts to use in the Fire phase, so it's logical for Astral Hearts to affect the ice phase instead. So Flare Star should've been Ice Age or Absolute Zero and be a very powerful Ice nuke, stronger than anything in Fire phase with AF3 bonuses combined. Instead, there are bigger emphasis on Fire yet again.

Thunderhead - is weird. Flat 200p with a DoT, you get it once when you shift between stances. And with that potency, it feels like using it for anything but reapplying the DoT is a waste. The upfront attack is weaker than the current Thundercloud proc. Even Thundercloud proc had a slight potency loss compared to Fire IV. And new thing is even worse, it lost damage, and you lost the opportunity to use several in a sequence for movement with some Sharpcasts. If they want to leave the whole mechanic as it is, then at least bring up the upfront damage to Thundercloud/Fire IV level (you can use it once per phase anyway, unless you Manafont).

Paradox - just bring the Ice Paradox back. The whole thing about this spell is that it's a dual spell using two opposing powers at once. It was a movement tool + a strong button to press during Ice. I think the 1 GCD of movement is a strong enough reason for this button to exist. They can go further and also make it stronger + count as an Ice spell and recover MP.

Hey at least there's 3 other casters to play!
Red Mage, Pictomancer and Samurai.

After musing more on the DT changes I would definitely appreciate an extra charge on mana font or a good cd adjustment to tackle drift issues, umbral soul available at the same level as transpose given it's your way to regen your mana between packs in dungeons now rather than transpose. Besides those two things, if the job needs additional changes to help maintain uptime I could see reducing recharge time of triplecast being helpful, returning ice paradox wouldn't be a bad idea either.

I do not want the mana tick changes reverted at all and I do not think ice paradox should give mana back if they do return it. We should have to cast blizzard if we want mana imo, non ice spells shouldn't give mana. I have no real interest in the return of non standard, the intended gameplay should be the most optimal and able to handle all encounters imo. Having an unintended playstyle be superior to the intended one jus comes across as the intended one being poorly designed, better to redesign the standard to be the most optimal and effective in all situations imo. Adjusting the timers to be slightly longer to allow for popping 4f4 before para would be good as well to allow for slow blm to continue existing. We don't know what the enounters are like but I do expect that if the fail state of losing flare star is occuring too frequently they will make adjustments to the BLM so that it functions as they desire.

I won't be mad if non std makes a return, but I don't think it is good for the job to have the intended gameplay loop be incapable of handling certain situations and being excused with, "play non standard". I also understand not all non std required a tick timer, but encouraging in any way third party to play to peak potential on a job is terrible and should stay gone.

Still looking forward to blasting away on BLM and curious what adjustments they will make to blm based on the combined feedback. I see far more positive reception to BLM changes in game, on twitter and on reddit than here.

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Originally Posted by Aelin_Ashryver

I won't be mad if non std makes a return, but I don't think it is good for the job to have the intended gameplay loop be incapable of handling certain situations and being excused with, "play non standard". I also understand not all non std required a tick timer, but encouraging in any way third party to play to peak potential on a job is terrible and should stay gone.

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I really think a lot of people really don't get non-standard. It's just adjusting the standard rotation to fit a fight better, things like not using ice 4 because you know the boss will stop being targetable soon so there's no point in having 3 UH and it's better to just replace it with an extra fire 4.
The whole mana tick things is not a non-standard thing it's a speed runner/parser thing.
I'm pretty sure most standard rotation players have unintentionally done their own non-standard plays by just changing the rotation to fit a fight better, every time you use a firestarter fire 3 for movement you did a non-standard action.

I just dont know how they think that removing UI paradox is a good idea.

Fine, you remove manatick its a janky stuff. I get it
Non-standard get killed, it sucks but sure its not how the dev intent for it to play, no matter how strange that sounds.

Who ask for UI paradox removal?

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Originally Posted by Ramiee

I really think a lot of people really don't get non-standard. It's just adjusting the standard rotation to fit a fight better, things like not using ice 4 because you know the boss will stop being targetable soon so there's no point in having 3 UH and it's better to just replace it with an extra fire 4.
The whole mana tick things is not a non-standard thing it's a speed runner/parser thing.
I'm pretty sure most standard rotation players have unintentionally done their own non-standard plays by just changing the rotation to fit a fight better, every time you use a firestarter fire 3 for movement you did a non-standard action.

