Revert these upcoming BLM changes IMMEDIATELY

Hey SE. Who did you listen to when collecting feedback for BLM? Cause it sure wasn't BLM players. You decide to alienate every BLM main in the game MID EXPANSION and FURTHER FUNDAMENTALLY CHANGING HOW THE ROTATION HAS WORKED SINCE 2.0.

BLM will turn into the most brain dead, piss easy job with these changes. I don't need to perfectly time my slidecasts to save some movement abilities to squeeze the brief 0.5s of movement each cast. I don't need to think of when to refresh AF3. Playing Star Rail on auto-battle would be more challenging than the new BLM. Might as well go and actually play Subway Surfers while streaming Savage raids instead of just playing a video since I don't need to pay attention to anything I do on BLM. I don't need to plan ahead for anything anymore, the rotation just happens and I just press the movement button to get movement without any chance of punishment or loss of DPS. All of the nuances of playing BLM are just gone.

Fundamentally for most players, there's nothing wrong about BLM in its current state. It's a fully functioning job and flows nicely (except for the absolutely horrific state of AoE, double transpose rotation is still lmao. literally all you need to do with AoE is buff High Fire 2 so it doesn't do less damage than Flare in LITERALLY every single situation). It does lack the min-maxing you could do in Endwalker by having added Flare Star and removing UI MP ticks, but it works and hasn't needed major changes for 12 years, only minor tweaks here and there. Stormblood had possibly the biggest change to BLM after launch by making the rotation not as strict and increasing its horrific DPS it had. F4 from 3 to 2.8s (still how it is today), removing MP cost of Foul, reducing MP cost of F1 to match F4.

So WHO THE HELL ASKED FOR ALL THIS? NO ONE. YOU'RE HALLUCINATING.

DO NOT CHANGE ANYTHING ABOUT BLM FOR THE REST OF THE EXPANSION IF THIS IS WHAT YOU THINK NEEDS CHANGING.

There is something wrong to me on the blm :)

Now you know how Viper players felt just before the first raid tier... it's rough.

I would say you should yell about this through every available channel of communication to get them to reverse it, but when Viper players did that they cancelled the initially planned changes only to surprise us with some other shit on patch day that made the job just as braindead, and then ghosted us until we gave up on it. They even lied in the patch notes to justify it, making up a fake demographic of players who allegedly thought it was "too busy" - despite the job not even being that hard, and being pretty much universally praised by those who played it.

I'm starting to think the developers do this to us out of spite.

Well Viper was less than a month old, I've mained BLM since 1.0. I've progged every savage raids from ARR as BLM. This is making me feel it's going to be worse than how BLM worked in 1.0 :/

But yeah. Nobody likes getting their jobs ruined. 14 years being BLM main might be coming to an end. Possibly game itself for me

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Originally Posted by Underscore

They even lied in the patch notes to justify it, making up a fake demographic of players who allegedly thought it was "too busy" - despite the job not even being that hard, and being pretty much universally praised by those who played it.

I'm starting to think the developers do this to us out of spite.

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Yoshi-P later even admitted in an interview that the feedback was just from internal testers, and that they willfully ignored player feedback.

Hence why I can safely say: no matter how much feedback and criticism the BLM changes will spark, no matter how many threads pop up, they will never revert it. They do not care one ounce for feedback from fans of a job. Praising Viper did nothing. A thousand pages of Healer feedback did nothing.

Fans of a job either have to learn to live with how the job is, or they can give CS3 a stronger signal of dissatisfaction.

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Originally Posted by Underscore

Now you know how Viper players felt just before the first raid tier... it's rough.

I would say you should yell about this through every available channel of communication to get them to reverse it, but when Viper players did that they cancelled the initially planned changes only to surprise us with some other shit on patch day that made the job just as braindead, and then ghosted us until we gave up on it. They even lied in the patch notes to justify it, making up a fake demographic of players who allegedly thought it was "too busy" - despite the job not even being that hard, and being pretty much universally praised by those who played it.

I'm starting to think the developers do this to us out of spite.

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This happened to every roles player base slowly.

I used to love paladin 6.3 ruined the job into a boring spawn what lights up job instead of a tank that's about upkeeping it's DOT while having two burst phases.
I loved Astro, they took stances in 6.0 then they decided to just completely ruin the card system in 7.0
I played a lot of BLM That got ruined in 7.0 but was somewhat improved in 7.1... now its going away to be a boring job likely forever.
I played a lot of ninja its still okay but ten chi jin changes are just yet another way to lower the skill floor.

