Dawntrail BLM | I'm so tired

First and probably last time posting on the forums. I joined around EW and fell in love with high end raiding as BLM; my favorite memory was my first clear of P10s, managing my sharpcasts gave me a high unlike any other.

So now we're well into dawntrail, 7.0 neutered BLM, 7.05 only gave back a bit of what was taken, and 7.2 has truly put the nail in the coffin for any enjoyment I had for black mage. I aim to explain why these changes hurt so much.

7.0| AoE is in shambles, sharpcast is gone, and Ice paradox is mourned

Dawntrail started off oh so rough, BLM was reworked to the demand of seemingly no one. First, the positive:

MP Regen changes:
I was first a stern hater of this idea, but upon actually playing with it, it just necessitates 2 ice casts in ice phase. That messed up some short lines, but it was better overall imo.

Flarestar:
Many people also doomed at this, but I liked the idea of blm having a finisher, it was kind of the only way to properly expand on it (plus like, shortlines really shouldn't be higher dps than standard, the idea is to either have a shorter burst or to have far more mobility)
manafont
yipee more fire phase yipee!!


Now, the negatives

Ice para:
This change was oh so obviously made half-hazardly to kill short-lines, which really shouldn't be a goal of the dev team. Enough people complained that we actually got this back, thus my hope remains that we can revert 7.2 changes aswell.


AoE, enhanced flare:
This change stands as why BLM feels so wrong at lvl 100 content, High fire 2 and high blizzard 2 are a damage loss over literally skipping them. Instead of the nice and clean 3 fire 2 -> 2 flares we had in EW, we now have an incredibly dubious and dare I say "cursed" flare spam rotation that is not intuitive to find out without crunching some numbers. The worst part? its boring as hell to do compared to EW AND half of your AoE buttons are now obsolete. Nothing speaks "we don't know what we're doing" like flare being a faster cast than fire 2.

Sharpcast:
With the removal of sharpcast, thunder became a normal DoT thats somehow harder to maintain because you don't have control over it anymore, very upsetting.

Now we have 7.2, the bruised barely living black mage was finally shot and now anyone can get top damage with a glorified healer rotation. BLM is a job about managing timers, now the only timer is thunder, nothing remains for me to greed. In one patch, they removed the core gimmick of a class that has remained since ARR with no remorse for the players. I can only imagine this is how Summoners and Astros felt.

I've seen plenty of people happy to try blm, but it must be noted, you could've always picked up the staff. Doing bad on a job is the first step to doing good on a job, dropping enochian was a learning experience on how you can fix it later, messing up thunder uptime only invited oneself to strategize differently.

Thank you for posting these new and novel ideas in a separate thread so they don't mix in with wildly different takes in other threads.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

Thank you for posting these new and novel ideas in a separate thread so they don't mix in with wildly different takes in other threads.

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People should still be allowed to voice their opinion, if something seems to be reoccurring such as Job design issues and ruining jobs like black mage maybe its a actual problem with the game that needs to be looked at. Instead of ignored.

I agree, new BLM is still a massive step backwards that I would like to see fixed.

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Originally Posted by Rithy255

People should still be allowed to voice their opinion, if something seems to be reoccurring such as Job design issues and ruining jobs like black mage maybe its a actual problem with the game that needs to be looked at. Instead of ignored.

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Sure, but if these forums had actual moderators you'd still get an infraction for spamming threads about the same topic instead of posting in existing ones - and then the posts would get merged into the main thread.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

Sure, but if these forums had actual moderators you'd still get an infraction for spamming threads about the same topic instead of posting in existing ones - and then the posts would get merged into the main thread.

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JP forums just show that megathreads are awful because there is basically no way to track what’s already been said or what discussion happens before or after a particular milestone

All it leads to is discussion being dampened on any topic that’s not immediately brand new and you know that nobody has discussed it before, like their topic on cosmic

Despair was already a finisher and a good one at that being free-form. If all they could come up with is yet another finisher like so many other jobs, they couldve at least not made it so rigid and ruin BLM.

while i dont disagree with your points but i do find the current 7.2 fun.

background history:
my history of playing blm dates back to arr.
pretty much main blm, did/clear the coil raid except for T13.

only dabbled into HW's A1s but never cleared it. kinda took a break from 14 until SB.

cleared o1-7s as blm (did o1-4s on pf, its rough. got drag into by friend static to help with o5-7s then they stop after progging a bit in o8s). i then took a break until shb.

Did not bother raiding in shb until e9-12s came out because ptsd pf rading in o1-4s lol. When i did pf o9-12s i cleared it as rdm then went back on blm to reclear.

similar story for ew's p1-8s (rdm first blm later) but i stop at p9s since too many games came out during that tine frame thus I stop raiding.

When 7.0 came out, I really hated the changes.

Particularly the thunder and sharpcast. I get what the dev were trying to do in term of easing rng and extra level of dot management (from procs to mp and timer) but it wasnt fun at all when it comes to trying to recast thunder when you encounter new mobs while still in your ui or af rotation. i just like the old way of being able to cast as much thunder if i want to dot every new mobs. thats the advantage of sharpcast thunder.

2nd was the ice paradox was removed. the ice phase felt very bad without it. after what we had in ew, this change in DT was so detrimental.

so with the unhappy change and how it was so bad in dps compare to pct in 7.0 launch, i stop playing blm all together. the dev did update and gave back some qol change but i already stop playing blm.

7.2 came out and i wanted to try blm again. funny enough, i actually like this iteration of blm.

