The End of Hard Job Content in 7.0: MNK and BLM

It has been said for some time that Monk and Black Mage were the most challenging jobs to play. They were more challenging to learn and required more thought and coordination to play. This was perfect for me. I do not enjoy the difficulty of Savage content because it always seems to center around memorizing hundreds of obtuse eight-party positional dances. The normal content is too easy for me… if I stuck with the mindless rails jobs. So I heard people say which jobs were the most challenging and I crafted harder content from the normal content by playing the hardest jobs. It was always exciting and I could think about my strategies using the difficult jobs and always find ways to improve. It kept my attention.

Now that MNK and BLM are being “streamlined” and being put on rails where you must play obviously mindless rotations, where will the hard job content be?

Timing around the dots and buff gauges of MNK was like timing your breath and knowing where your feet are relative to you hands. You actually had a feeling for watching your timing and balance, like you do in real life martial arts. Now it looks like you just fill up circles according to a set pattern.

There were so many situational possibilities with how the BLM skills and spells could be mixed together that it felt like you were composing your own song of damage. Every BLM seemed to play slightly differently. But now it’s looking like you have to play the song they want you to play. The same song over and over gets boring.

It was nice to have some complicated jobs to help moderate the extremes between the easy normal content and overly complicated time-consuming savage content. SE, I would pay 100$ to the Mogstation to get pre-7.0 MNK and BLM back even if they cannot be used in 7.0 content. I enjoyed using them to help new players complete older content. Just once I wish you would leave two versions of jobs in the game so players could actually compare extreme job changes side by side.

There are numerous jobs in FFXIV: they don’t need to all be easy and “accessible” to play. There should be content for all player skill levels, including some jobs that are harder to master.

[To whomever at SE created Anatman: it did still serve a function, perhaps the most important one of all; I could use it during down-times and look cool as hell.]

Welcome to the life of a healer. mindnumbing. monotonous. mundane. Unless everyone is awful. when they get better its back to triple m.

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Originally Posted by Hastatus

It has been said for some time that Monk and Black Mage were the most challenging jobs to play. They were more challenging to learn and required more thought and coordination to play. This was perfect for me. I do not enjoy the difficulty of Savage content because it always seems to center around memorizing hundreds of obtuse eight-party positional dances. The normal content is too easy for me… if I stuck with the mindless rails jobs. So I heard people say which jobs were the most challenging and I crafted harder content from the normal content by playing the hardest jobs. It was always exciting and I could think about my strategies using the difficult jobs and always find ways to improve. It kept my attention.

Now that MNK and BLM are being “streamlined” and being put on rails where you must play obviously mindless rotations, where will the hard job content be?

Timing around the dots and buff gauges of MNK was like timing your breath and knowing where your feet are relative to you hands. You actually had a feeling for watching your timing and balance, like you do in real life martial arts. Now it looks like you just fill up circles according to a set pattern.

There were so many situational possibilities with how the BLM skills and spells could be mixed together that it felt like you were composing your own song of damage. Every BLM seemed to play slightly differently. But now it’s looking like you have to play the song they want you to play. The same song over and over gets boring.

It was nice to have some complicated jobs to help moderate the extremes between the easy normal content and overly complicated time-consuming savage content. SE, I would pay 100$ to the Mogstation to get pre-7.0 MNK and BLM back even if they cannot be used in 7.0 content. I enjoyed using them to help new players complete older content. Just once I wish you would leave two versions of jobs in the game so players could actually compare extreme job changes side by side.

There are numerous jobs in FFXIV: they don’t need to all be easy and “accessible” to play. There should be content for all player skill levels, including some jobs that are harder to master.

[To whomever at SE created Anatman: it did still serve a function, perhaps the most important one of all; I could use it during down-times and look cool as hell.]

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Man I'm so sorry to hear that, or I'm happy for you idk I didn't read all that lol

You should do as yoshi-p says and play ultimate content if you're feeling the game is too easy. I feel a lot of these posts are just made by people who are too anxious to engage in ultimates.

What are you talking?
I liked the monk, esspecialy at the end of shb, because i was able to shut down my brain, while i punched anything who was before me.

