I Reached Crystal Using Only BLM. AMA.

Took about 180 victories, many losses, and much learning. AMA

Congrats​​​​​​

I think there's just one question; Why?

Congratulations! Could you provide any tips for blm play? ^-^

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

Congrats​​​​​​

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Thanks :)

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Originally Posted by LeonKeyh

I think there's just one question; Why?

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In most things I tend to just play what I like without caring much about meta. Sometimes it works in my favor (Carl main in BB), sometimes not (Zato in Rev2).

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Originally Posted by CapnWeebleBug

Congratulations! Could you provide any tips for blm play? ^-^

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Thanks! Here's a few of the important things I learned while climbing.

General Notes:

Play the map objectives. Don't forget the wind, use the speedways, and pick up the damage orbs. It's actually more important than most people realize.

Do Not Die. Run from a fight if you must, but do your very best to simply stay alive. Aside from the obvious reason not to die, your limit doesn't recharge while dead, which is bad for any class, but super bad for BLM since a lot of your usefulness is tied to it. There's a reason it's a low CD.

Guard early. Don't wait until you're at 30% to activate guard. If you think you need to, just hit it. It blocks all CC too so it trumps just about everything.

Purify only when you're in danger. This just takes time to learn when to and when not to, but don't waste purify on a CC if you're in no danger. That WHM LB may have hit you, but you're not dying if there are no enemies around.

Play around your Guard and Purify. Don't be reckless if these abilities are down. Otherwise you're actually pretty annoying to lock down if played right.

Use Recuperate liberally and back off to refresh mana with Elixir if needed. It's way more useful to back off for 10s to regain mana, than it is to keep fighting with low mana. In higher tier players will target enemies with low mana, so don't let that be you.

Don't stack on the crystal if it's not at one of the stall points. Don't listen to those stupid people pinging, you only need one person to move the crystal, stacking more does nothing. Unless it's at a stall point, then you just need more people on it than the enemy has. But again, that really isn't your primary job to do. Go if you can, but don't risk yourself.

Always activate Sprint. If you aren't doing an action, you should be sprinting. There's no reason to not be sprinting all the time, as much as possible.

Keep a internal idea of what big crowd control abilities the enemy has used. You don't need to keep track of every CC timer every class has, but try to notice if they waste a CC or something. Like if a RDM uses silence on someone other than you, or War Primal Rends someone else. You know that CC is down for at least a little bit, so use that knowledge.

Glance at the enemy's mana if before you decide to chase a kill. This is good to glance at every now and the all the timen, but especially so before you try chasing down a fleeing enemy. Even with ice, chasing someone with 50% mana isn't worth being massively out of position for most of the time. They'll likely heal or get support before you can lock them down again. But if you do, have a Guard/AM exit strategy ready.

Also glance at enemy ult bars. Try to keep in mind who has ult, and play around that. Particularly so for SAM and DRG. You have to be super careful spamming AOE's when SAM has ult, or keep in mind that the DRG just used ult, and not a normal jump. That's actually one of my biggest peeves is with pvp right now, with how bad sound queues and visual clutter is. It's weird that SAM ult has almost no animation or sound, DRG limit has a thin transparent light blue marker that gets lost in all the other clutter, and yet BLM limit turns you into a bright purple walking target. The most reliable way to keep track of those is to watch their ult bar and just be super careful if they're up.

BLM Specific Stuff:

Fire is worthless, never use it. Seriously I cannot stress this enough. Resist all temptation to press Fire ever. Remove it from your bar if you must if you can't resist. You'll be better off.

Ice is probably one of the best CC's in the game because of how bind's work in pvp. Binding with Ice will stop all actions the enemy is currently doing, bind them in place, and most importantly, prevents them from activating Guard or Recuperate. A large amount of your usefulness comes from this. Keep all of this in mind when deciding when to Superflare.

Use limitbreak on cooldown most of the time. Unless the entire enemy team is dead, just pop your ult. It's the lowest CD limitbreak at 60s and it recharges while active, so in theory you can keep it rolling every 30s, which is where the majority of your power comes from.

Live, breathe and learn Aetherial Manipulation. Learning how to properly use this is what took me from Plat to Diamond. Aside from being a fantastic movement tool on a 10s cooldown, it's also a 10s swiftcast. You can also self cast it, so I highly suggest making a self cast macro for AM, as you want to be using this every chance you can. Either on an enemy, ally, or yourself. I cannot stress this enough, use AM very liberally.


