Square Enix seems to really think BLM is just a joke class and that no one plays it

Honestly. Whoever is in charge of BLM needs to stop having that as their job. I have no idea what these recent changes are, but not a single one of them is particularly beneficial. And that 1% NERF? ARE YOU ACTUALLY FOR REAL? LMAO. Seriously, the designer must be on some of that good stuff thinking BLM needed a nerf when PCT already outclasses BLM on literally every point. (And PCT also got a huge buff to their already busted opener too which is hilarious)

Despair instant cast. Thanks, now I have to relearn all of my muscle memory again.

2 LL charges. So we get 1 additional burst outside of the burst window... Might be useful for movement, but it's literally only useful ONCE for the entire fight. That's how much we got from this, we got 1 more out of party burst window ley lines, woo.

Flare 3 second cast. This is actually so hilarious, it's almost like they don't even know what spells BLM has. Not only does this further reduce the point of High Fire 2 existing (And Fire 2 after you get Flare in the first place), but it even further buffs the double transpose rotation, making it now the de facto best AoE rotation. The BLM AoE rotation was already so stupid by using transpose to get from AF3 to UI1, but now an AF1 Flare + AF3 Flare is the most powerful rotation. Compared to Endwalker, Dawntrail BLM is potentially the dumbest iteration of this job since the pre-buff 4.0 Stormblood BLM where Foul cost MP and F4/B4 still had 3 second casts. Which is also funny that Flare now has the same cast time as F4/B4 had in Heavensward.

Then the 1% Enochian nerf. I don't think I have to explain myself at how absolutely moronic this decision is. Square Enix, surely reverting this idiotic change isn't too difficult before 7.11? (Not like I'm doing ultimates anymore, TOP killed most of the interest I had after I cleared it a single time. And then making the worst savage tiers in the game's history the next ultimate REALLY killed all interest in Ultimates).


So yeah, for another patch, the clownshow that is Square Enix """"balance""""" patches continue. (also just remove MP from healers cause it really has no impact on anything anymore)

2nd Leylines is huge. There are several ill timed boss mechanics where it's completely unfeasible to use leylines, forcing you to use it elsewhere and completely desync it from 2 minute raid buffs for the rest of the encounter and 2nd leylines lets you avoid that. It also lets BLM sometimes make use of an extra pot window over other jobs and rewards proper pot planning in regards to expected kill times. Finally, it essentially gives BLM a huge chunk of "non-sustained" damage that makes it easier to balance alongside PCT which essentially starts each encounter with 9 seconds of free cast time.

I like how the game makes it unnfeasible to use a base skill, so the solution is to double the skill and nerf the job. Lmfao.

"This will make it lag behind PCT less maybe" is also an interesting take.

@OP

At the time of writing, this JP forum users post has 40+ likes and shares many of your criticisms as well as some solutions. It's not perfect but it's the most popular post I've seen about improving BLM in a while. Try Google translate and give it a like.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post6623255

How did PCT get buffed? You already drew everything before the fight started, now you just get it pre-drawn for you

You do realize that the game's boss plays BLM? You might want to re-iterate on your blame approach on why BLM "gets ignored" (you know, other than getting always-on-burst ley-lines, which is a buff so big I had not even considered it hypothetically as it felt entirely unrealistic).

Did some quick calculator math.

As a result of instant cast Despair (because Despair has a cast time longer than its recast) BLM rotation got about 1.4%ish faster. An extra charge of Leylines is also worth about 2 extra casts. I think the Despair change alone offsets the Enochian damage reduction (which was actually about .75% damage loss).

They were probably conservative with the buffs because they wanted to see the impact of the quality of life changes brought by instant despair and non drifting Leylines.

The goal wasn't to buff BLM dramatically. The goal was to make it easier.
It's almost as if the braindead jobs invalidate the harder jobs when they aren't penalised on their damage, making nobody want to play the harder jobs.
The only way to alleviate this problem is to either make braindead jobs do a little bit less damage, which this community is staunchly opposed to. Or, make everything braindead, so that it doesn't matter what you play. so thanks everyone insisting their braindead job should do the same damage.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

You do realize that the game's boss plays BLM? You might want to re-iterate on your blame approach on why BLM "gets ignored" (you know, other than getting always-on-burst ley-lines, which is a buff so big I had not even considered it hypothetically as it felt entirely unrealistic).

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Yes, and for most of the game's lifetime the class has been in a stagnant state of not getting any attention it needs while getting a ton of things that has slowly broken it more and more over time, to the point where modern BLM mains hated the original class design being reasserted because flexibility was never an intended part of BLM's kit, but a consequence of bad design decisions.

It actually stands to reason that BLM is in this state now is because Yoshi-P has refused to actually let the class get updated with things literally every other class has gotten already. This is, incidentally, the same bizarre state Monk was in for the longest time.

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Originally Posted by GoatOfWar

The goal wasn't to buff BLM dramatically. The goal was to make it easier.
It's almost as if the braindead jobs invalidate the harder jobs when they aren't penalised on their damage, making nobody want to play the harder jobs.
The only way to alleviate this problem is to either make braindead jobs do a little bit less damage, which this community is staunchly opposed to. Or, make everything braindead, so that it doesn't matter what you play. so thanks everyone insisting their braindead job should do the same damage.

