Scared to try black mage

Just as the title says, extremely scared/worried about trying another role. I leveled monk to 80 and while I'm loving the job, I want to try different things. I got THM to 12 and unlocked Arc but I'm worried about stepping into these roles. Dnc has been fun but I feel like I suck because I do such tiny damage. Only time I didn't feel like I was bad was when I was grouped up with an ungeared sam and he was always number 4 on the hate list. And dead most of the time.

My question is I know blackmage is top deeps, but is it fun to play/easy to learn for a new player?

In my experience BLM Is the hardest DPS to play well by a long way. It requires you to know every fight extremely well so that you can minimise the amount you need to move in an effective way. There are amazing BLMs out there and it's awesome if you get one in a run. But awesome BLMs are few and far between

It's also not fun to play - for me - for the same reason. I am not in any way an awesome BLM, I don't have a script in my head for every fight in every dungeon, and so I constantly mess up my rotation and nerf my damage. Which I find not enjoyable at all

BLM in my opinion isn't that hard. It has a steady learning curve if you level it up naturally. It's incredibly simple at lower levels and starts to have depth at around 60...but not that much. At level 80, one of BLM's weakness which is mobility doesn't become much of a problem anymore, to a point it's the most mobile caster (dethroning SMN) in optimal play.

If you want to try out an easier caster, play RDM. SMN is said to be the most difficult out of the three so you might want so sit that out until you feel more comfortable with the caster role.

Black Mage is the easiest it has ever been. The worst part about the job is the leveling experience, it turns your optimal rotation on its side every 5-10 levels. It has a couple dead skills like Fire II, Blizzard II and Blizzard.

Once you hit 80 it all fits together nicely and its performs really well. HW Blackmage level difficulty is dead.

The biggest part about BLM is the biggest part about all classes! If you understand how to keep your GCD rolling [Also known as ABC, Always be casting!] youll be successful on any class, magical or physical.

https://images-ext-2.discordapp.net/...315&height=673

blm can be difficult, but in a different way to other jobs imo. Depending on the type of player you are, you may find it very difficult, or possibly even easier. Its the only dps in this game that plays like a caster imo. Something with longer cast times that just wants to anchor to the ground and become a turret.

The core rotation? Likely the easiest in the game. The difficulty comes from knowing how to move, and where to weave ogcds as there aren't many opportunities for blm to weave their ogcds, as well as times to modify your rotation to get more damage if a boss is about to jump (but i think every job deals with this in some way).

Its also hard to gauge how much you'll enjoy blm while leveling it up, as its play style changes a good bit through the levels.

Also, don't be afraid of the notion that blm has to know a fight very well to do well in it. Knowing a fight helps anyone, but to be able to adapt on blm in a fight while you're learning it you just keep your mobility options available and do mild tweaks on the second run to optimize a little more damage if you can identify spots to. General rule while you're at level 80 learning a fight is to just keep at least one polygot ready, and that can give you a gcd's worth of movement on demand without any clipping. Keeping a triple cast open can weave that xeno into a triple, into a swift, to a sharp fire off the swift to get an ensured fire 3 proc. That's 6 gcd's of movement, 7 if you have another polygot open, so it can be very mobile if you set yourself up for it. Theres a lot of fine tuning you can do on a fight, but playing it safe the first time through wont really hurt your damage much.

Blm is only hard if you try to maximize is up too 100% and even so its not the hardest as some people say (just need difference adjustment for every fight) but atm even if you perform badly it'll probably on oar with an okay smn/rdm, so... just fire iv things :p

Thanks for the replies. I'll look into all of that and if possible keep you guys updated. So far at 12 I'm getting the hang of it but I'll keep note that it changes in higher levels. So far now it's kindof relaxing compared to my monk. Tho the cast times is something I'm getting used too.

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Originally Posted by monk-dps

Thanks for the replies. I'll look into all of that and if possible keep you guys updated. So far at 12 I'm getting the hang of it but I'll keep note that it changes in higher levels. So far now it's kindof relaxing compared to my monk. Tho the cast times is something I'm getting used too.

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It'll feel really clunky until you get fire 3 and blizzard 3. After that it at least flows well enough.

The difficulty of black mage doesn't come from the rotation, which I find really easy, but from the requirement of fight knowledge, and even that is not so set in stone now that you have more free movement utilities than ever, I wouldn't be scared, it's not that hard, it's just that it's difficulty comes from entirely different place than most dps.

If it's fun to play and easy to learn is subjective to the person.

My suggestion is to stop being afraid, pick up the job and learn it and decide for yourself. Just make sure to read your skill descriptions to know your AoE rotation and single target rotation. When you get to about 60 go and look up a video or seek guidance on optimizing the rotation. No one picks up a class and instantly knows how to play it and everyone makes mistakes while trying to optimize the class in different situations. If anyone else tells you other wise, their lying.

