Suggestion to improve Aetherial Manipulation for BLM.

I don't find Aetherial Manipulation to be particularly useful as it is at the moment. It's too clunky to target party members when you want to move quickly, and I find mouseover to be very awkward to use. For example, if there's an enemy between you and who you want to move to, you end up not moving anywhere. At the moment, I've resorted to macroing it directly to a healer I generally trust to be in a good place, but this isn't very mobile as it should be.

So, my suggestion is to make Aetherial Manipulation to work like a Mark/Recall spell.

This method would allow you to place a waymark somewhere on the field (say, your favourite turreting spot), and when you hit AM afterwards if your target was not a party member, you would zoom to that spot.


That clarification in bold is important, because it means that if people don't like the idea of this method - or it messes up their mouseover macros for it (instead of not moving to where they want, it sends them to the wrong place and puts AM on CD), they can just not place the waymark and it'll function as it does currently. Of course, if you have a party member selected via target/mo/whatever while a waymark is active, you will still go to their side instead of the mark.

Basically, this would take nothing away from people who like Aetherial Manipulation as it is currently, it would only add to the ability without breaking it.

Now, the difficult bit with this idea would be implementation. As far as I know, this game doesn't allow abilities to do different things depending on how it's pressed. The simplest solution would probably be having a second long CD ability used to mark, but it does seem sort of weird having an ability that does nothing but prepare another.

A kind of weird method I could see to implement this would be to have Sharpcast trigger the mark placement when AM is selected. This could, however, lead to a lot of issues with needing to AM at a bad time in rotation. Perhaps it could only work while not engaged in battle?

I'm sure someone could come up with better implementation ideas than I can.

Also, a small range boost couldn't hurt.

Anyway, that's my suggestion to improve Aetherial Manipulation. What do you guys think of it?

Not a BLM here, but sounds like it would make BLM more interesting and not having to rely on the position of your party members would be nice.

Just adding some random idea, maybe have AM return you to the center of your Ley Lines if no party member is selected and Ley Lines was up?

Personally I like the way aetherial manipulation is now.

But I would love a range boost. ♡

I had it macro'd to take me to the tank. With <tt>. That would take me out of any aoe targeting me and I could also use it after flares to get close for blizzard 2.