Gameplan:

So your main gameplan is to deal damage and secure kills using Ice Superflare. Always start out of the gate with Sprint up, and self cast AM to get a quick Blizzard off. You're pretty weak for the first 60s but more often than not an enemy overextends and you might be able to get a quick kill with a bind before they can guard (remember bind prevents guarding/Recuperate). Also remember to use AM often to rack up blizzards.

At 60s you get your ult. 90% of the time just pop it right away and go to town. Try to time it to hit as many enemies as possible, but going for just one is fine if you need to. Your bread and butter plan here is to stack 3 freeze then go for a big burst combo. The most reliable combo I've been able to come up with is Stack 3 freeze > Nightwing (stall) > Foul > Superflare > AM > Burst. This is a quick 45,000 potency that whoever is caught by Superflare can't guard against. If your team is doing anything at all, someone should go down from this.

Outside from that, your going for kill securing and support damage. Stay hidden, don't get into direct los of a melee if you can avoid it, and watch your flanks. Usually try to save Paradox for anyone who dives for a quick bind, and keep them locked up with more AM blizzards if you need to. But keep in mind you can use Paradox to secure a kill too.

Don't be afraid to be aggressive, especially once you get more comfortable using AM. You deal quite a lot of damage with a Paradox> Superflare > AM > Burst, combo. Anyone who gets to 30% is usually worth going in on with a AM > Burst. AM back out again if needed. If a fight is going in your favor, run enemies down with AM > Ice.

Eventually you'll get a RDM or melee trying to run you down, but with proper use of AM you can pretty easily survive. Your goal here isn't to fight 1v1, but to lock them down long enough for your team to notice and help. Use AM here to get away, either to your own teammate or even an enemy, so long as you create space between you and your attacker. Also keep in mind you can Guard and AM right out of Guard. An easy out is something like Guard > AM > Ice > Paradox> Superflare > Hardcast Ice > AM > Ice > Superflare, etc. If your team can't help you by then, its a go next.

If you really, really need to, you can Nightwing > Guard / Bind to escape. Honestly burn anything you can to survive, it's worth for your ult recharge.

Those are some nice tips, thank you. Im actually climbing using only BLM myself.

Congratulations for playing hard and never settling for less you earned it

Grats on Crystal. Your tips section is rock solid. I hope a lot of people read it and learn.

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Originally Posted by Inuakurei

Thanks :)
General Notes:
Fire is worthless, never use it. Seriously I cannot stress this enough. Resist all temptation to press Fire ever. Remove it from your bar if you must if you can't resist. You'll be better off.
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Shows they need to buff the Fire DoT. I've seen health regen faster than it can tick making it worthless. Fire is used to pad damage numbers, *thats all* It can't even kill someone at 2% health running away with no MP trying to potion up compare to that red mage dot who can just land the dots and watch you die in a guard. Fire is a trap and worthless >:-(

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Originally Posted by Pinkie_Pie

Shows they need to buff the Fire DoT. I've seen health regen faster than it can tick making it worthless. Fire is used to pad damage numbers, *thats all* It can't even kill someone at 2% health running away with no MP trying to potion up compare to that red mage dot who can just land the dots and watch you die in a guard. Fire is a trap and worthless >:-(

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I've been trying to tell people this since 6.1 dropped, so it's nice to see other people are on the same page.
Fire is garbage. It would be weak even in a vacuum, but at the cost of spammable crowd control it's a genuine trap.
The Burn dot should increase in potency with Astral stacks, not duration.

I catch that pretty early on even before i hit bronze 2. It is too slow and too weak to be in a DPS toolkit that requires a lot of set up.

SCH can do must better and stronger DoT for practically no problem or set up. Burn DoT is just too weak, too slow, and extremely high opportunity cost for the troubles BLM has to go through.

Thank you all! I added a little more to my post as I thought of a few more things afterwards. I'll continue to do so if I remember anything that could be helpful.

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Originally Posted by Iyrnwaen

I've been trying to tell people this since 6.1 dropped, so it's nice to see other people are on the same page.
Fire is garbage. It would be weak even in a vacuum, but at the cost of spammable crowd control it's a genuine trap.
The Burn dot should increase in potency with Astral stacks, not duration.

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Ya Fire is complete garbage. I tried using a mix of Fire and Ice depending on the situation, like Fire if they're tightly grouped during overtime and such, but it's just never worth using. The fire dot is laughably bad, doesn't scale well, and is wasted on multiple applications. I'm pretty sure your base mana regen is enough to Recuperate all the dot damage away on it's own.

Damage isn't really the issue most of the time anyway, it's kill securing. Healing and mobility are so prevalent that it's pretty easy to spam Recuperate, slip away, and Elixir back into the fight 5s later.

