Black Mage Casting Glitches

I just wanted to compile glitches I've seen with BLM that greatly reduce the "fun" of the class.

1. When entering the astral fire/umbral ice stance with enochian up, the respective fire/ice 4 spells remain disabled for a brief period of time. This breaks the game's mechanism that allows the next skill to be queued up pre-emptively allowing for smooth, relaxed skill usage, even during moderate latency. Watch any video of a BLM on YouTube as the furiously mash on the disabled fire 4 button until it finally activates. It is very stressful and broken by comparison.

2. When casting fire 1, firestarter procs are delayed such that it is possible for 2 firestarter procs to merge into a single firestarter opportunity because the firestarter opportunity only becomes available once the next fire 1 cast is in progress.

3. When astral fire 3 runs out during the cast of fire 1, the BLM is returned to an unpredictable astral fire state. It would feel better if I was always put into the AF state in effect at the beginning of the cast.

4. It is possible for astral fire to run out during a transpose (an instant cast skill) leaving the BLM in what is usually a state where they have 0 mana.

5. If astral fire, umbral ice or enochian drops in the middle of the cast of a dependent skill, the cast is interrupted. Again it would feel smoother and be less susceptible to latency if it simply prevented the skill from being used again rather than interrupting the current cast.

Just some minor cleanup to the sub-second timings could make BLM a lot smoother to play and a lot more resilient against latency. I think this would result in it being much more fun than it currently is.

No.

BLM is already a high DPS class, it should require good management from the player.

Some of these issues, like transpose not working due to loss of stacks or losing stacks while casting Fire IV/Bliz IV could be avoided by just being a better BLM.

We don't need BLM to get any buffs to make the skill ceiling even lower



Also as to the Firestarter thing: There is literally no way to change that without opening up possible abuse.

When would you want Firestarter to proc? Right as you cast? Because then people could find a way to just tap Fire 1, and if it procs Firestarter, cancel it and just use Firestarter instead.

It HAS to hit the enemy to proc or else it'd be broken. And since BLM Spells have decently long cast times, the stacking of two procs is inevitable.

yes, let's let the skill floor/ceiling dictate whether we protect classes from latency issues. if we give firestarter the straight shot treatment then people's cats will raid on blm for them while they play other games and that is simply unacceptable.

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Originally Posted by Tsilyi

yes, let's let the skill floor/ceiling dictate whether we protect classes from latency issues. if we give firestarter the straight shot treatment then people's cats will raid on blm for them while they play other games and that is simply unacceptable.

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Heavy shot has to hit before Straight shot procs.
Due to animation, before WM, Heavy shot would appear to instantly proc Straight Shot.
But in reality, the hit of heavy shot was already decided server side, and was proccing it.


Here, we're talking about a spell (Fire 1) that has a 2+second cast time (Vs Heavy Shot with 1.5 or less cast time on BRD with WM, or instant before WM). Or even compare it to Split Shot on MCH with GB. Those have lower cast times such that you can see the proc before your GCD is up.

They can't make it proc earlier unless they decided to check if your spell hits well in advance of the animation actually HITTING



Not to mention that every class has their own little latency things to deal with (See SMN and waiting for Bane after Bio) or other little annoyances caused by other issues (Animation delay for Benediction/Hallowed Ground).

Welcome to FFXIV, learn to adapt and make yourself a better player, don't wait for devs to make your job easy mode.

1. I'm going to furiously mash the buttons regardless. Ain't no gamer out there that pushes limits that's zen as all !@#^.

2. Firestarter already procs on cast. It just doesn't register onto your character until the animation finishes, or you use an instant abilty or spell like Scathe or Thundercloud to 'force' it to show.

Hell, if it actually procced on the animation instead, that would have made it so you could chain firestarters.

3. It's not unpredictable. If fire finishes casting before your stacks wear off, you get the bonus damage and reset at stack 3. If it finishes after, you don't. It's that simple.

4. The easy fix is avoid situations where a transpose that fails due to latency leaves you without at least enough MP for blizzard 1.

5. As it should be.

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Originally Posted by Ashelia_Ferron

Not to mention that every class has their own little latency things to deal with (See SMN and waiting for Bane after Bio) or other little annoyances caused by other issues (Animation delay for Benediction/Hallowed Ground).

Welcome to FFXIV, learn to adapt and make yourself a better player, don't wait for devs to make your job easy mode.

