Trying to decide whether I should play Samurai or play a BLM. BLM looks pretty fun, from the gear to the big explosions but is it good right now? In PVP and PVE? Easy Rotation? Fun to play?
Thanks in advance!
How is BLM?
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05-05-2021, 11:42 PMAiridenHow is BLM?
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05-05-2021, 11:49 PMKalaam
BLM is extremely good.
The rotation isn't that complex, but it changes several times over the course of your levelling. And you have to pay attention to your timers to keep it steady.
Since your goal is to move as little as possible, it'll be better to know the safe spots of fights pretty well to put down your leylines and stay in place to blast away. -
05-06-2021, 12:08 AMMagiusNecros
Easy to learn. Hard to master.
When you know the fight you know where to stand and just turret. -
05-10-2021, 10:11 AMAxzeriuth
BLM is very fun to play, especially when you get Flare at lvl 50. BOOOOM!!
I find BLM easy to learn because it's all about casting as much fire spells to use your mana then swapping to ice to regain mana. The spell interaction with the two stances change as you level up so theres a learning curve there.
The hard part to master is learning to use your procs to instant cast spells so you can move around when rquired and not interupt your casting. -
05-10-2021, 11:46 PMNYCLouisGamer
Good morning! Please explain what I am missing. Why is BLM considered easy to learn or even moderate in difficulty? It seems very hard to reach a base level of competency, considering the length of the opener alone!
https://www.akhmorning.com/jobs/blm/...eners/#openers
And the opener is something that can be memorized. I cannot imagine what happens when you have to then use a bunch of split-second decision-making for other stuff while using to tricks to squeeze out multiple Flares, unintuitive but brilliant ways to use low-level spells to take advantage of server ticks, etc.
Seems hard. -
05-10-2021, 11:58 PMKalaam
You are looking at it the wrong way.
You're looking at a raid optimized opener for a levelled up character, of course this'll look complicated because you don't know what the skills are. This is something you learn by playing. -
05-11-2021, 01:27 AMRisvertasashi
Your best bet is to just try the jobs yourself and see how you like them. This game minimizes the investment for this, with how easy it is to switch between them.
Don't worry about "meta" unless you're trying to join a world first raid group (But even if you were doing that, you'd want several jobs ready to go, not just one). -
05-11-2021, 03:30 PMFrizzeIt really is easy to learn though. If played right you have infinite resources so you always want to be casting if you can(and since you usually cant cast while moving, that means standing still as much as you can). You use fire stance to do damage, ice stance to regen mana(your entire bar in 2 server ticks at higher levels) - switching back and forth throughout the fight. Theres one DoT you should maintain for additional damage. Different spells are used in different situations(fire 2 isnt an upgrade of fire 1 - its an aoe spell instead), so you need to learn what they do and when they should be used. And then at higher levels you get one buff to maintain(buffs damage and gives access to strongest spells), and a couple others to learn when to use(with a couple different effects). And thats the whole class. Mastery is harder, as there is a lot of optimizing that can be done in terms of when you use skills and learning fights to allow for the most uptime. But at its most basic you spam a fire spell to run out of mana, then use ice to get back to full before you repeat - thats pretty easy to pick up.Quote:
Originally Posted by NYCLouisGamer
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05-11-2021, 07:35 PMTintQuote:
Originally Posted by NYCLouisGamer
It's easy to learn because the rotation is really simple.
Blizzard 3 > Blizzard 4 > Thunder 3 > Xeno
Is the hardest part to remember. That's the ice phase. Fire phase is basically just counting to 3:
Fire 3 > Fire 4 > Fire 4 > Fire 4 >
Fire 1 > Fire 4 > Fire 4 > Fire 4 > Despair
And everything starts from the beginning.
And to make it easier for new BLMs: Everytime you move (more than 1 second) just cast Fire 1 afterwards and then start counting to 3 again with the Fire 4s. That's not optimal play, but makes it easier to maintain your buff. Optimizing comes later... -
05-11-2021, 11:28 PMNYCLouisGamerThank you, Tint & Frizze! I will get over my fear and try out the BLM job this weekend. I have been secretly wanting to play it for some time!Quote:
Originally Posted by Tint
The biggest part that confuses me is Fire 1. It's like, why do we stick that in when we have access to F3 & F4? -
05-12-2021, 12:00 AMTintThe cast time and MP cost of Fire 3 is too big. You only use it to get the 3 stack Astral Fire buff and when you have a Firestarter procc, wich removes the MP cost and cast time from Fire 3. Same for Blizzard 3, you only use it to get the 3 stack Umral Ice buff.Quote:
Originally Posted by NYCLouisGamer
Fire 4 does not extend the timer of the Astral Fire buff. So you have to use Fire 1 after 3 (or at most 4) Fire 4 casts or your Astral Fire buff will run out. -
05-12-2021, 01:18 AMBrandedbladeFire 3 and Blizzard 3 are incredibly cheap (free once you get to level 72) and fast casting, but only when you're in the opposite element phase. Casting them in the same element phase makes them slow and expensive. So the purpose of Fire 3 and Blizzard 3 is to quickly switch your stacks over when you're done with your element phase.Quote:
Originally Posted by NYCLouisGamer
Tl;dr:
Fire 3: Use to switch to fire while in ice phase, or to move/deal damage with a Firestarter proc
Blizzard 3: Use to switch to ice while in fire phase.
Fire: Use to refresh your fire stacks while in fire phase.
