A slightly above average player's opinion on Black Mage (7.1)

Looking at all the creativity in Black Mage's new and improved ad-hoc rotations from the community, I am pretty excited seeing what might happen in the future. I do hope that the team behind Black Mage's gameplay do take into account what people in the community have done going forward and have what they have done in the past.

With the new non-standard rotations coming up, I am disappointed that Flare Star does not come up often enough in these rotations due to the limitations of Astral Soul Charges. I hope that this can be changed in the future to allow the Astral Soul charges to carry over in umbral ice.

My belief is that Black Mage should be an advanced difficulty job (in this instance having a less restricting job mechanic), I believe that a few jobs in each role should be considered advanced difficulty for those that seek and desire it, and I hope that for a game that's been around for 11 years going on 12, we can have that.

If it is a major cause for concern to have Black Mage considered an "advanced" job, I'd consider directly informing the player that it isn't an easy job to master.

Yeah but if you do that intentionally, you get into... weird territory.

Should advanced jobs deal more damage if played to their fullest potential?

If yes, what do you base ultra-high-end content on? Will it be too easy with advanced jobs played well, or impossible without advanced jobs or when not played well?
If no, how do you prevent everyone from excluding advanced jobs while progging and only bringing them later when stuff is overgeared and there's room for jobs that at best do equal, but usually do worse (due to their complexity)?

What about advanced non-damage jobs? Do advanced tanks take less damage? Do they deal more damage? How do you design fights so non-homogenized tanks can still fit into the raid fight design structure? What about healers, who already do not have to use the vast majority of their kit by button count?

It's a neat idea, but I feel it precludes being able to numerically balance jobs. Which I personally would not mind, but a community as expectant of tight~perfect DPS balance would probably not be very welcoming of intentionally reducing balance?

As i was writing out a reply to this, I realized that what i truly want is the jobs to be more unique and to do the same things in their own way again, such as DRK before being reliant on MP for DPS and Survivability, AST being RNG dependent for buffs, etc. The argument that I would present is that jobs should be harder than they currently are, or at least more involved, which is something im sure you can find in these forums by the hundreds.

The advanced job "tag" was more of a side thing to the main argument to iterate my distain for making harder jobs easier, like in the case of summoner going into EW from ShB/StB.

I believe that more jobs should be more complex like BLM in other roles, perhaps needing to be its own unique archetype for each role.

complexity and job difficulty I believe has decreased over time and jobs have been more homogenized to play more similarly to each other, and is easier to balance on SE's end, but has caused more strife than rewards in my opinion.
this is probably due to the fact that SE sells job boosts 10 levels before cap with no restrictions, so they don't want these skippers to feel like they have to go through a whole thesis to play their job. This is what spoils the bunch for the rest of us who have played for such a long time.

Balancing for ultra-high-end content currently, the community already excludes certain jobs mostly due to how they preform damage wise in x.0 and x.1 patches should the difference between jobs be large enough, or harder to play jobs be about the same output as easier jobs. We can already see in FRU that no serious prog team is going to take BLM or MCH because of how poorly it is performing.

The way that I believe this can be tackled, if SE doesn't want to make all the jobs incredibly unique to each other, is for all jobs to focus on Unique Utility, which is something that was more prominent before, but has since been dialed back. Something small that each job has that, if balanced properly, each job has a chance to use in a fight.
A current example off the top of my head would be MCH with Dismantle and BRD with Warden's Paean. If utilized correctly, certain fights can have mechanics where healers would need to esuna a few party members. If a Paean is used then its one less GCD a healer would need to use. But later on in a fight there might be a heavy hitting AoE that can be Dismantled, negating 1 or 2 GCDs from a healer.
I think that that would dispel people from barring certain jobs from joining their parties, where they change from "their dps is crap" to "that ability can be useful at x part/ for prog/ in general"

I couldn't tell you how exactly that can be done with healers & tanks, but with the fact that, as you mentioned, these jobs aren't pressing all their abilities anyway, it can be explored upon. SSCH having expedience would be that idea for SCH, but other healers need a unique thing of their own.

so semi fresh 100 BLM and on paper it made sense for the thunder change but it should have been addition to what was already there and stacked to 5 or so

i would have like to see a extra charge of paradox(para) when we got our 3rd polygot(poly)

Flare Star
its neat tho persisting through ice phase and back into fire would be neat...maybe lose a charge when switching

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Originally Posted by Xanfer

Looking at all the creativity in Black Mage's new and improved ad-hoc rotations from the community, I am pretty excited seeing what might happen in the future. I do hope that the team behind Black Mage's gameplay do take into account what people in the community have done going forward and have what they have done in the past.

With the new non-standard rotations coming up, I am disappointed that Flare Star does not come up often enough in these rotations due to the limitations of Astral Soul Charges. I hope that this can be changed in the future to allow the Astral Soul charges to carry over in umbral ice.

My belief is that Black Mage should be an advanced difficulty job (in this instance having a less restricting job mechanic), I believe that a few jobs in each role should be considered advanced difficulty for those that seek and desire it, and I hope that for a game that's been around for 11 years going on 12, we can have that.

If it is a major cause for concern to have Black Mage considered an "advanced" job, I'd consider directly informing the player that it isn't an easy job to master.