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are you ok? let's not fix anything! certainly not latency issues. why can't we fix everything? i have no problem playing my jobs, as i play summoner and am familiar with the fester interaction, &c., but why are you not in favor of fixing things? This is how the game works now, and players adapt, but wouldn't it be better if we didn't have to adapt to things that are not player error? other games can do it, certainly ffxiv could at some point.

what i'm getting at is this: yes, i can and other players can and will work around the issues with latency involved in this game, but why not work slowly but surely toward a place where latency does not have as big of an effect?

There are times even with a decent connection that FS will have a slight delay even after the spell hits. Same thing with refreshing UI3/AF3 with F3/B3. So you have to wait a second before casting your next spell even though you always want to weave in spell after spell to be at optimal performance. It only serves to slow you down. Reason being the proc didn't reach the damn server yet.

If it was up to me I'd make FS proc on any Fire Spell except Fire 4. Since with TC they just said use any Thunder spell you want it'll eventually proc. With any one you use. And then people would cry about that.

Dunno why Ninja's got their latency fix if people are gonna have an issue with other classes getting the same deal.

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Originally Posted by Lendari

1. When entering the astral fire/umbral ice stance with enochian up, the respective fire/ice 4 spells remain disabled for a brief period of time. This breaks the game's mechanism that allows the next skill to be queued up pre-emptively allowing for smooth, relaxed skill usage, even during moderate latency. Watch any video of a BLM on YouTube as the furiously mash on the disabled fire 4 button until it finally activates. It is very stressful and broken by comparison.

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From the top of my head, you have to wait for the F3 animation before you get AF3 and that causes F4 to get delayed very slightly every time, but almost always you'd be in the middle of GCD anyway when this happens, so it's not a huge deal. I'd like the ability to queue that F4, though.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is a side-effect from the double Flare fix and sometimes-getting-fast-F1-after-F3-fix from back in the day.

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2. When casting fire 1, firestarter procs are delayed such that it is possible for 2 firestarter procs to merge into a single firestarter opportunity because the firestarter opportunity only becomes available once the next fire 1 cast is in progress.

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Intented -- you have to wait for the spell to land. Personally I would find it very annoying, if you had to check for FS proc after every F1 for optimal DPS. Slight annoyance at worst and practically never seen now with F4.

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3. When astral fire 3 runs out during the cast of fire 1, the BLM is returned to an unpredictable astral fire state. It would feel better if I was always put into the AF state in effect at the beginning of the cast.

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That depends on entirely when your AF runs out during your F1 cast and nothing else. Nothing unpredictable about it. I haven't given the second point any thought to form an opinion.

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4. It is possible for astral fire to run out during a transpose (an instant cast skill) leaving the BLM in what is usually a state where they have 0 mana.

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This is a problem problem with every instant cast, where you have to wait for all the hand waves and prayers to finish before anything happens. Has the potential to cause deaths and wipes in the case of healers and tanks. Fix please.

Another problem that can happen is when the Transpose effect happens before you get your AF3 stacks from Flare, and you're left stranded for a long time. Happens every time when you run out of AF during your Flare cast. Might be a server hiccup otherwise, and I can't remember the last time it happened without AF running out.

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5. If astral fire, umbral ice or enochian drops in the middle of the cast of a dependent skill, the cast is interrupted. Again it would feel smoother and be less susceptible to latency if it simply prevented the skill from being used again rather than interrupting the current cast.

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I'm pretty sure this is intented, but it's quite annoying when it happens nonetheless. A change would most likely end up being a DPS increase, as you could basically fit an extra spell into every rotation.

I guess the snarky response would be "L2P issues".

My two cents.

BLM player here since 2.0. I just want to respond to the glitches that you pointed out.

1. Played on constant 80ms and constant 400ms and I have never encountered this issue (also I play on a Japanese server from Europe and SEA). The only time I noticed the delay is when you cast Enochian when you already are in astral/umbral, or you're having ping time outs.

2. Known issue since 2.0.

3. You'll have to look at the remaining time on your astral fire. The only time that this happens is when you cast Fire 1 when you have 2 seconds left (depending on your SS) on Astral.

4. This happens when you have high latency (>200ms for me). Transpose is mostly used after Flare anyway so just wait a few milliseconds before using transpose.

5. Not a glitch. You need to check how much time you have left on your buffs factoring the cast time of your spells. Don't be afraid cancel spells just to keep your buffs up.

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Originally Posted by Lendari

I just wanted to compile glitches I've seen with BLM that greatly reduce the "fun" of the class.
[...]
Just some minor cleanup to the sub-second timings could make BLM a lot smoother to play and a lot more resilient against latency. I think this would result in it being much more fun than it currently is.