I has 2 lines of ST roration, where i go tought one line, switch to the other line and than back to the first line. There wasnt much more with it. One line was the side attack skills. The other line,0 the rear attack skills (what i didnt changed in EW, even, when the skills lost the positiuonal).
The change of EW ruined this simplicity a little. But on overall, was it mostly the same.
I barely keeped track of the buff and dot, simply, because i knowed, that i would cast them one rotation later anyway. The hardest thing was only, to keep track, in wich rotation i was at the moment and dont press the false button accidantily.

The new monk by the other hand looks now very complex for me. Because, from what i understanded, is it not anymore, that you simply use stance 1-2-3, like before. But, that you use stance 1 first, than stance 2 and 3. Than 1,3,1,2, and so one. Based on, how many points you has in the new gauge system. At last is it, what i understand from the clip saw.

Similary to the Black mage. He is in its core easy. Because, you mostly use 1 button. The hard stuff was for me in shb time, around lvl 75, because there was so to many procs and times to keep track on, what maked it to hard for me, to keep track of the fight in the dungeon to (damit walls by the first boss in 75er dungeon).
That changed, after a longer break and re-organizing of the skill places. The only hard thing that keeped left was, to keep track of cd and, that the blm is so slow in casting (reason, why i prefer spell speed on him).
I dont even understand what you mean, that every blm created his own "music".
Whe are knowing for, only spamming 1 skill. Explosion.
All other things are only side things that whe press, to keep up tzhe fire timer ort, because the button was shiny.
Than, entering for a short time ice phase. Wait until the mp is ready and use some skills in between to do something (sometimes, keep longer in icer phase, to use up all shiny buttons, so, that you are not distracted in the fire phase). And than go back to fire mode and press fire 4 again until its not possible anymore.

The only form of freedom is, to decide, if whe want to use more spell speed materia or crit materia in or outfits. And maybe, choice outfits, that increase the wanted stat. Even, when the item lvl is than lower.
And than some minimal rotaion adjustments for your own taste (all guides says, to use 4x fire4 and than paradox, i prefer mostly 3 fire 4s and than paradox, because it feels to unsafe from the timer otherwise).
The only other choice you have is maybe, to make short cuts in your rotation and finish it earlier, because you know, that something is coming, that is hindering you otherwise. Or, to adjust the skill timer with some other stuff.
And that will probably bne the case now to.

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Originally Posted by Keichi

The new monk by the other hand looks now very complex for me. Because, from what i understanded, is it not anymore, that you simply use stance 1-2-3, like before. But, that you use stance 1 first, than stance 2 and 3. Than 1,3,1,2, and so one. Based on, how many points you has in the new gauge system. At last is it, what i understand from the clip saw.

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Pretty sure you have misunderstood how new monk is going to work.

Your forms still progress as normal. Opo-Opo > Raptor > Coeurl > Repeat.

Every form has 2 attacks (not counting AoE), and they all have the same relation as Dragon Kick and Bootshine, ie. Use Dragon Kick, it boosts the power of Bootshine, Twin Snakes boost True Strike and Demolish boosts Snap Punch. This boost, rather than being shown as a buff, is shown on the job gauge by the 'pips'. The gauge keeps track of the pips and is in the order Opo-Opo > Raptor > Coeurl, with the respective attack generating pips for that specific stance. Using a boosted attack uses up 1 pip. So, between each Dragon Kick, you will use Bootshine once (as it is now), Between each Twin Snakes, you will use True Strike twice (the same as current Snap Punch and Demolish timings) and between each Demolish is 3 Snap Punches.

So, the rotation will look like this:

Dragon Kick > Twin Snakes > Demolish
Bootshine > True Strike > Snap Punch
Dragon Kick > True Strike > Snap Punch
Booshine > Twin Snakes > Snap Punch
Dragon Kick > True Strike > Demolish
Bootshine > True Strike > Snap Punch
Dragon Kick > Twin Snakes > Snap Punch
Bootshine > True Strike > Snap Punch
etc.

That should give a good idea about how this is all going to work. This also assumes no Perfect Balance usage which will disrupt that chain. Of course, replace Bootshine, True Strike and Snap Punch with the new actions, I just used those names for familiarities sake.

Yeah, maybe i had missheared sometzhing or imaged it false.
But you showed it even very good her.