But you take everything in general you also have to consider how simplified tanks/healers have become with the removal of core class abilities and the content itself being a joke for any "support" jobs to the point where they aren't even that needed.
DPS slowly becoming more generic and samey even raid buffs themselves have to be the same timer and same duration.

What's the point of having different jobs if all that's different is the animations and weapon.

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Originally Posted by ovIm

Yoshi-P later even admitted in an interview that the feedback was just from internal testers, and that they willfully ignored player feedback.

Hence why I can safely say: no matter how much feedback and criticism the BLM changes will spark, no matter how many threads pop up, they will never revert it. They do not care one ounce for feedback from fans of a job. Praising Viper did nothing. A thousand pages of Healer feedback did nothing.

Fans of a job either have to learn to live with how the job is, or they can give CS3 a stronger signal of dissatisfaction.

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First time I hear about this interview so I'd be actually curious to read it, because if true, this is literally the hallmark of trash video game developers.
Sorry no sorry for the namecalling.

All the more odd since they seem to still listen when it comes to pvp adjustments... And oddly enough, their design team isn't trying to ruin the game on purpose and it shows.

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Originally Posted by Valence

First time I hear about this interview so I'd be actually curious to read it, because if true, this is literally the hallmark of trash video game developers.
Sorry no sorry for the namecalling.

All the more odd since they seem to still listen when it comes to pvp adjustments... And oddly enough, their design team isn't trying to ruin the game on purpose and it shows.

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https://www.eurogamer.net/naoki-yosh...nal-fantasy-14

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"With regards to the changes for Viper, we had adjusted right until the last minute and we did have in mind the possibility that some players might provide feedback that it was too busy to play. We did release the job in that state, and then we found a lot of players say it was very busy to play to the extent that they were not able to see mechanics.

The battle team, right until the last minute, were considering whether to make any adjustments to the job. The battle director actually consulted with me because he was quite torn about whether they should go through with an adjustment or not. We announced that we were considering making adjustments to the job, but the response to that was a lot of feedback from players who had already reached the level cap and were already used to playing with the job, and they were happy with the way it played. However, we had already identified some actions which would inevitably be a cause of stress for players. Eventually, we just went through with adjusting what we had initially planned, and that was unrelated to the community feedback. However, I believe probably there was some misunderstanding on the community's part."

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> Eventually, we just went through with adjusting what we had initially planned, and that was unrelated to the community feedback.

We know that there was just very few voices in the forums that complained about Viper. Hells, the class wasn't even out a week, most people weren't even max level when that blog post was released.

Oh alright, that interview. I remember about it. I never liked what he said there, but it's one case among many, and I think it would be a fallacy to blanket it to literally everything else. I mean, maybe it's the case, maybe it isn't, I don't know. Probably?

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Originally Posted by ovIm

Yoshi-P later even admitted in an interview that the feedback was just from internal testers, and that they willfully ignored player feedback.

Hence why I can safely say: no matter how much feedback and criticism the BLM changes will spark, no matter how many threads pop up, they will never revert it. They do not care one ounce for feedback from fans of a job. Praising Viper did nothing. A thousand pages of Healer feedback did nothing.

Fans of a job either have to learn to live with how the job is, or they can give CS3 a stronger signal of dissatisfaction.

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Unfortunately, their goal since Shadowbringers hasn't been to response to players who are passionate about a job they love but rather try to convince players who don't like the job to give it a chance. And they're accomplishing that by dumbing them all down to their barest minimum.

It doesn't matter if Sally's been a BLM main for half a decade and has some criticism, but otherwise loves her job. Little Timmy struggles with his timers and thinks they suck, so they clearly need to rip them off so he can have fun.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

It doesn't matter if Sally's been a BLM main for half a decade and has some criticism, but otherwise loves her job. Little Timmy struggles with his timers and thinks they suck, so they clearly need to rip them off so he can have fun.

