Black Mage :( Please roll-back the DT changes

I am a very average Black Mage player that picked up the class mid-Endwalker casually for fun! Eventually I dropped everything and became a BLM main. I am not great at the class but it was very fun.

The Dawntrail changes to Black Mage don't feel like buffs or improvements - they feel like direct downgrades that make the class very strict in an expansion that was announced to be focused on fight design (so far has been great in that matter!) and requires quick thinking and movement. It now feels like a clunky Summoner. Changes implemented in Dawntrail look like things given in apology for removing non-standard play, and it feels much worse at all levels of play

• Flare Star is a flashy spell that seems like it was only added to force you to do 6 Fire IV's - counter resets to zero if you drop enochian or go back to Umbral Ice - seems purely to stop non-standard
• You can't double dot targets efficiently anymore
• Instant cast thunder is more or less the worst movement option you can use thanks to potency changes - less on-hit damage and higher per-tick damage meaning it's bad to refresh your thunder effect early because you needed to move)
• Ice Paradox removed purely to kill non-standard? I don't see another reason
• Mana regeneration changes feel very bad in all content, let alone content with phase changes and downtime ('down for the count' moments especially)

I do not feel like these changes make Black Mage more approachable to new players - the learning curve for the class was not ever in the way mana regenerates, nor high level spells like ice paradox. (I feel like it is in the way that it is unclear what fire and ice spells you should be using e.g. Fire 3 must be better than Fire 1 right? Perhaps if Blizzard/Fire III glowed when you should press it to swap from fire>ice or vice versa it would help)

If I had to give a wish-list it would look something like

• letting you keep stacks of Astral Gauge for Flare Star regardless of if you swap to umbral ice (losing all if you drop enochian is fair probably)
• revert mana regeneration changes
• revert thunder changes? it wouldn't be the worst if they stayed as they are in DT but double dotting needs to be possible
• bring back ice paradox
• retrace and 3 xenoglossy is great and no changes needed. same with enhanced swift cast, enochian etc

I have been looking everywhere for black mage discussion and maybe some light in the dark but it feels like no-one enjoys these changes :( People in the community who don't play the job feel less inclined to play it as well seemingly - it's no longer that job that rewards you for playing well or planning things out well. I am very very sad about it and feel like there is no other job that I'll ever enjoy as much as I did with Endwalker Black Mage. Please consider reverting these changes :(

DT BLM excepting Retrace and third Xenoglossy feels so bad. It was my favorite caster and third favorite dps, and now I don't have a caster I want to play.

I think if DT Thunder was turned into an ogcd it would feel a lot better.

Thunder as an OGCD would do a lot for DT BLM's terrible feel.

Oh, I see now.

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Originally Posted by SeriousPan

Thunder as an OGCD would do a lot for DT BLM's terrible feel.

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Factually the same effect could be achieved by entirely removing Despair and rolling the damage into Flare Star (that is, make FS a trait upgrade to Despair), without making Thunder feel whimpy in the process (as oGCDs naturally lack weight, no matter the number they print above the enemy).

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Originally Posted by Carighan

Factually the same effect could be achieved by entirely removing Despair and rolling the damage into Flare Star (that is, make FS a trait upgrade to Despair), without making Thunder feel whimpy in the process (as oGCDs naturally lack weight, no matter the number they print above the enemy).

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At that point, may as well do a full rework with the major goals of: 1, reducing button bloat, especially concerning low use skills (used once every ~20s or worse, BLM has a lot of buttons in this category to choose from.) 2, expanding umbral ice and thunder rotations and options available, as a DoT used once every ~30s isn't exactly exciting thunder gameplay. 3, vastly improving the leveling experience. 4, if the devs insist on a burst damage meta, give the class a real burst rotation, manafont and amplifier aren't good burst skills.

I'd be all in favor of this, but it's also a big ask to communicate this to a dev team that thinks casters shouldn't exist in their game. Especially if the goal of maintaining BLM's high skill ceiling is desired. Which, well, given 7.2, they finally fixed the skill cliff that was its skill floor, but the ceiling also collapsed in the process.

Having actions that you use every ~20s or so in this case is because they fulfil distinct functions beyond just More Potency. If anything I'd say blm has a huge leg up on the rest of the cast because it isn't coated with a new 500 potency ogcd every expansion.

I mean sure, you can say that. But I don't think BLM is enriched by having scathe, or by foul and xenoglossy being on 2 separate buttons. Nor is it enriched by having blizzard 3 and blizzard 4. Hell, let's just look at every skill used roughly once every 20s or worse at 100.

Flare Star, High Thunder, High Thunder 2 (borderline,) Amplifier, Xenoglossy, Despair, Foul, Blizzard 4, Ley Lines, Freeze (Borderline in AoE rotation,) Blizzard 3, Manafont, Scathe (dead skill,) Fire 1 (really Paradox,) blizzard 1 (really also paradox.) If you choose to remove B1 from your bars, that further emphasizes the point I'm making.