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The goal was also to find ways to turn BLM into more of an rphys because fights are too movement heavy in the game, and they wanted to do it in the simplest way that requires the least dev time. It usually preludes a bigger rework, but as my last post specifically mentions, BLM has been weirdly immune to getting any reworks despite being in a state of needing something for a long time.

Unrelated to that, hard fights demand easy jobs. A hard job with hard fights means people just don't play the job. Easy fights, like what we had in SB and early ShB, can allow for harder jobs. And while I've always been a proponent of updating BLM, my goal was mostly to drop the skill floor to make it more approachable. Dropping the skill ceiling is basically a: "Yeah, I saw this coming, because the devs forced themselves into a corner." I don't really mind the despair change directly, but they really are throwing the baby out with the bathwater all the same.

It will be interesting to see what happens once we have more data. It's certainly true that instant Despair is intended to make things easier-- I'm ambivalent about it. Is it a bad thing if the average BLM brings more to the table in a wider context? And if the above average BLM is only doing marginally more DPS, they're still doing a whole lot for nothing really. An above average PCT (even average) is still going to meaningfully wreck them, most likely.

And yeah devs have put themselves into this corner. I'm not a huge fan of justifying current design by going backward i.e it was just too hard to keep balancing old BLM so anything goes now, Yoshi P should have acted sooner. In an ideal world that would have happened, there's still an active ongoing audience for this job, or any job. There's still a larger context the job has to fit into.

Whatever job or role you are talking about, the past is effectively meaningless. Devs have shown they are not going backward. It's full steam ahead and they must be held accountable for current day design.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

You do realize that the game's boss plays BLM? You might want to re-iterate on your blame approach on why BLM "gets ignored" (you know, other than getting always-on-burst ley-lines, which is a buff so big I had not even considered it hypothetically as it felt entirely unrealistic).

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I'm not sure that he still has time to play the game, given the amount of responsibility that he's taken on. I feel like he hardly has time to even communicate directly with the playerbase on this game, let alone keep up as an active player.

If he still is playing privately, I'd be surprised if it was still on a job like BLM (photo-ops aside), which does require a degree of time investment.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

How did PCT get buffed? You already drew everything before the fight started, now you just get it pre-drawn for you

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In fairness, that's probably an indirect buff, given the average PCT enjoyer.

Band aid fix number 2 or 3 after the questionable changes with Dawntrail, combined with the absurdity in dps difference to picto, does not make the impression that they know where to go with Blm. At least for parse parties it already caused to lock in only picto as caster role.

The only thing a I can get behind is the second LL charge. not for the extra use, but for freeing you from using this skill on cooldown for optimal usage. I could see this being useful for other skills like swiftcast, manafont... This way playstyle would shift from playing around using all these skill's on cd.

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Originally Posted by meie

combined with the absurdity in dps difference to picto

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For high-end content? Yeah Black Mage outdamages Picto, but I wouldn't call the difference "absurd", if anything they're so close together the difference is negligible.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

For high-end content? Yeah Black Mage outdamages Picto, but I wouldn't call the difference "absurd", if anything they're so close together the difference is negligible.

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So here you're telling us there's no meaningful difference between these two casters except that one of them is a support job on top of being a DPS job. Case closed innit?

You could buff BLM and get a more severe aDPS difference, orrrr nerf PCT.

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Originally Posted by Carighan

For high-end content? Yeah Black Mage outdamages Picto, but I wouldn't call the difference "absurd", if anything they're so close together the difference is negligible.

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Picto does around 5% more damage than blm, I assume SE has there internal numbers. This is already a reason to take picto over any caster when it comes to good kill times for Arcadion, except p2s

I just want endwalker black mage it was fine, I don't get why they are trying to rework it just so non standard BLM isn't a thing.

Diversity in playstyles on jobs are interesting, I'm really tired of jobs having one set way of play something similar happened with paladin (granted it had some balance issues), but having different ways of play is interesting, theirs already the majority of jobs that play in one set way (now all jobs), I don't get why BLM Had to change.

I understand some jobs may have a lesser play rate then the more "easy jobs" but that doesn't mean the job is bad or in need of a "rework" outside some cases. A lot of players were dedicated to old black mage or old Paladin, because those jobs had different ways of play.

As someone whos been casually leveling BLM (currently 78) I can confidently say this is the wonkiest class in the game....

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Originally Posted by DenariusJay

As someone whos been casually leveling BLM (currently 78) I can confidently say this is the wonkiest class in the game....

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while leveling, definitely. Are you having fun needing to allocate time to cast Fire1? Because it's all going to be ripped away at level 90. Then at 100 you don't even need to hard cast Despair.

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Originally Posted by Rithy255

I just want endwalker black mage it was fine, I don't get why they are trying to rework it just so non standard BLM isn't a thing.

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Probably for all the complaints here and on JP forums (who are intensely roasting BLM). I think the devs knew it would generate backlash and result in huge popularity for PCT, thus justifying the budget allocation that goes into making new jobs. Simultaneously it gives the BLM mains willing to hold on a reason to keep subbing i.e I will keep paying until inevitable changes that would happen anyway are finally made.

BLM main community is small and they know that. Not really a big deal to sacrifice us on the altar of PCT and then pay for the privilege to complain.

That's my tinfoil hat theory anyway.

Its only 1% reducing. Its wondering why it is reduced, but in overall does it mean nothing (by a calculation i saw, was that only 6-10 potency).