I too was one of the ppl that is very against to remove the ui/af timer because it kinda remove blm identity. You can check my old posted on blm threads.
But this 7.2 blm version had many qol changes already done to it, that somewhat made blm fun again, even with ui/af timer removed.

im gonna breakdown atleast why i find the removed timer is ok now and that it felt fun again.

yes, removing the ui/af timer does make it somewhat like healer rotation but back in arr, blm was one of the most easy job rotation you can play. and thus was even why i main blm lol. ( f3> f1 repeat. have swift off cd, then end af with a swift flare.)
blm grew on me. hw's blm roation was rough but the payoff was that its one of the jobs that does big dmg number per cast. the other job that can hit that high potency was war' felt cleave at the time. it was fun chasing that high dmg number lol.

so anyway, with the removed timer and paradox being instantcast, despair being instantcast, f3p has no expiration timer and f4 cast are now 2s;

this gave birth to freeing up triple and swift (no longer a dps gain to use with f4, other than maybe for movement advantage to not miss a cast during mechanica) to be used for despair (transpose+swift/triple) > b3. and with no af timer, means the fire paradox is not needed to refresh af, thus giving birth to the ability to from ui > instantcast spell (tranpose) > fire para > af1f3p is always available. well you can fire para later after the 2nd manafont. since you save the f3p generated from fire para after the manafont comes off the first 100s cd. which can be carry thru the whole ui phase.

in short, despair (transpose+swift/triple)> b3 >b4 > para/xeno/or th (tranpose) > para > f3p.

this right here made the transition from af to ui then back to af fun for me. it felt strong and nearly all is instantcast depending if you triple or not to make b4 a instantcast too.


as for the 2x flare +flarestar thing and skipping hf2/hb2. well, in sb, we already had similar rotation, where we do cold flare into more flare in dungeon for aoe. back then convert/manafont gave you enough to mp to flare again. so its basically double or (mp pot or convert) triple flare into foul every af phase.
its one of the fun dungeon rotation.

only in ew, where dev introduced hf2/hb2, which they need to add enhance flare, just so ppl need to use the new ability. otherwise they would have skip it again.

my only wish right now is that the dev can balance all aoe spell/ability where its a potency gain or even neutral for 2 targets vs using a single target spell when fighting only two target.

quite some amount jobs have aoe abilities that is potency gain or neutral on 2 target but there'a still some that you want to single target. ie, b4 over freeze in 2 targets.
might as well i want them to just universalize it, since now we have aoe abilities already a potency gain for 2 target.


another qol change i want the dev to do for blm is to reduce tranpose cd to 4s or even better yet 3s. this is because if your gcd is low and on top of being on LL, your ui phase could be shorter than the typical base 2gcd @2.5s (5s cs of tranpose).

with like a 3s cd for transpose, atleast when we cast b4 > paradox at a gcd lower than 2.35, the tranpose could be up and ready even when in LL.

funny enough, i was one of the ppl that suggested to reduce the transpose cd from (15 or 12s cd originally i think/could rember) back in sb. the reason was when i was doing shinryu ex and o3s, caster lb3 was the norm for adds. thus trying to maintain ui/af timer for polygot generation with tranpose was not possible after casting lb3. tranpose was the fastest way to continue the timer as casting b3/f3 the the opposite element still have a 1.75s cast time.

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Originally Posted by Komaru_Tatoro

as for the 2x flare +flarestar thing and skipping hf2/hb2. well, in sb, we already had similar rotation, where we do cold flare into more flare in dungeon for aoe. back then convert/manafont gave you enough to mp to flare again. so its basically double or (mp pot or convert) triple flare into foul every af phase.
its one of the fun dungeon rotation.

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I find AoE particularly boring now because you're barely pressing anything, it feels like an ARR rotation. Granted BLM AoE was always simple and F2 was looking for a purpose more often than not, but what I feel the most is the loss of triplecast. Flare being so slow made triplecast Flare a significant gain and I thought it felt good to have this option on hand to turn up AoE DPS on demand. It also broke up some of the monotony.

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my only wish right now is that the dev can balance all aoe spell/ability where its a potency gain or even neutral for 2 targets vs using a single target spell when fighting only two target.

quite some amount jobs have aoe abilities that is potency gain or neutral on 2 target but there'a still some that you want to single target. ie, b4 over freeze in 2 targets.
might as well i want them to just universalize it, since now we have aoe abilities already a potency gain for 2 target.

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This point is one I strongly disagree with and want to encourage the devs to avoid. 2 target situations are interesting because they're not uniform and don't line up with ST or 3+ AoE. Homogenizing this would be another huge loss for the game in my opinion. I'd even go so far as changing healers to have 2 target rotations. It's one of the few ways that the gameplay naturally breaks away from rigid rotations.

i dont disgree with having 2target variety of rotation is interesting but for the general mass of ffxiv players, they arent up to the know hows or keep up with balance discord's optimizing rotation/ability interpreting.

look at m6s. the add phase imo is one of the most interesting adds fight to date. (prev add phases where just simple bring add from point A to B then burn etc. m6s phase had alot going on with every player have a role to take part to clear that phase.)
but whats hindering the enjoyment in pf is that not alot of player know how to use their resource or priority targeting.
with some jobs already have the 2target gain on aoe, i thought might as well ease up these friction for all job/ability so that new players can easily do.

my point is, while rotation can be made easy, as long the dev make the add phase more engaging like m6s add, its fine.

some ppl may say m1-4s was so easy but you cant disargee that fact it is easy, it brought more players into trying it. thus as analogy, making 2target aoe abilities homogenize can reduce the friction for having more fun add phase fight with more things going on.

been thinking. thunderhead should have charges. like everytime you switch element, you gain 1 charge of th. this way we can double dot, which was my first complain i had when 7.0 launched.
hopefully dev read this and implement this in 8.0
we need to be able to use multiple thunderhead within an ui/af without manafont