The form i liked for monk was:
Dragon Kick > Twin Snakes > Demolish
Bootshine > True Strike > Snap Punch
Dragon Kick > Twin Snakes > Demolish

and so on. I switched simply between this 2 lines. What was than a little ruined, with the beast chakra, who practicly forced me to do: Bootshine, dragon kick, Bootshine (or reverse, have forgotten, wich of thsi 2 strenghted the other), for obtaining the chakra. And forced me to think a little more.
And the new monk looks to have that increased even more (he looks nice, from what i saw, and looks to has now his needed improvement from his 5.5 rework and has even ereased my biggest complain about the class, but, im a little salty about the new form, because of my liking of the "brain dead" version^^)

Not going to say that MNK/BLM are incredibly hard jobs to play, because playing them at a base level is incredibly easy and straight forward. I do agree with the sentiment of having some forms of skill expression that are either just small forms of optimization(MNK's buff management and how that plays into re openers or Perfect Balance) or rotational changes for more DMG(BLM's unconventional rotations to get more damage out) is very cool. And the sad part is that these changes are made for people to be able to play these more optimized play styles easier, however from my experience the people these changes are designed for just don't actually care and will just continue to play the way they want to play. Even if the way they want to play is not optimal in the slightest.

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Originally Posted by HikariKurosawa

You should do as yoshi-p says and play ultimate content if you're feeling the game is too easy. I feel a lot of these posts are just made by people who are too anxious to engage in ultimates.

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Can't wait for FRU to have the only healer mechanic that can be bypassed with 10 resses so it will be done without healers on patch just like TOP.

What i mean is that you should not take words about ultimate seriously

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Originally Posted by Stasya

Can't wait for FRU to have the only healer mechanic that can be bypassed with 10 resses so it will be done without healers on patch just like TOP.

What i mean is that you should not take words about ultimate seriously

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10 deaths wow that's really satisfying they sure outplayed the ultimate! Really showed healer gang how useless they are!

What's the point of posts like this? People have been breaking games since the very beginning. What I mean is that, if you want to have a perfect run you're gonna need a healer. 10 deaths doesn't really seem cool to me, but hey at least they cleared?

How is BLM getting easier? Its core rotation has always been easy. What makes BLM challenging is how stationary it often is and trying to plan movement tools around mechanics. Unless all BLM spells are becoming instant cast, I don't see how its difficulty will change much.

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Originally Posted by HikariKurosawa

You should do as yoshi-p says and play ultimate content if you're feeling the game is too easy. I feel a lot of these posts are just made by people who are too anxious to engage in ultimates.

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People aren't complaining about encounter difficulty, but rather the level of engagement they're getting from the jobs themselves, which has progressively been going down over time due to ability pruning and simplification of rotations. MNK and BLM just happens to be the latest victims.

Doing ultimate content does not change the fact that the jobs are boring; not least of which the tanks and healers where everything can still healed/mitigated on a predictable timeline.

Standard BLM is certainly not getting easier. If anything, it's getting a LOT more rigid with flare star (losing stacks when swapping to ice), still has the same-ish rotation, same timers, etc. Non standard BLM, which was way harder since it required a deeper understanding of the job and a good reactivity on execution, is being removed, what's being lowered is the skill ceiling, but the skill floor at lvl100 isn't necessarily being lowered, perhaps the opposite.

For MNK the main rotation remains relatively similar, it's getting somewhat easier to track gauge stacks than nebulous timers maybe, at best. New tools to get into the burst which can raise difficulty a bit though. The DK spamm rotation that was performing barely less than standard has been axed? I think? If so, then the job is actually getting harder. But on the other hand optimal drift like non standard seems to keel over so, again, I think the skill floor remains very similar (if you don't count current DK spamm), but the skill ceiling is being lowered.

It seems they are planning a complete job overhaul for 8.0, with unique ways to play for every job and bringing back "complexity" in gameplay. They know that the game has been too simplified and made to focused on casual players, but the truth is, the main core playerbase are not "casuals", so they need to listen to them. Players want each job to be truly unique in the way you play them. Instead of just streamlining all jobs into categories, they need to make every job stand out from the rest because of truly unique, useful features that are needed in certain game situations. For example: DRG and MCH are just DPSs. The only variation are the skills, but in the end they're just that. What makes NIN unique? nothing. Just another melee DPS to add to the list. So give each job something truly unique that no other job can do. Something that transcends the typical dungeon instance.