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I think you are confusing glitches with design intent.
Be aware that there is a .5-1.5s DELAY when it comes to UI elements, depending on the mood of the server. It is not directly related to latency as I play in EU on EU servers and have a latency of 30-50ms.

This awkward delay is esp notable when you are a healer and closely observe HP bars / debuffs. Sometimes I dispel and the debuff stays there for a second, making me wonder if the dispel went through.

The above is really annoying but like the abysmal 400ms position polling nothing we can somehow fix.
This should cover 1. 3. and 4. All of these happen because your UI is out of sync with what is happening on the server.

2.: intended design. Fire 1 ins a missile that has travel time. Proc only activates after travel time. No big deal.
5.: intended design. You are supposed to check whether the remaining buff time is enough in order to finish the cast. Imho the wrong route, they should have made it so that it is enough if you have the buff at the beginning of the cast and compensate numerically for the increase in DPS that would provide.

The timings of the buffs are extremely tight, esp when you don't have a lot of haste.
Add latency, UI delay and the absence of proper buff/debuff tracking mods that can visualize that in a more comfortable manner to that and you get one unfun mess of a class.

I have nothing against skill caps so crazy people can pull off wonderous feats. But BLM went from a smooth feeling class in 2.x to a clunky and frustrating exercise of "WATCH THAT TIMER!"

Even after playing 60 BLM for quite a while, I find the delay in availability of B4/F4 the most annoying thing, because it stops the smooth queueing of spells.

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Originally Posted by Lendari

2. When casting fire 1, firestarter procs are delayed such that it is possible for 2 firestarter procs to merge into a single firestarter opportunity because the firestarter opportunity only becomes available once the next fire 1 cast is in progress.

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At 60, there's no reason you should ever be in this situation; if you're casting Fire twice in succession, you failed to execute your Enochian rotation.
Sub 60, if a lost Firestarter opportunity is the deciding factor in a fight, the party has bigger problems than "BLM only got to use Firestarter once".

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Originally Posted by Lendari

3. When astral fire 3 runs out during the cast of fire 1, the BLM is returned to an unpredictable astral fire state. It would feel better if I was always put into the AF state in effect at the beginning of the cast.

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Originally Posted by Lendari

5. If astral fire, umbral ice or enochian drops in the middle of the cast of a dependent skill, the cast is interrupted. Again it would feel smoother and be less susceptible to latency if it simply prevented the skill from being used again rather than interrupting the current cast.

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Try moving your buff bar somewhere you can see it without moving your eyes too much. It tells you how much time is left on your buffs; plan your casts accordingly.
At 50, you'll never cast Fire as your Astral buff is wearing, since the BLM MO is to spam Fire.
At 60, because of MP constraints, you shouldn't run into any (rotation-normal) situations where Fire IV -> Fire -> Fire IV will result in being able to cast more Fire IVs than just casting Fire one action early. Cast it while there's still time, instead of trying to shoehorn it in as your buff's wearing.
But it's not the Fire part you really need to worry about; it's the Ice. If Umbral Ice wears mid Blizzard IV cast and everything before that went normally, then you need to drop an earlier action from your rotation. If Umbral Ice wore because of interruption/dodge, then make better use of your arsenal of BLM abilities with "Additional effect: What mechanics?". Eat a hit with Manaward/Manawall, slide-dodge to a party member with an Aetherial Manipulation macro, or prevent interruption with Surecast.

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Originally Posted by Lendari

4. It is possible for astral fire to run out during a transpose (an instant cast skill) leaving the BLM in what is usually a state where they have 0 mana.

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Every job has this problem, and it's a result of having every action validated by the server. It's more than an annoyance, sure, but it's working as intended.

I am a ps4 player, and something I noticed is that sometimes when I get a fire starter proc, and I press it, it'll start hard casting a fire3. Is that commonly known to happen?

I mean...

I haven't hit 60 on my BLM yet, but I'm fairly certain that every issue in this thread is solved by simply... dealing with it?

1- You can't F3>F4 so just do F3>F1>F4. It doesn't change much *and* gives you the potential of a F3 proc, which lets you use an additional F4 before having to cast another AF spell.

2- Firestarter isn't a thing at 60, since you should never be doing F1>F1 anymore. If you are, you lost Enochian, which is another way of saying "you messed up." Punishment for failing to properly execute your class.

3- You should really not be casting Fire that late in AF that you are left wondering which state you'll be in. It all depends what the state is when the cast finishes. If you don't have enough time left to finish the cast, don't cast it. Easy. Or just... don't get yourself in that situation. Swiftcast is a spell you have.

