The 7.2 Black Mage Changes Are Counterproductive

My quick tl;dr: The Black Mage changes in 7.2, particularly the deletion of the Enochian timer, serve no one. They do not encourage casual players to engage with the job, & alienate veteran players. The stated justification for these changes is not relevant, as we had movement options already if players were willing to plan. Please restore Enochian at least, even if the timer is 16s-19s.

I will give more of my thoughts below.

1. My credentials - I have been playing endgame since HW & I have dozens of clears of Arcadion LHW as BLM, as I became quite enthusiastic about the 7.1 iteration of the job.

2. The timing of these changes is extremely poor. If these changes had to be made (and they did not) then 7.3, 7.5, or 8.0 would have been slightly more acceptable than 7.2. Now the 7.1 iteration of BLM is completely gone from the game without us even having a full new tier beforehand.

3. The changes themselves are not all horrible. The infinite F3 & Thunder procs are welcome, actually, but are near pointless in the new rotation. The cast times I like less, however I would have adjusted...

4. Had Enochian not been removed. This change truly baffles me. The entire job is designed around Enochian+refreshing it. Without it, I find myself using at best 20% of the brain cells I needed to play the job before.

5. We already have the easy casters. SMN and RDM were far simpler than 7.1 BLM, & even PCT, while having a lot of skill expression, did not have the same level of near infinite flexibility & planning. The point of the job/class system in an MMO is to offer options. The other casters are better for new players/prog? That's okay. No need to flatten it all.

6. The stated justification makes no sense. I think this is a holdover from Endwalker, where Anabaseios punished BLM players by forcing heavy mechanics during burst windows & exhausting us of our movement tools.

7.1 BLM already addressed all this welll! There was no part of LHW where I felt I did not have a tool to manage movement, and even P1+P2 of FRU were highly accessible to me on BLM (I didn't go further).

Maintaining a bit depth in the game mechanics is important. The complex battle system of Heavensward was how I got into raiding in the first place. Most of those systems are long gone. BLM was really the last holdout, and now it's completely gutted. I'm so disheartened.

7. My final proposal for DT BLM:

A. Keep the Firestarter/Thunder procs.

B. Give each use of Leylines its own consumable Retrace buff.

C. Make Flare Star a guaranteed Direct Critical Hit.

D. Restore Enochian, if not at 15s then maybe 16/17/18/even 19s. This gives the risk/reward that was key to the job.

Final thought: I do not want to sit out this raid tier and while I do play many other jobs, BLM was my refuge to challenge myself. Now I am so devastated I am considering leaving my raid group's caster spot.

Complete agree. While I haven't played BLM much in savage, I did play it in extreme and normal difficulty dungeons. The challenge with movement and the reward of high damage was the reason I played and was the design of the job. Playing it now without the Enochian timer feels boring and the job is missing something.

I would only add 1 thing to the suggestions, and it would be for high fire II to have a use. Enhanced flare was good, dunno where it went.

SE has showed us that with all these micro changes and neglect of the aoe rotation, that they clearly have no vision where to go. Adding to that many of the changes where not made to improve the gameplay, but to shut down non standard rotation. SE, just give us the option to opt out of the DT blm and you can go on changing things until the playerbase prefers the new version.