Fire 4: Deals the most damage but doesn't refresh your fire stacks. -
05-12-2021, 02:09 AMLilyPendragonCompare that to a SMN opener and you'll see why people say it's easier to pick up. Rotationally BLM is not very complex, the complexity comes in decision making of when to use your abilities to mantain casting.Quote:
Originally Posted by NYCLouisGamer
Essentially you want to fit as many Fire IV's into your Fire phase as possible, casting a Fire I when the enochian timer ticks to around 3-4 seconds, and despair when you can't cast any more Fire IV (usually at 800 MP). After that it's Blizzard 3, a sharpcast (the blizzard 3 casts quickly enough for you to weave sharpcast without clipping your GCD), then Blizz IV > Thunder IV > Fire III (I believe this is also a weave window) > Repeat Fire phase.
The complexity is positioning yourself in such a way that you can cast Leylines as close to on cooldown as possible, and stay in them as close to their entire duration as possible as Leylines is a massive damage boost. Along with other things like only casting a single Fire I in your fire phase, not refreshing Thunder IV early without a damn good reason etc...
There's a reason there's a massive discrepancy between top Black Mages and bottom black mages (I think it's actually the biggest DPS discrepancy of all classes?), and that's not because of rotational complexity, it's simply because you have to know the fight inside and out, so that you can map out all of your instacasts and leylines to maintain as much Fire IV spam as possible. -
05-12-2021, 03:34 AMNYCLouisGamer
All of you should write ads for FFXIV :p
Now I am even more excited to try BLM! Thank you for clearing up my questions on BLM mechanics. I know there is more to learn but you definitely explained the toughest parts for me. I had no idea that only some of the Fire spells extend the astral timer. -
05-12-2021, 09:36 AMDaws
BLM is maybe the most well designed caster I've ever played. It's like playing the game in hard mode, though. I love it, but it can be tiring.
SAM is also fun. Easier, and more forgiving then BLM. Personally, I've found it hard to stick with a melee for long. I tend to prefer ranged. -
05-12-2021, 04:08 PMFrizzeIt sounds like you got this, but ill put a little bit of the math in a reply incase anyone searches up this topic and has more questions.Quote:
Originally Posted by NYCLouisGamer
So for Fire 4, the reason it cant be our only attack spell is that it doesnt refresh the astral fire buff window. If it was all we had access to, then our "burn" phase would be F4 F4 F4 F4 and then we would be at the limit of the timer and need to switch back to ice quickly to keep the Eno buff rolling(the alternative of only using 4 or 5 buffed spells every 30 seconds is much worse). We get 6 of these spells in(plus other spells) per cycle rather then 4 by using the rest of our toolkit.
The reason that Fire 3 doesnt take up the mantle of primary nuke is cost and strength. At full power Fire 3 is an approx 646 potency attack spell(base potency 240, 1.8 multiplier for astral 3, 30% boost for M&M trait, 15% boost for eno). It takes 3.5 seconds to cast, along with 4000 mana. At the same power level Fire 1 is an approx 484 potency spell(base 180 same boosts). It takes 2.5 seconds to cast, along with 1600 mana. So with F3 only your burn phase would last 7 seconds, would only be 2 spells before you couldnt continue, and would be roughly 1292 potency(or 184.6 pot per sec). With F1 only you end up with a phase that goes 15 seconds over 6 casts, and an approx potency of 2904(193.6 pps). Fire 1 also has the bonus of a 40% chance to give you a free cast of F3(no mana, no cast time - still triggers GCD though) raising the average value of an F1 cast(assuming all procs are used without being overwritten) to roughly 742 potency(so effectively a 212 pps rotation). But Fire 1 only still doesnt outpace the version Tint spelled out that included Fire 4(for comparison, Fire 4 is roughly 807 pot and the despair at the end of the cycle is roughly 1023 pot - for a burn phase with roughly 279 pps if we ignore the DoT you should have running). -
05-12-2021, 11:43 PMAlxyzntlct
As another new player to this game and one that just happened to pick BLM as their starting Job, I would like to thank everyone in this thread for both the thoughtful questions and incredibly helpful replies! I've taken notes on everything mentioned as like NYCLouisGamer said, I'm really looking forward to seeing what I can do with BLM.
^_^ -
05-13-2021, 02:17 AMzcrash970Adding my two cents here since I don't think anyone really said it.Quote:
Originally Posted by NYCLouisGamer
BLM is extremely easy to play and a job that anyone can pick up and play for most content.
Astral Fire for damage
Umbral Ice to restore mp after fire phase.
Keep thunder dot up.
That's essentially all there is to BLM. You add enochian and the mechanics associated to it as you get passed lvl55 but it will always boil down to fire, ice, and thunder.
The reason why everyone says BLM is hard to master is because it requires planning and fight mastery to optimize. Looking at BLM at a beginner level, you think that you lack any kind of movement and will get destroyed by aoes or lose a lot of DPS to move.
But BLM actually has a lot of movement options. Procs(firestarter and thundercloud), xeno, tripcast and swiftcast which all allow instant cast spells.
The idea of BLM is too maximize damage while keeping all unnecessary movement at a minimum. It sounds easy but FFXIV raiding requires a lot of movement and you need to learn when to use your abilities to not lose dps -
05-15-2021, 07:57 PMSylvainSo much so that I have to actively spend Xenos during ice phase otherwise I overwrite stacks. This is especially true on Diamond x(... all those wasted XenosQuote:
Originally Posted by zcrash970