4- AF doesn't run out during Transpose. It runs out before you clicked Transpose. You need to be quicker hitting it, though I'm honestly very curious as to when this would ever be an issue, since your AF/UI should never be close to 0s when you use Transpose.

5- You shouldn't be casting B4 or F4 if your UI or AF or Enochian is going to wear off during the cast. You should have been using B4 a cast sooner. You should have been in UI two casts ago to re-activate Enochian. You should have been casting F1 or F3 a cast ago (or this current cast) to maintain stacks.

All of it is solved by simply dealing with these intended consequences for screwing up the way you're playing the class.


As for Chako above - no. That shouldn't be happening. The only reason it does is because you cast your F1 and waited for the proc to activate before hitting F3 immediately, which, besides being the wrong way to play the class, can result in the above issue, since you hit it in the time between "i saw the proc" and "the server registered the proc." The game functions on a heartbeat. You see things happen in real time, but the server only updates the information that i has once every 400-ish milliseconds. This means that, if your proc appears at the start of a heartbeat, you have 400ms where IF YOU HIT IT, the server will think you did not actually have that proc.


And last - Transpose and Convert sharing a cd is the absolute worst possible idea. Convert on a 12s cooldown would allow you to stay in Fire literally forever by just constantly using Convert, casting more fire spells, waiting a couple seconds, and converting again. Like - it should probably have a somewhat shorter cooldown, sure, but not the same length as Transpose - and Transpose shouldn't be any longer than it is, due to the reason you use it and how frequently you need to use it at lower levels to not be shit.

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Originally Posted by ChakoTako

I am a ps4 player, and something I noticed is that sometimes when I get a fire starter proc, and I press it, it'll start hard casting a fire3. Is that commonly known to happen?

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Yes that is typical. Even if you Sharp Cast a F1 and then immediately que F3 it will hard cast the F3 regardless of the guaranteed proc.

They really should address that like they did with the Straighter Shot proc timing for Bard while under WM. It is apparent they have the ability to do so, so why not.

When I played BLM my biggest thing was during my initial activation of enochian, when casting 5-6 fire 4's, when working on the transition from astral 3 to umbral 3, knowing full well that the astral 3 casting buff for ice spells would drop mid-cast of blizzard 3...on occasion...my blizzard 3 would get interrupted.

It wasn't all too regular of an occurrence but it was still sad because when pushing fire 4's out and leaving yourself 4-6 seconds to cast blizzard 3 into blizzard 4 and buff drops and you see your blizzard cancel. Blargity!

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Originally Posted by JackFross

I mean...

I haven't hit 60 on my BLM yet, but I'm fairly certain that every issue in this thread is solved by simply... dealing with it?

1- You can't F3>F4 so just do F3>F1>F4. It doesn't change much *and* gives you the potential of a F3 proc, which lets you use an additional F4 before having to cast another AF spell.

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Don't do that unless you have Sharp available. It turns your rotation into F1 - F4 - F4 - F1 - F4 without a Firestarter.

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Originally Posted by Judge_Xero

Yes that is typical. Even if you Sharp Cast a F1 and then immediately que F3 it will hard cast the F3 regardless of the guaranteed proc.

They really should address that like they did with the Straighter Shot proc timing for Bard while under WM. It is apparent they have the ability to do so, so why not.

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Because arrows don't have travel time, duh.

[QUOTE=Judge_Xero;3489777]Yes that is typical. Even if you Sharp Cast a F1 and then immediately que F3 it will hard cast the F3 regardless of the guaranteed proc.

Ya, I was going to say it's happened a few times when I've sharp casted a fire starter too. Well it's not a huge deal, I still love the class and plan on keeping it my main:)

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Originally Posted by Judge_Xero

They really should address that like they did with the Straighter Shot proc timing for Bard while under WM. It is apparent they have the ability to do so, so why not.

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They don't, really. Nothing is different with the proc time. It's the ability timing. Wanderer's Minuet and Guass Cannon give waste-less procs because their abilities are 1.5s cast, 2.5s recast. Having a 1.5s cast time on Fire would make Lv50 sync content stupid easy on BLM.

The best response to this thread would just be time and skill management. I mean, any of those changes and BLM would just blow everything up at all times with no consequences. I've mained BLM since 2.0 and never have a problem. I mean, if there is a bit of latency? Maybe I needed to move? Or maybe I clipped my spells too close and my Enochian timer fell. Guess what? You deal with it. Sometimes you can pull yourself out of it and sometimes you have to do your rotation of shame (2.0 rotation).