I had no idea how to play Black Mage and still don't have much, always leveled the job at 70 and sleep on it, not touched in 2 years and all I could remember was the Flare spam for aoe.
It's a very difficult job to learn at first but once you get the grip, it's very satisfying to play and feels natural. For sure it's not as easy or simple as the Red Mage.
You only need to grab the logic of "Fire" and "Ice" phases, once it's done, there's no difficulty anymore

Don't be afraid to try it, if you level it from the start to 80 I'm sure you'll grab the mechanics very fast!

I'm not someone who believes Black Mage is some super hard class that only 1337 G4M3R$ can master, but with that said, going from a melee to BLM will require serious adjustments and practice. Ultimately that's what it comes down to, just getting used to the playstyle of different jobs and roles

As someone who has picked blm few weeks ago, i'd say only first step was hard - you drop gcd on rdm you lose gcd, you drop gcd on blm you lose enochian; but after that it was on par (have to be focused not to unbalance mana/lose enochian, preposition on dualcast/instants or slidecast) or even easier than rdm (less rng, less distractions without having to monitor party list)

As for fun factor, i'm way too biased :)

https://i.imgur.com/hnSpJhw.gif

I have my Black Mage around level 60 I believe.

What I can tell is in order to play Black Mage you have to learn a quite in depth and complicated skill rotation. (At least for me it is.)
Black Mage is considered the turret mage so it requires you to stand on one spot as much as possible.

Also Black Mage lacks mobility by a lot and is extremely squishy.
So a boss AoE attack will hurt extremely much if not avoided.

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Originally Posted by Amaterasu_

I have my Black Mage around level 60 I believe.

What I can tell is in order to play Black Mage you have to learn a quite in depth and complicated skill rotation. (At least for me it is.)
Black Mage is considered the turret mage so it requires you to stand on one spot as much as possible.

Also Black Mage lacks mobility by a lot and is extremely squishy.
So a boss AoE attack will hurt extremely much if not avoided.

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The rotation isn't complicated at all. It's actually the simplest, easiest rotation in the game to teach anyone short of teaching people a healer's AoE rotation.

BLM exemplifies the concept of "Easy to learn, hard to master," however, because it's very much a low skill floor high skill ceiling job, and has been since SB. All of its difficulty comes from adapting its very basic rotation into hostile situations. And let me tell you, the current raid tier is not friendly to Black Mages, at least E3S and E4S. It's not irredeemably difficult, but it's not easy and I still haven't been able to optimize the rotation on those fights to my liking, sometimes having to move like a peasant or drop Enochian because I'm not reacting to the situation correctly or RNG decides to screw me over.

Though to anyone that thinks the class is unapproachable, just approach it anyways. The class is insanely fun if you like it, and if you don't, well, you at least get to understand exactly why others might like it. You don't need to be 99th percentile to enjoy the class. Though I would caution anyone who wants to play it that it prefers people who have a good memory above all else, since you do need to custom tailor it to every single fight, so memorizing how to react to mechanics is very important.

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Originally Posted by Amaterasu_

I have my Black Mage around level 60 I believe.

What I can tell is in order to play Black Mage you have to learn a quite in depth and complicated skill rotation. (At least for me it is.)
Black Mage is considered the turret mage so it requires you to stand on one spot as much as possible.

Also Black Mage lacks mobility by a lot and is extremely squishy.
So a boss AoE attack will hurt extremely much if not avoided.

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60... You just learned Enochian, Ice IV and Fire IV.
It's actually the least difficult rotation out of all BLM iterations, I still don't understand how ARR rotation was supposed to work (Spam fire for procs?).

The very basic rotation is:
Ice III -> Enochian (If not up) -> Ice IV -> Thunder III -> Fire III -> Fire IV * 3 -> Fire -> Five IV * 3 -> Repeat

The only tricky parts are the Thunder procs, the use of Sharpcast and that Fire IV doesn't reset Astral Fire duration.

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Originally Posted by CKNovel

60... You just learned Enochian, Ice IV and Fire IV.
It's actually the least difficult rotation out of all BLM iterations, I still don't understand how ARR rotation was supposed to work (Spam fire for procs?).

The very basic rotation is:
Ice III -> Enochian (If not up) -> Ice IV -> Thunder III -> Fire III -> Fire IV * 3 -> Fire -> Five IV * 3 -> Repeat

The only tricky parts are the Thunder procs, the use of Sharpcast and that Fire IV doesn't reset Astral Fire duration.

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ARR's rotation was basically a proc-based rotation. It worked like this.

Fire 3->Thunder 1 (opener)->Fire 1 'til low on mana (about 600 at level 50, pre-MP changes) bliz 3->thunder 1->bliz 1 (if you need to delay for MP)->fire 3.

