"Future battle design may cause difficulty with casting spells"

It's hard to describe how frustrated I am at the explanation for Black Mage's changes.

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"Future battle design may cause difficulty with casting spells, so we have shortened the cast time for a variety of actions."

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"Furthermore, the effect expiration of Astral Fire and Umbral Ice has been largely detrimental to attack power in situations where players must interrupt casting to address battle mechanics."

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I feel like this should be self-explanatory, but the players who kept playing BLM instead of switching to another job liked this. They liked the additional difficulty of casting spells, and they liked trying to manage Astral Fire in the midst of battle mechanics. It provided them with a challenge that they found engaging. BLM players voluntarily chose to play a job that was more demanding and more punishing than others, because that experience was satisfying to them.

But you're so focused on "attack power" that you've lost sight of the fact that players play games because the moment-to-moment experience of playing makes them feel something. The damage output is just a contrivance, a carrot that players chase to give them an extrinsic motivation to engage with the fundamental game loop that is the actual source of their enjoyment. As game designers, I feel like you should know that.

And yet, instead of balancing these new mechanics around the game's existing jobs, you elected to remove multiple core aspects of BLM's game loop in a way that impacts the entire game for BLM players.

FF14 developers, for a decade you have managed to successfully design battle content that BLM players were enjoying.

What made you give up now?

I cannot understate the extent to which removing these aspects from BLM removes something valuable from the entire game. Whenever any player — BLM mains in particular — wanted to add a bit more engagement to a combat encounter, BLM was there to provide that additional layer of engagement. In that way, BLM allowed a wider variety of players to readily get access to a level of difficulty and engagement that was better suited to their needs. Now that option is gone, with nothing to replace it.

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

FF14 developers, for a decade you have managed to successfully design battle content that BLM players were enjoying.

What made you give up now?

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As much as I agree with the rest let's be honest here, this isn't a new problem.
Sure they may have made fights fun for BLM players, but for tanks and healers they haven't been in a long long time, you only see it now that it affects BLM specifically as well.

It's been the same combination of chariot, dynamo, proteans, towers, meteors, limit cut for at least three expansions now, they just increasingly stacked more of them on top of each other for years and their "new and improved" encounter design was to just make them faster.

I just can't agree that the dev team's lack of imagination for encounter design needs to result in the blm rotation being as complex as a healer's dps rotation without the healing.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

Sure they may have made fights fun for BLM players, but for tanks and healers they haven't been in a long long time, you only see it now that it affects BLM specifically as well.

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Oh, quite the opposite. I used to play plenty of other jobs, and the entire reason I no longer play them is that the game changed and they were no longer engaging. For me, BLM has been the only way to experience engaging FF14 combat for a long time.

Would I have preferred more? Absolutely. But one job was at the very least enough. I could play the game and have a good time with this one job: Black Mage.

But with these changes, that's no longer the case, and there are no other jobs to retreat to.

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

It provided them with a challenge that they found engaging

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This works well, in a single player game like Dark Souls. This is an MMORPG. A certain basic level of cohesion and balance is expected. If 25 out of 26 jobs require X amount of casting, then 26 can require a lot more, but not crazy amounts more. If the newer the job the less casting it requires, it'd be for the in-that-context oldest design (requiring the most casts) to not be next to get updated.

And as you yourself state just a few lines further on, this BLM design held the entire encounter design hostage. That's just not good game design in a game with so many jobs. Plus, let's not forget, BLM already didn't feel like a turret caster or a big badaboom caster, owing to tons of instant cast / movement options, anemic spell visuals and audio and fairly tepid damage numbers, coupled with a massively overloaded hotbar that also further reduced the felt impact of spells since each one only contributed a small portion to the overall package.

Am I annoyed at the changes? For sure. Because they don't go remotely far enough. The whole job needs scrapping, taking "Big Badaboom caster" as a concept back to the drawing board, and re-implementing it from the ground up. I mean they kinda did that already, but do it again without the paint can in the mix.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

This works well, in a single player game like Dark Souls. This is an MMORPG. A certain basic level of cohesion and balance is expected. If 25 out of 26 jobs require X amount of casting, then 26 can require a lot more, but not crazy amounts more. If the newer the job the less casting it requires, it'd be for the in-that-context oldest design (requiring the most casts) to not be next to get updated.

And as you yourself state just a few lines further on, this BLM design held the entire encounter design hostage. That's just not good game design in a game with so many jobs. Plus, let's not forget, BLM already didn't feel like a turret caster or a big badaboom caster, owing to tons of instant cast / movement options, anemic spell visuals and audio and fairly tepid damage numbers, coupled with a massively overloaded hotbar that also further reduced the felt impact of spells since each one only contributed a small portion to the overall package.

Am I annoyed at the changes? For sure. Because they don't go remotely far enough. The whole job needs scrapping, taking "Big Badaboom caster" as a concept back to the drawing board, and re-implementing it from the ground up. I mean they kinda did that already, but do it again without the paint can in the mix.

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If the fight design isn't going to let casters cast, well maybe it's the fight design that's a problem.

But it's all kind of irrelevant anyway, because EW BLM and DT BLM had more than enough movement options to handle those fights, and no one can convince me that M1-M4S or FRU were unable to be handled on BLM's kit. The same goes for the normal mode raids that were just released.

The job was fine in Endwalker, and it was fine in 7.1. And before someone comes at me with "but think about the new players!!!", there were multiple ways to make the job easier for newer players or lesser skilled players to do well on while also preserving BLM's identity and depth. SE simply chose (or was unable) to make those changes and instead decided on this massive simplification.

I disagree wholeheartedly with the premise that the encounter designers have been holding back due to the limitations of BLM. I mentioned in another post most recent examples TOP P6, Superchain, purgation, natural alignment, Manifold flames, fourfold flames require heavy movement that BLM still managed to overcome. I would argue it's up to the players to figure out rather than force developers to tip toe a design with 1 job in mind. The reasoning for BLM changes just does not make sense to me.

What I believe to be the case is they are worried about troublesome gameplay in general, so at first they watered down encounter design to ease tension on gameplay, and the community complained about that. In order to maintain the same, low level tension, they are upping the designs on encounters a little but watering down job designs to compensate and keep things at a certain level. But this sort of mentality is the problem to me.

I'm starting to think this game isn't for me anymore. I personally enjoy classes being different with strengths and weaknesses, ff14 lacks that.

As cool as a encounter can be, nothing will be good for me unless both class and encounter design is a focus.

I don't even think the slidecast distance on Fire IV has more than doubled for me. The main problem with casting remains a fast mechanic showing up under my feet when I've just barely started, something I can't always slide out of, but I can always solve by just eating a relatively minor damage loss and doing better on the next pull. I took triplecast off my bar to do the normal raids and didn't even end up missing it because so much of the blm kit is -already- instant, so is this consideration meant to literally only be for the savage version?

Maybe you guys should go and play classic WoW, i suggest to play a destruction Warlock, your entire raid evening will be standing around and spamming Shadowbolt, Shadowbolt, Shadowbolt....
True caster gameplay.

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Originally Posted by Rithy255

I'm starting to think this game isn't for me anymore. I personally enjoy classes being different with strengths and weaknesses, ff14 lacks that.
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The only MMORPG that ever had that was Classic WoW.