Honestly, none of this should be a big deal. And really, if you hit the Sp.S threshold (which I think is like 670 something? I can't remember) then you should be able to do your rotation just fine with no issues. Practice more. That's all I can say.

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Originally Posted by JackFross

I mean...

I haven't hit 60 on my BLM yet...

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Your point 1) makes no sense as that is not how F4 works. F4 can never be cast with proc from F1. It's only requirements are Astral Fire and Enochian.

2) Firestarter is still a thing, it's the only way to get 6 f4's off in your opener. And it helps in your second rotation too.

3) It's inevitable that sometimes you won't know what state you're going to be in every time you case F1 with Astral Fire dropping off.

4) AF does run out during transpose. It's annoying as hell. It runs out during the animation before granting UI.

5) It's pretty hard to tell if you're going to lose Enochian or UI or AF during cast as sometimes 3 seconds remaining is enough time, sometimes it is not.

Further the lag time on the F4 proc after AF is annoying.

These are QOL buffs not skill affecters.

It's not a skill problem, it's a latency problem.

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Originally Posted by FunkyBunch

These are QOL buffs not skill affecters.

It's not a skill problem, it's a latency problem.

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First off, Jack's responding to someone, not throwing up a new list.

1. She doesn't say that.
2. She's responding to overlapping Firestarters
3. You will always know the state you're going to be in. If Fire finishes before AF runs off, you stay in AF. If it doesn't, you don't. It's not random.
4. It doesn't. You didn't activate the ability soon enough.
5. It's really not.

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Originally Posted by Ashelia_Ferron

They can't make it proc earlier unless they decided to check if your spell hits well in advance of the animation actually HITTING

Not to mention that every class has their own little latency things to deal with (See SMN and waiting for Bane after Bio) or other little annoyances caused by other issues (Animation delay for Benediction/Hallowed Ground).

Welcome to FFXIV, learn to adapt and make yourself a better player, don't wait for devs to make your job easy mode.

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Fair enough, but a good deal of those are due only to purposeful design.

Have you seen how fast Greased Lightning procs from a Rock Breaker that may have missed? Before the animation finishes. It's not like the server has to actual wait for the projectile animation to cross over to the mob to calculate whether it will hit.

That said, BLM becoming unable to waste Firestarters would be a pretty huge and unnecessary buff prior to level 60, and would frankly make the job less interesting to me, given that I liked using oGCD weaves to deal with it, etc (the mere fact that oGCDs would allow you to proc Firestarter early should be a queue that the time before you have access to Firestarter has been purposely prolonged by design...).

That said, the other changes (more responsive Transpose, F4, B4) mentioned here largely lie within latency-safety / QoL. Would like it if B4 would end casting instantly if Enochian drops rather than completing the cast before fizzling.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

First off, Jack's responding to someone, not throwing up a new list.

1. She doesn't say that.
2. She's responding to overlapping Firestarters
3. You will always know the state you're going to be in. If Fire finishes before AF runs off, you stay in AF. If it doesn't, you don't. It's not random.
4. It doesn't. You didn't activate the ability soon enough.
5. It's really not.

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No, I will explain better.

1. I read that wrong, my bad.

2. I understand now, again not how I read it.

3. I'm talking about latency here. I can do the exact same rotation and sometimes I will lose my AF3 and other times I will not.
It only ever seems to refresh as AF1 when someone is lagging.

4.Transpose, you can look at the combat logs. It will go Transpose, -AF, Transpose has no effect. It happens that you lose it after you are already casting Transpose. Very rare, but happens.

5. I don't like to have to base my rotations on if there's a laggy server or group that day. Usually first pull in the dungeon/raid I can tell if I'm going to have a full rotation or a laggy rotation (meaning I have to drop a spell or proc at some point for optimal DPS).

Just because it doesn't happen to everyone all the time doesn't mean it's not an issue. The scenarios I'm talking about happen to me very, very rarely. But they still happen.

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Originally Posted by Rongway

They don't, really. Nothing is different with the proc time. It's the ability timing. Wanderer's Minuet and Guass Cannon give waste-less procs because their abilities are 1.5s cast, 2.5s recast. Having a 1.5s cast time on Fire would make Lv50 sync content stupid easy on BLM.

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Even with the 1.5s Recast the BRD SS Procs were severely delayed while under WM until SE adjusted the timing of the proc.

They could change F1 to a 2s Cast and maintain the 2.5s Recast to tighten the proc timing. All that would add is a bit more movement through slide casting at sub 50, which I doubt would be game altering.

Also lvl 50 sync content is stupid easy anyway...