NIN could get a "stealth" gameplay to use in certain missions and situations, or "steal" could be used on certain NPCs, and so on.

The main issue here is that they discovered this when Dawntrail was too advance in its development, so they had to postpone a full job overhaul for 8.0.

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Originally Posted by Ryskim

It seems they are planning a complete job overhaul for 8.0, with unique ways to play for every job and bringing back "complexity" in gameplay.

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I'll believe it when I see it. Cynically, talking up how 8.0 will revive class identities is a way to deflect any questions or complaints during 7.0. Kind of like how "go play ultimates LOL" was meant to shut down healer criticism for 6.0.

If we look at what the team is doing, they're expressing a pretty consistent design philosophy with each rework: simpler, homogenized, easy. It's more likely that an underserved segment of the community it latching onto one translated phrase, completely changing its meaning from what was intended.

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Originally Posted by Ryskim

It seems they are planning a complete job overhaul for 8.0, with unique ways to play for every job and bringing back "complexity" in gameplay.. Players want each job to be truly unique in the way you play them. Instead of just streamlining all jobs into categories, they need to make every job stand out from the rest because of truly unique, useful features that are needed in certain game situations. For example: DRG and MCH are just DPSs. The only variation are the skills, but in the end they're just that. What makes NIN unique? nothing. Just another melee DPS to add to the list. So give each job something truly unique that no other job can do. Something that transcends the typical dungeon instance

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It was stated, that they will think/talk about that as focus or 8.0.

That doesnt mean, that whe will have that for everyone in around 3 years.
Esspecialy, when they first need to decide, who need a "identity" re-work/actualisation.

Blm identity is, beeing the wizard of the game. Who use elemental attacks for dmg. That was allways the case. Except, that esspecialy now is the blm focusing to much on fire. And to little on ice and thunder. They could search for ways to increase the use of this 2 elements (change ice phase, that ice spells recover mp differently strong, with B1 as the strongest recovery spell and B4 for ice shards, maybe create a very strong ice spell, that is only usable, when all ice stacks are there).

Monk was allways the fist fighter who attack very fast and many times. I think that is fullfilled now. Many of there skills have now nice special effects.

Summoner is summoning beeings. That is even given now. What they could improve is the duration, each beeing is staying there. And give them maybe more actions (and give Kabunkel something to do).
Red Mage is a mix between BLM and WhiteMage. What he is missing would be healing power.

So, the first thing that has to decide is, what "identity" is meaning.

If you mean, gameplay mechanic, could you say, that this is allready given.
There are no 2 classes, who plays exactly the same (only similary by the tank and healer).

Nin, Red mage and Reaper are "magic knights", who combining magic with meele. Where Red mage is more on the magic side, reaper on the meele side and Ninja is balanced within the middle (has around the same numbers of physicaly and elemental magic attacks).
Monks are the "weaponless" fastes attacker. Samurai the slow but powerfull attacker, with little movement and Lancer is the mobile physicaly attacker in between this 2.

If you mean, that the classes should have skills, that allows them to solve certain problems much easier as the other classes, could it create problems in fight designing. Or, that some classes are excluded from content. Because there are some who are more usefull (like, taking summoner and RM over BLM for ressurection option).

I suspect making ice spells actively casted to regain MP is them trying to restore some more prevalence to the ice part of black mage.

For monk, I'm not sure if there were further changes. But changing the core combo from two buffs to keep an eye on and one debuff to consolidating all the info I need to track in one place will, for me at least, be a welcome change.

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Originally Posted by Bright-Flower

I suspect making ice spells actively casted to regain MP is them trying to restore some more prevalence to the ice part of black mage.

For monk, I'm not sure if there were further changes. But changing the core combo from two buffs to keep an eye on and one debuff to consolidating all the info I need to track in one place will, for me at least, be a welcome change.

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Another thing that would have restored prevalence to ice phase would have been an ice finisher instead of yet another fire spell.
The devs don't want us to skip ice phase but they themself do everything they can to make us spend the less amount of time in it as possible.