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You know, from the exposure to game and in particular MMO design I've had, the actual reason is essentially the opposite. There's a side-benefit of making the job perform better when someone not adept at it plays it, but the core +1 for the change will be that as Sally is so good and so experienced at BLM, for her the timer has lost all meaning: She never rubs up against it. Hence it can be removed at 0 loss of gameplay, a side benefit is that Timmy now performs better and finds the job easier to pick up.

(Of course the BLM changes also include cast time reductions and those break that mold of their usual type of change, f'me I got no clue why those happen - but what I said explains changes such as the Enochian timer of the 2 lost charges of Nastrond on DRG, and is a rather common sentiment in MMORPG design. Wish I could tell you where I stand on it personally, I hate losing systems - I'd rather lose bloated button setups - but I can also sorta see where the design perspective takes its logic from, board game design is a lot like that.)

I've been playing since PS3 beta (this account only since HW) and I have never really been active on the forums. The recently shown BLM rework made me want to finally add to the discussion.

I think it's vital for the developers to step forward and clearly communicate what they want out of the game. Because at this point what they say and what they do are in clear conflict, which is causing the playerbase to lose trust and creates resentment. I feel that at this point most of the goodwill they built is running out.

We have at least 4 jobs per role to play with. It's fine for different jobs to appeal to different people. I, for example, don't enjoy procs. So I don't play red mage, dancer, or bard much (am forcing myself with bard through 7.2 out of challenge to see if my mind changes on it). But I still have black mage, summoner, pictomancer and machinist to play with within that role. And mechanics have become so symmetrical that in most fights being a melee dps or not hardly changes anything anymore outside of greeding the odd gcd.

So do the developers want all jobs within a role to be just flavours of the same? Won't that completely tank interest in new jobs coming in the future? And if not, then what explains these changes over the years? Is it because simpler, homogenized jobs = easier to maintain? Isn't that a self-inflicted issue though, with the developers needing to add abilities every expansion? Other mmos don't do this as a hard fast rule, classes get adjustments if they need them, not just because. Maybe it's time to actually lock down the kits of each job, and refine those kits instead of doing reworks just for the sake of keeping them fresh, or attracting them to people who wouldn't play them otherwise when they already have a core identity and playerbase (which is reinforced by game design with its restrictive gearing encouraging people to stick to one job for a long time).

I played Black Mage in a hard environment (anabaseios savage) for the first time in 6.4. It was a challenge, but I got through it and learned so much. It felt satisfying to actually go through all of the superchain theories without dropping my casts. Now I don't feel like I'll ever have that feeling again with these changes. I played it on the 7.0 extremes and already felt it lost some of that spark. And now? It is insane to me that Red Mage, once thought to be the easiest caster, barely got changed over the years and could now unironically be the hardest one. How is that not a failure of design? And if 8.0 changes will shake everything up (which for the record I have no hopes for anymore) why bother changing things now? Because if these black mage changes are not indicative of 8.0, then you're just changing it for a year for no reason, and if they are, then you're telling us it's going to get even worse than it is now?

I just don't understand how these things get decided and approved at CBU3. For half a decade now me (and a sizeable portion of the playerbase) have been increasingly more baffled by taken decisions and the lack of clear communication is frankly making us lose our patience with this product. I'll never forget how it took 2 full patch cycles to fix a 100% reproducible gamebreaking bug introduced with the pvp rework that was added with CC (bards/machinists casting getting heavy'd by an astro would force-disconnect them from the game). The response is too slow, too disconnected, and often times tonedeaf. Other live service games will rush changes to answer playerbase wants (not asking for crunch, but the devs shouldn't have had to work on ARR flying on their own time, hire more ppl), and yet with CBU3 it only happens if they have bad publicity in game journalism websites. Isn't that in itself not a statement that the devs don't care about the playerbase???

Enough with the half-answers, enough with the ambiguity, enough with the "please look forward to it"s. We had a 10 year old plan presented to us where nothing of substance was put on the table outside of pure client-side fluff (graphical overhaul). What do the devs want to do with the part that matters - the game? State your purpose or you'll see your core playerbase slowly leave until all you're left with are people who don't care they're playing a mmorpg. And maybe you'll be happy with that if they bring in money, but you HAVE to know this won't last. The people who want to be here for THE GAME will stick with THE GAME as long as it delivers. The ones that aren't will jump ship for anything else.

Adding another voice to the disapproval of BLM changes. No enochian? Sub GCD cast times? Why? If I could I'd go back to EW BLM.