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The problem with nonstandard is it's an abuse of class design. And remember, there's nonstandard from a boss jumping and you want to do as much damage as you can (which every class does,) and nonstandard where even normal play is nonstandard, which is exactly what BLM does. Nonstandard didn't exist in SB except for boss optimizations and was barely a whisper for most of ShB. Then EW came in and nonstandard became mandatory. Classes that can't handle content get adjustments, but classes that are 'fine' don't get adjustments. Nonstandard isn't quite 11 wyrmwaves or HW SMN levels of nonsense, but at the end of the day it's bad for a class to be played in a way other than how it was intended, especially when this method causes other people who don't know about nonstandard to suffer.

Which is exactly what happened. How many people have said you can't do TOP without nonstandard? How many recommend it for DSR for later phases especially? How can devs make adjustments the class needs when they see the playerbase handling the issue to the point where they can't even tell the core class has serious issues?

Hell, I can guarantee that manafont is failing the sniff test. It is going to require immediate adjustments for lack of overcap protection and its strict location of use. If nonstandard exists and finds a way to mask this issue, it will never get fixed. Likewise, why should monk and summoner not be allowed nonstandard, but BLM should?

What's worse is, if anyone truly stopped for half a second and looked at the class, I mean truly analyzed every single ability, the class is an absolute mess of design based around the oldest class mechanic still left in the game and the original structure it had in ARR, and everything else is slaved to it. Even nonstandard is. This wouldn't even be a problem if the devs seriously modernized the class, which they're still not doing despite fixing the tic issue.

I fully expect BLM to be in a worse state going into DT, but not because nonstandard is being removed. Because the game has moved on without BLM, but the devs are oblivious to just how far removed it is. I've commented that LL is probably going to become 15 yalms or so like pict's 'ley lines' specifically because the devs aren't designing the game out of any one class, and BLM will still require special attention, meaning even a mere one replace isn't going to be good enough.

But hopefully at the end of the road, the class will be fixed and brought to a better place because the devs finally deal with its core design problems that are as old as the relaunch of the game. And then maybe, the class will be more than just a glorified fire wizard that lightly dabbles in thunder and ice. Because I'd like more of the other elements as well, but they can barely exist within the tyranny of the timers.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Evenescence

I just dont know how they think that removing UI paradox is a good idea.

Fine, you remove manatick its a janky stuff. I get it
Non-standard get killed, it sucks but sure its not how the dev intent for it to play, no matter how strange that sounds.

Who ask for UI paradox removal?

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I'm guessing it was removed because of nonstandard. It's the only reason I'd even consider removing it. They wanted to force players to cast blizzard spells, and removing paradox was their solution. And between that and thunderscathe, the class has some emergency movement. But damn thunderscathe is hot garbage as a movement tool when it clips a lot.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Evenescence

I just dont know how they think that removing UI paradox is a good idea.

Fine, you remove manatick its a janky stuff. I get it
Non-standard get killed, it sucks but sure its not how the dev intent for it to play, no matter how strange that sounds.

Who ask for UI paradox removal?

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I simply would say, that Paradox in ice phase became meaningless.
Ice phase is now very short. Except of some dmg would it has no use anymore (until now did whe needed some moves for the ice phase, to cover the waiting time).
The dmg it would have maked, is probably covered by the fire spells.

And than could it maybe be a coding reason. Paradox has now a lot of effects. Maybe, there was a Limit, what the coding allowed (have no knowledge about that, why i would tought, that reason 1 is more likely).

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Originally Posted by Taranok

The problem with nonstandard is it's an abuse of class design. And remember, there's nonstandard from a boss jumping and you want to do as much damage as you can (which every class does,) and nonstandard where even normal play is nonstandard, which is exactly what BLM does. Nonstandard didn't exist in SB except for boss optimizations and was barely a whisper for most of ShB. Then EW came in and nonstandard became mandatory. Classes that can't handle content get adjustments, but classes that are 'fine' don't get adjustments. Nonstandard isn't quite 11 wyrmwaves or HW SMN levels of nonsense, but at the end of the day it's bad for a class to be played in a way other than how it was intended, especially when this method causes other people who don't know about nonstandard to suffer.

Which is exactly what happened. How many people have said you can't do TOP without nonstandard? How many recommend it for DSR for later phases especially? How can devs make adjustments the class needs when they see the playerbase handling the issue to the point where they can't even tell the core class has serious issues?