3 of those skills are pure 2m burst skills all used as close to each other as possible (LL, Amplifier, Manafont.) Of those, 2 of them are literally: "You can do stuff you normally can do slightly faster." Namely amplifier and manafont, with amplifier adding +1 xeno and manafont removing 3 GCDs, that is B3->B4->F3.

On top of that, it also has extremely niche support skills. Manaward, between the lines, aetherial manipulation, transpose* (part of DPS rotation with transpose tech,) umbral soul, and triplecast. Nevermind other valuable role actions like swiftcast, addle, and surecast.

I need to draw even more attention to scathe still existing, because flare star and the lack of UI regen completely kills the ability to use scathe at literally any point in any rotation.

Black Mage is, presently, one of the singularly most bloated jobs in the game. It should be roughly tied with SAM for raw skill count, and is only beaten by the likes of Paladin and Astrologian for raw skill count.

Understanding the sheer number of low use skills BLM has, do you really think it's important for foul and xeno to be separate buttons when they're mutually exclusive, or that B4 should be a distinct button from F4 when it, too, is mutually exclusive? How about flare and freeze, when they're, also, mutually exclusive?

Should BLM truly have 3 separate 2m burst cooldowns when 2 of them are the exact same concept and the third one is a watered down version of one of the more unique burst skills in the game?

Hell, should blizzard 1 and fire 1 even exist past level 60, provided paradox as a button exists at 90?

There's even a valid argument that transpose and umbral soul do the same thing. One gets you into UI, the other builds it up to max resources. Both are intended as downtime actions, and with how strong flare star is, neither is necessarily worth using at 100. While transpose can be used for transpose tech, that's more a consequence of how the transition from AF to UI and back is handled than it being an actually good design feature of the class.

And, if we actually removed any or all of those skills, is there something more interesting you can imagine going there to take the place of the new space opened up? Are there any unique thunder spells you can think of, or blizzard spells you might want? Would you rather have manafont and amplifier exist as 2 separate buttons, or merge them and make it change a skill that exists, like flare star, into a more fun burst spell, like ultima or zettaflare?

All of the bloat comes at a cost. Opportunity cost is the biggest one, bar bloat is just more fuel on the fire that is bad class design. Doubly so when you do it by putting 2 skills that share an identical resource together. Other classes have this issue as well, like SAM's guren and senei. The class is not fundamentally improved by having an AoE-exclusive 2m cooldown clogging bars along a single target exclusive 2m cooldown when both activate each other. Even the argument that it makes cleave more interesting falls shallow when you realize the choice was already made long before you entered the encounter.

So when you say BLM has a huge leg up, I look at a sea of redundant and terribly designed and defined skills that could be better served doing something else, provided one is willing to prune to begin with. Even just simply removing bloat for its own sake is worth it when you have such obvious freebies like merging freeze and flare, or merging fire and blizzard 4.

One of the main reasons that Viper was considered a confusing class at launch despite largely being a 1-2-3-4-5-6 class is that buttons transforming into other buttons in the middle of your main rotation adds a giant hurdle of "oh my god what's even happening", and that's for gcds that were largely interchangeable, so no I don't think merging flare and freeze etc. would be better, and if you desperately wanted them to be there are many ways to bungle it together.

Choosing to remove scathe, F1, highB, and highF from your bars takes us down to fewer buttons than Samurai, does that make the class good suddenly?

Manafont is actually not used close to your other burst cooldowns because it doesn't increase your burst potential, it only re-aligns your rotation.

All of your other considerations seem to mostly be complaining about the main rotation of the class existing, or about things that happen to every class (0m acceleration cooldowns, defensives, aoe ability splits, movement buttons)

Like the new change mostly.

The biggest complain i had with him (and had heared sometimes) was, that he was to slow and the timer was annoying (in New content was it easy to dont take attention to it, and it feeled bad, if it runned out).

My biggest complain would now only:
- to much fire4 spamming: Without the timer is there nothing that hinders you to Spam the whole time fire4. You could even forget paradox and fire3 at this point. Because, they practicly has no fixed place in the rotation and are practicly filler dmg spells. With no additional useness.

- summoner lose his role:
Until now (at last for my understanding) was the blm the "canon". Slow but strong.
Summoner was the "gun". Fast but weaker.
Now is the blm very fast to. And feels to steal the role of summoner or rdm.

But in overall do i like the change.

My dream solution would be if they let us choose which version we want to play, DT or Endwalker BLM. Then they can continue to play around until people say the new version is better

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Originally Posted by meie

My dream solution would be if they let us choose which version we want to play, DT or Endwalker BLM. Then they can continue to play around until people say the new version is better

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Imagine if we had class specs and this was the speed build which was easier to play, while there was a slow build that was harder to play but had more damage output if used well.

Though sadly that sort of depth will never happen in ff14.