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Hard disagree. Adding a second layer of choice where players not only have to pick a job they vibe with either for its aesthetics and/or gameplay style, but also for its difficulty, is something I'm staunchly opposed to. It's already a pain to find jobs we both like aesthetically AND in gameplay (that's two layers already), without adding a third one that can be totally avoided by using accessible skill floors combined with higher skill ceilings on every job.

Seeing your second post however, if it's just to complain about jobs having been made resident sleepers and homogenized, sure, most people do agree, and I do agree too.

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Originally Posted by Xanfer

As i was writing out a reply to this, I realized that what i truly want is the jobs to be more unique and to do the same things in their own way again, such as DRK before being reliant on MP for DPS and Survivability, AST being RNG dependent for buffs, etc. The argument that I would present is that jobs should be harder than they currently are, or at least more involved, which is something im sure you can find in these forums by the hundreds.

The advanced job "tag" was more of a side thing to the main argument to iterate my distain for making harder jobs easier, like in the case of summoner going into EW from ShB/StB.

I believe that more jobs should be more complex like BLM in other roles, perhaps needing to be its own unique archetype for each role.

complexity and job difficulty I believe has decreased over time and jobs have been more homogenized to play more similarly to each other, and is easier to balance on SE's end, but has caused more strife than rewards in my opinion.
this is probably due to the fact that SE sells job boosts 10 levels before cap with no restrictions, so they don't want these skippers to feel like they have to go through a whole thesis to play their job. This is what spoils the bunch for the rest of us who have played for such a long time.

Balancing for ultra-high-end content currently, the community already excludes certain jobs mostly due to how they preform damage wise in x.0 and x.1 patches should the difference between jobs be large enough, or harder to play jobs be about the same output as easier jobs. We can already see in FRU that no serious prog team is going to take BLM or MCH because of how poorly it is performing.

The way that I believe this can be tackled, if SE doesn't want to make all the jobs incredibly unique to each other, is for all jobs to focus on Unique Utility, which is something that was more prominent before, but has since been dialed back. Something small that each job has that, if balanced properly, each job has a chance to use in a fight.
A current example off the top of my head would be MCH with Dismantle and BRD with Warden's Paean. If utilized correctly, certain fights can have mechanics where healers would need to esuna a few party members. If a Paean is used then its one less GCD a healer would need to use. But later on in a fight there might be a heavy hitting AoE that can be Dismantled, negating 1 or 2 GCDs from a healer.
I think that that would dispel people from barring certain jobs from joining their parties, where they change from "their dps is crap" to "that ability can be useful at x part/ for prog/ in general"

I couldn't tell you how exactly that can be done with healers & tanks, but with the fact that, as you mentioned, these jobs aren't pressing all their abilities anyway, it can be explored upon. SSCH having expedience would be that idea for SCH, but other healers need a unique thing of their own.

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They already do fights with debuffs that can be esuna'd, which they have started doing again in Anabaseios and now in the Chaotic raid. Warden is used again. Dismantle is already used by any MCH worth their salt and it's just a boring mitigation debuff anyway (which it has always been tbh, but at least before we used to choose between physical or magical, which was slightly less braindead). And while I do believe the first example is sound, it's certainly not justifying taking a BRD to my eyes. In fact, the only current utility that's worth sacrificing damage for is raise, period. The second concern people tend to have is when a job is too hard to perform well with (like BLM has suffered from for many expansions) people just tend to scorn it to play it safe.

The real problem is that unlike what you say, they simplify jobs not because of skippers, but because they shift everything onto encounter mechanics now, so jobs have to not get too much in the way (see how BLM struggles).

Disagree.
Blm is the standard wizard of most rpg games and a core job. It doesnt make sense to make it a advangte difficulty class. Esspecialy, when he can be allready hard enough.

At the start has he non of his insta cast spell. Mean: in solo Story fights are the enemie allways on you and can interupt your casting. In addition has he the longest casting time. That makes quest where you have to be fast dificult.

In addition is he the only class left, where holding up timers is still a core mechanic, that ruin your skill flow, if you are to slow. The timer in combination of long casting time and movement intensive bosses, can allready be to much for some people. The only other timers of other classes are eather dots or burst modes.
It would make more sense, to make the blm easier, as the core wizard, and make other caster the advangted Version. Because, they are classes, that you obtain with higher lvl.

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Originally Posted by Keichi

Blm is the standard wizard of most rpg games and a core job.

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I dunno. There's so many instant casts, so much mobility, does it really still fulfill the "big badaboom caster"-role for you?

I'll be honest, if I accept that slow big casts aren't a mechanical identifier, then to me, Summoner is what I consider the "main wizard" of the game. While its super mobile and many hits are smaller, visually it really elicits this "I bring the big nukes" feel with its (if set to) giant summons and big flashy spell effects. And if we want more conventional caster play, we don't really have that in this game, so I might as well go by visuals.

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Originally Posted by Xanfer

Looking at all the creativity in Black Mage's new and improved ad-hoc rotations from the community, I am pretty excited seeing what might happen in the future.

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Huh? Square hates ad-hoc rotations and will figure out a way to remove it. Why are you excited about that?