The more I think and the more interviews I read I get the impression they wanted to go down the road of simplification in the future but were surprised by the amount of negative feedback that was piling up. Not saying it was the majority but it was getting louder and louder (Yoshida himself said that he watched Zeplas video on EW).
A loud negative minority if I'm allowed to call it that is still bad PR for the game that already has its fair share of cliches in the mmo community.

Yeah, I'm not saying it's the best solution but that's just my guess as to why they made the ice change.

Ultimately I'm not too sure what to do about it though. When they were first making the job, it seemed like a decent way to work black mage into an MMO rotation. FFXIV doesnt' have specs/talents like WoW does, so they couldn't just make 'fire mage, ice mage, lightning mage' as separate things. But in classic FF games, having fire/ice/lightning spells was their iconic thing. But in those games they were all basically the same spell but with a different elemental tag. Fitting well into the turn baed jrpg genre but not so much in a hotbar rotation WoW style MMO.

So the idea of 'fire phase is burn mp for big damage, ice phase to cool down and regain mp, and lightning as a dot' was a clever way to in a sense to work all three into a rotation and cycle. But the unfortunate end is it makes the ice phase lame. You don't want to be in ice phase any longer than neccesary, want to use as few ice spells as possible, and if you like the flavor of an ice mage, too bad. Fire eclipses lightning and ice both. And because it's more fun and exciting to be in fire phase over time, expansion by expansion they add onto that.

I wonder if perhaps BLM could benefit from something similar to summoner and the way it cycles through ifrit/garuda/titan. If they had fire/ice/blizzard stages and the emphasis wasn't all put on FIRE FIRE FIRE with lightning relegated to a dot and ice to mp recovery. Or to the way paladin used to cycle between its physical and magical rotations before things were shaken up mid EW. A way to put all three elements on equal footing and make all three of them just as exciting and interesting. But then copying summoner would likely just make the jobs more homogenous and alienate players who like how the job has played up until now. So I'm not really sure what the best way to go about things would be.

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Originally Posted by Bright-Flower

Snipped because of post limit stuff.

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Agreed.
I also don't have a solution neither do I think anyone has.
I love blm and its nice rotation flow that still gives room for optimization but tbh even I grew tired of only fire phase getting interesting things. That's why I adored paradox so much. It seemed to be the starting point of something bigger.

If job identity are going to be more of a thing in the future, in my opinion that's what blm should go to.
Maybe fire phase stationary and ice phase allowing instant casting while still having some kind of mana refreshing system in ice phase or somewhere else.
Or give both phases the same potency and make it a thing to switch between the elements not in a phase like system but fire >ice > fire to hold enochian and so on.
If its done well that would give entirely new optimization chances like filling with thunder or xeno to keep enochian up and so on.

On the other hand I wouldn't mind if it stays in its EW state with more interesting stuff outside fire phase. That would probably be the easiest workaround to make most people happy.

They designed themself into a corner with the simplification in my opinion. Stormblood was a nice middle ground for the jobs. Was it perfect? No it had lots of grumbling back then too but its ok for an mmo to have some friction between players.

Oh I'm actually pretty convinced that the specific target to kill was definitely non standard. Almost all the changes seem to directly kneecap it in one way or another:

- Only ice spells to regen MP (the ice spells that non standard always tries to skip among others)
- Flare star in fire phase that specifically requires casting 6 fire 4 (no less) and with gauge dropping when swapping to ice prematurely
- Sharpcast removal, essentially deleting out of the game one of the main non standard filler generator (from thundercloud and firestarter procs)
- Back in EW they also added paradox, which was supposed to replace the weak spells like fire 1, but got derailed into non standard as a valuable tool. Guess what's not castable anymore in umbral ice?

So yeah maybe the side effects is getting rid of a clunky server based mechanic to regen MP and make ice spells feel that they have more actual meaning behind them, but come on. If they wanted to kill non standard they wouldn't have done a better job, it's a little sussy if I may say so.

Edit: Although it would be fair to mention that new BLM is not without non standard new optimizations either, so perhaps it would be more accurate to say they wanted to reframe non standard to their own terms.