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Non-standard existed as long as Black Mage existed. Even in StB there were lines where you skipped Blizzard IV and opted for shorter Fire lines on occasion, especially pre-Blizzard IV buff. ShB with instantcast xenoglossy and Despair also had Blizzard IV skip for the 3-4 Fire iV -> Despair lines. The goal is the same as standard - maximizing Fire IVs, but in a more compact window. Endwalker simply expanded on it with Paradox - essentially a beefed up Blizzard I in Umbral Ice and a juicier Firestarter enabler in Astral Fire. If anything, current Black Mage, minus perhaps MP regeneration (debatable on who you ask), is currently the most well designed version for both the average person wanting to learn the job and wanting to optimize it.

However, as I need to repeat along with the others for the xth time because players including yourself seem to not understand this - it's called non-standard for a reason. If non-standard was actually mandatory, it would be called STANDARD. The fact it is called non-standard should heavily imply that it is an OPTION, not a must and the difference between standard and non-standard is miniscule and basically just a point of optimisation and, as others pointed out, aligning things better in specific phases and cooldowns, not just in ultimates mind you.

Calling the shortening of Fire lines to align cooldowns and aspect shifts better to the flow of a fight an abuse of class design is just incredibly short-sighted; the fact that Black Mage is so free flowing and allows for this is what makes it a BETTER designed job rather than being the 11th dps with a strict rotational gameplan with minimal deviation. Players should be rewarded for creativity in using their kit, not be punished and have their options ripped out for doing something else.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Keichi

I simply would say, that Paradox in ice phase became meaningless.
Ice phase is now very short. Except of some dmg would it has no use anymore (until now did whe needed some moves for the ice phase, to cover the waiting time).
The dmg it would have maked, is probably covered by the fire spells.

And than could it maybe be a coding reason. Paradox has now a lot of effects. Maybe, there was a Limit, what the coding allowed (have no knowledge about that, why i would tought, that reason 1 is more likely).

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UI Paradox would still be a strong movement tool, damage button for Ice phase and a decent weave window without having to opt for overwriting Thunder early or using stacks of Polyglot. I absolutely expect the return of it within the 7.X patch cycle because the removal of it really wont sit right with many seasoned Black Mages and makes zero sense from class fantasy either (given the dual element aesthetic).

As for the coding limit - I can assure you this wont be the reason. If anything, making Firestarter guaranteed removed a random-proc function and shortened it. The instantcast in AF is just cut & paste from UI Paradox and could also just be made baseline by changing the cast time. As for the condition of obtaining it, it is actually a shorter switch case or if-else statement than checking for 3 Umbral Hearts on top of Umbral Ice III.

There is not even such thing as "non-standard rotation", cause it is not a fixed rotation or sequence of skills. It's a usage of your tools tailored to the needs of specific encounters, so it differs from fight to fight. If anything, non-standard is a means to an end, allowing you to bypass obstacles in encounters that impede BLM performance and were not thought through by devs (looking at you, P7S). And now all the Non-standard movement is gone, optimization is gone, and other movement options are limited. Feels like we are back into being unmovable Fire 4 turret, that gets broken by any downtime. Maybe this in devs eye will actually balance out BLM to the level of other casters, with all that damage we will miss from fumbled Flare Stars.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Taranok

Classes that can't handle content get adjustments, but classes that are 'fine' don't get adjustments. Nonstandard isn't quite 11 wyrmwaves or HW SMN levels of nonsense, but at the end of the day it's bad for a class to be played in a way other than how it was intended, especially when this method causes other people who don't know about nonstandard to suffer.

Which is exactly what happened.

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Excuse me, what? The content that cannot be completed using the standard rotation is not a surprise to BLM players nor is it bad game design as long as BLM has rotational flexibility. The fact you cannot use the standard rotation is immediately obvious, and there are a number of ways to resolve it. Some are more obvious than others, but the parts where nonstandard play is mandatory will still not permit you to use the standard rotation even after these changes. It's simply methods to maintain uptime and continue using strong spells rather than weak spells, and most of the extra finicky nonstandard rotations are excruciatingly punishing if you flub any of it while being a rounding error of a dps gain vs playing slightly more conservatively.

I just realized how awful the MP regen system from 7.0 is - bro you can't even Scathe during Umbral Ice a single time anymore without running into MP issues for AF phase unless you Blizzard I/IV or Umbral Soul. With current system I can at least go UI and Scathe on the run if I absolutely have to, but with the new system I wont regen that anymore in time. Unironic Scathe nerf.

It's niche, but there goes another avenue of rotational flexibility. jfc.