I'm really not sure how they could fix it to be honest without scaling Fire damage to insanity. Ice is just too good at securing kills. Maybe make it so that applying the Fire dot again, it instantly deals the remaining dot's damage all at once?

The only other thing you could do besides jacking the damage into the stratosphere would be apply some other debilitating debuff with the Burn.
A debuff that substantially reduced damage output, reduced healing received or increased damage received would give the extended duration a purpose,
and might give you a reason to alternate between Fire and Ice against certain targets/comps instead of just spamming Ice 100% of the time.

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Originally Posted by LeonKeyh

I think there's just one question; Why?

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To make this thread.

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Originally Posted by Iyrnwaen

The only other thing you could do besides jacking the damage into the stratosphere would be apply some other debilitating debuff with the Burn.
A debuff that substantially reduced damage output, reduced healing received or increased damage received would give the extended duration a purpose,
and might give you a reason to alternate between Fire and Ice against certain targets/comps instead of just spamming Ice 100% of the time.

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I think 3k-4.5k-6k DoT for 6s or 3k-6k-9k additional burst dmg sounds ok (perhaps a bit lower?) as BLM has no CC or stackable DoT during Fire, unlike other jobs which still have access to CC. This way, BLM can be a dmg dealer with Fire in a low dmg team comp, and can be a CC support with Ice for low CC team comp.

I love the concept of Fire and Ice being the exactly opposite, so i think fire should be pure in damage and fast for zero utility it has while Ice is already good in utility and dmg wise. If the devs intended to separate Fire and Ice, unlike RDM which can easily switch back and forth, making both of them viable depending on the current team comp might be a good idea.

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Originally Posted by Lymberey

I think 3k-4.5k-6k DoT for 6s or 3k-6k-9k additional burst dmg sounds ok (perhaps a bit lower?) as BLM has no CC or stackable DoT during Fire, unlike other jobs which still have access to CC. This way, BLM can be a dmg dealer with Fire in a low dmg team comp, and can be a CC support with Ice for low CC team comp.

I love the concept of Fire and Ice being the exactly opposite, so i think fire should be pure in damage and fast for zero utility it has while Ice is already good in utility and dmg wise. If the devs intended to separate Fire and Ice, unlike RDM which can easily switch back and forth, making both of them viable depending on the current team comp might be a good idea.

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Yeah, like I said earlier, I think the easiest and most appropriate change is to make the DoT increase in potency with more stacks instead of duration.
It gives you a tradeoff between control and burst damage, and the DoT ticking off more quickly mostly solves the issue of reapplication being worthless.
The OP's suggestion of having a reapplication of Fire consume the existing DoT and deal its damage all at once is also a good one.

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Originally Posted by Iyrnwaen

Yeah, like I said earlier, I think the easiest and most appropriate change is to make the DoT increase in potency with more stacks instead of duration.
It gives you a tradeoff between control and burst damage, and the DoT ticking off more quickly mostly solves the issue of reapplication being worthless.
The OP's suggestion of having a reapplication of Fire consume the existing DoT and deal its damage all at once is also a good one.

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In FFXIV dots ticks on a fixed 3 second timer, u cant make them faster without changing how the game works, doubt is possible.

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Originally Posted by Raistlin

In FFXIV dots ticks on a fixed 3 second timer, u cant make them faster without changing how the game works, doubt is possible.

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By "ticking off more quickly", I meant finishing in 6 seconds instead of 12 at 3 stacks of Warmth, because the potency would increase instead of the duration.
I'm not talking about increasing the frequency of the ticks.

Ice Mage is da way.

Fire does have one good use, and that is when you fight a NIN on your own. The DoT itself breaks a NIN out of stealth so going for a quick 1 stack Fire Superflare is a reasonable choice when u think that a NIN is about to dip out. Freezing him does keep the NIN locked in place in that situation, BUT he keeps the Stealth effect since it seems that only damage effects actually break it.

Didn't realize fire was so bad... Thank you so much for the advice!

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Originally Posted by Inuakurei

Thanks :)

Ice is probably one of the best CC's in the game because of how bind's work in pvp. Binding with Ice will stop all actions the enemy is currently doing, bind them in place, and most importantly, prevents them from activating Guard or Recuperate.

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Wow. So bind is basically yet another stun? And here I just suggested to change WHM stun to bind in another thread...

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Originally Posted by Petite

Wow. So bind is basically yet another stun? And here I just suggested to change WHM stun to bind in another thread...

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The black mage ice bind is a stun, though its called (bind) its a total stop of your character and actions.