The ways procs worked are: If you get thundercloud, use Thunder 3 AFTER fire 1, if you get fire 3, DO NOT INTERRUPT FIRE 1 to cast it, even if you lose a proc you still fire 1'd and then fire 3'd. Thunder 3 can also be used during ice which lets you push your MP even lower (like 215ish required to T1, but otherwise you can just instant thunder 3). Thunder 2 was not used at all in the BLM rotation once T3 was acquired.

The rotation was actually made possible to do as of ShB, whereas in SB it was broken due to MP and T1-3 merging changes (couldn't get as many fire 1s without losing out during UI phase). But if you want a good impression of what it was like, RDM is basically how it was intended, but not how it actually was. They screwed up firestarter as a proc because by the time you noticed it procced, it was too late (they since sped it up, but still too fast for most people to notice in time and get) and, well, most of the worst aspects of Black Mage's class design is caused by legacy ARR mechanics before it was turned into the HW+ rotation. It's really hard to work in procs when your rotation is so set in stone and time-limited. Plus at this point, I just wish Sharpcast was a trait that worked on every fire 1, because I basically just use it on UI->AF transition at all times now. But I digress.

That's basically how it worked. Procs broke up what was basically fire 1 spam.

The main problem of BLM is that you get punished for messing up a lot.

When you move you can't cast, so no damage.

While moving your Astral Fire timer just keeps running, so you now have to replace a Fire 4 with a Fire 1 to refresh the timer, wich means you further lose damage.

If you was moving out if your Ley-Lines you also will lose damage. With a bad timing on the Ley-Lines you can waste them completely.

When Enochian drops you are really screwed and basically have to restart your rotation with a weak 3.5 seconds cast. Bonus points if it happens right after you have used Enochian, like in the opener, you are now stuck in the 2.0 rotation!
And of course you lost the timer for your Polyglot.


While the job is actually not that hard to play, one mistake can lead to a cascade of damage loss >.>

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Originally Posted by Amaterasu_

I have my Black Mage around level 60 I believe.

What I can tell is in order to play Black Mage you have to learn a quite in depth and complicated skill rotation. (At least for me it is.)
Black Mage is considered the turret mage so it requires you to stand on one spot as much as possible.

Also Black Mage lacks mobility by a lot and is extremely squishy.
So a boss AoE attack will hurt extremely much if not avoided.

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Those things aren't really true though... The rotation is really simple really and while blm does benefit from minimal movement, it has a shit ton of tools nowadays for movement, swiftcast, triplecast, xenoglossy and procs. Also blm is not anymore "squishy" than any other caster (or pretty much any other non-tank for that matter, although technically the defense stats are a little different)

Black Mage isn't at all hard. The rotation is simple throughout its entirety as others have said. Though I've heard here and there that the AoE rotation still a foreign concept to some level 80's out there.

Movement becomes less and less of an issue once you learn to look at Swiftcast and later Triplecast as not only burst/frontloading options, but as movement options. Our HP pool is the same as all other DPS Casters and is dependent on gear.

Also, if you REALLY don't want to move for a moment, and you know a certain AoE isn't going to do something wacky like debuff or outright kill you... Pull a "Healers Adjust" move and use Manaward. Out of all the DPS Casters, as far as I remember, we're the only ones with a self-shield to mitigate damage.

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Originally Posted by Souijinn

Also, if you REALLY don't want to move for a moment, and you know a certain AoE isn't going to do something wacky like debuff or outright kill you... Pull a "Healers Adjust" move and use Manaward. Out of all the DPS Casters, as far as I remember, we're the only ones with a self-shield to mitigate damage.

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Summoner says "hi." Though you should almost never be in a situation where you CAN easily cast the barrier at will, it's still there.

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Originally Posted by Souijinn

Black Mage isn't at all hard. The rotation is simple throughout its entirety as others have said. Though I've heard here and there that the AoE rotation still a foreign concept to some level 80's out there.

Movement becomes less and less of an issue once you learn to look at Swiftcast and later Triplecast as not only burst/frontloading options, but as movement options. Our HP pool is the same as all other DPS Casters and is dependent on gear.

Also, if you REALLY don't want to move for a moment, and you know a certain AoE isn't going to do something wacky like debuff or outright kill you... Pull a "Healers Adjust" move and use Manaward. Out of all the DPS Casters, as far as I remember, we're the only ones with a self-shield to mitigate damage.

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Summoners technically have a shield too. But manaward is the strongest defensive move in the game that is used by a class that isnt a tank. Ive lost count of the number of times the tank has died to something, agro comes for me, i pop ward, and i negate all the auto-attacks while the healer gets the tank back on its feet. If the healer is quick enough with the raise/tank with the aggro regaining moves(and i was quick enough with the ward) i often end up taking 0 damage in these situations. And even when that isnt the case and i get knocked around a little, the ward almost always lasts long enough for an awake healer to get the tank back up and toss out a heal or two.

since pet-groomer won’t fight with Titan this is „kinda“ true : /