Enjoy Black Mage But Need Advice

Hi everyone!

After watching Pint's excellent video, 10,000 Hours of Black Mage, I decided to give Black Mage another whirl. I am enjoying the challenge.

I'm running Palace of the Dead to level. Unfortunately, the Deep Dungeon doesn't play nice with a turret class. I seldom get in more than two spells before the mobs are killed by my party members. Even worse, mobs are often pulled out of my range by players committed to running the PotD as quickly as possible.

What I'm getting at, is I am unable to use the proper spell rotation in that place.

So, I'm using things like Scathe, Sharpcast, and Thunder III. Is there a better rotation for Black Mages for Palace of the Dead?

Thanks!

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kacho_Nacho

Hi everyone!

After watching Pint's excellent video, 10,000 Hours of Black Mage, I decided to give Black Mage another whirl. I am enjoying the challenge.

I'm running Palace of the Dead to level. Unfortunately, the Deep Dungeon doesn't play nice with a turret class. I seldom get in more than two spells before the mobs are killed by my party members. Even worse, mobs are often pulled out of my range by players committed to running the PotD as quickly as possible.

What I'm getting at, is I am unable to use the proper spell rotation in that place.

So, I'm using things like Scathe, Sharpcast, and Thunder III. Is there a better rotation for Black Mages for Palace of the Dead?

Thanks!

---

Palace of the Dead isn’t BLM friendly and you’ve basically identified why. The part you’re missing to make the experience enjoyable is all the mobility focused cooldowns it gets in Stormblood onward, but PotD caps you at level 60. Since it doesn’t get better during the level bracket you’ll experience in there so you are better off using Squadrons (Unlocked by ranking up your Grand Company) and roulettes to level. Dungeon content has enough HP on mobs that you can count on it soaking your casts.

It’s not ideal, but lots of phase shifting, f3 > b3 works, you can 1 or 2 shot most things with f4 so if you can peel away from the group you can clear rooms fast solo. Before the changes to freeze, that was a fast way to get ui3 for a quick way to get back into fire, but alas that is a fading dream. I find lvl 60 the most awkward version of blm. You may be better off spamming the highest lvl dungeons to lvl fast. Also do the challenge log battle challenges, frontline roulette, alliance raid, leveling. That 10,000 hours vid was pretty funny, always happy to welcome another blm into the world

PoTD is not really a place to learn how your job's rotation work because it's meant to be able to be done solo at lower stages. The mobs generally die very fast and you have to consistently move around a lot. Black Mage excels in burst mobility rather than sustained mobility (aetherial manipulation at lv 50, triple cast at lv 66, Xenoglossy at 80, etc.).

If you have a tank + 1 healer in your PoTD run, you can get the tank to pull all the mobs and then learn the Black mage rotation, but generally you get a better learning experience for Black Mage's rotation in normal dungeons and trials/raids. Generally though, PoTD runs are with 4 DPS due to queue times.

Thanks for all the tips! I appreciate it!