Dawntrail was the worst thing to happen to BLM

HF and HB- Enhanced flare was removed because people were cheesing flare stars on single target using flare. HF and HB also got potency nerfs. Since these spells are significantly less PPS than flare and they don't buff flare anymore they're redundant and useless. The current aoe rotation feels awful and cheese compared to the thoughtfulness of the EW aoe rotation. I used to get excited about using manafont and ethers to get extra flares in the rotation and now flare is the entire rotation. its been 8 months and the best that SE can do is to make the HF HB situation even worse.

Instant Casts- Despair and paradox were both made instant cast to loosen the timing with Astral Fire phase to make it easier for people to stop astral fire from dropping. These changes are pretty neutral imo. The paradox one throws off timing going from unsynced to synced content, but gives a mid rotation window for weaves. Despair being instant takes away a little bit of the turret mage identity, but doesn't break anything.

Sharpcast- I kinda understand why they did it to remove extra buttons and move the effects to other spells, but I still dislike it. Removing sharpcast takes away another decision that has to be made by the player. In EW you had to think about whether to use sharpcast on firestarter or thundercloud. You also had to find space to weave in the ability as well. What is the point of even having thunderhead? Just make high thunder a regular cast since its always available. Having sharpcast in the game gave players some little bit of choice in their rotation.

Cast Lengths- FFXIV's cookie cutter mechanic design claims another victim. "stand here" "okay now move here" "now move again". Most of the mechanics in fights involve moving and standing on a specific spot and SE's answer to fights being boring is to.... wait for it.. do the same thing but faster!! Instead of coming up with unique mechanics for players, they double down on playing DDR . So much so that they annihilated the black mage turret caster playstyle for it. Flare star requiring 6 casts of Fire 4 means that losing one cast because of movement means also losing a giant potency cast. And twelve forbid that anyone enters a fail state in this game caused by anything other than not moving to the correct spot on a circle/square. Reducing the cast times to 2 seconds means that anyone can still get enough stacks for flare star no matter how many mistakes they make and still have enough movement to play DDR. Half of the fun of the job was the overcoming the difficulty in maintaining uptime with long casts while doing mechanics. There are plenty of tools for the job to be able to do that from the 40% of spells being instant castable to aetherial manipulation and between the lines for movement. It seems SE saw people saying "Why the hell am I playing BLM when PCT does even more for less work" and decided to just make black mage easier instead of more rewarding to master.

Scary Timers- If reducing all the cast times was pushing you down a flight of stairs, removing all timers from the job is spitting on you at the bottom. Not only are they making it incredibly easy to cast enough Fire 4s for flare star while moving constantly for mechanics, but they also decided to make it IMPOSSIBLE to drop astral fire and thus dropping flare star. The removal of timers for the firestarter and thunderhead buffs isn't as meaningful as enochian since if you were dropping those timers, you were messing up severely already. But when I started writing, I was standing next to a target dummy with 4 flare star stacks and when I finish I will be in no worse position than when I was 20 minutes ago. The only fail state of the job is to not have the GCD running anymore. The only thing this might be positive for is during downtime, but that was already taken care of by having umbral soul freeze the timer outside of combat. Playing SLIGHTLY sub-optimally, beginner players can use the following line starting from OOM in AF3: B3>B4>Paradox>F3>F4>F4>Paradox>F4>F4>F3P>F4>F4>Despair>Flare Star. Especially with the cast times changed, this is FIVE SECONDS of casting during a 15 second window and 6 seconds pre-7.2. The only thing this change serves is to remove meaning from spells and their placements. Now its just thoughtlessly press spells until you run out of MP and lit up buttons before refreshing, a glorified builder spender job. Because you don't need to refresh anymore, paradox is pointless other than for the fact it does the same potency as Fire 4 and grants F3P to transpose. You can use paradox at any point in the rotation and not enter a fail state. Even the opener now skips paradox in favor of a second flare star. What does this change do other than make the job less rewarding to succeed on and to remove meaning from spells?

I understand that there might be some players that like the changes and will disagree that black mage should remain difficult. I don't want to come off as elitist and have it seem like my points are that black mage should remain difficult so its inaccessible to people, but I like to play difficult things and I like to fail. When I first picked up black mage, I sucked at it. I was constantly dropping enochian and getting caught in aoe's, even now in new things I sometimes catch a vuln stack. But, being able to overcome something that was difficult and clear my first high-end duty as black mage was a huge accomplishment for me. To be able to say not only did I complete the content, but I also did it on a difficult job was the most satisfying part of playing black mage. You didn't have to be the best player in the word to play pre-7.2 black mage, but in the era of Endwalker, it was an accessible job that still maintained a high skill ceiling. It gave you enough room for error to be sub-optimal, yet still effective while learning; but the job still punished you for mistakes and let you know when you messed up. Its sad to no longer be able to say that I overcame the challenges of playing black mage and after seeing the direction of game design in 7.2, I have little hope for improvement in 8.0, nor do I want to wait a year and a half for them to resurrect the job in its true glory.
I have ideas for changes I would like to see for the job in coming patches that I can add if anyone wants to see them. I'll likely still continue to play black mage despite its shortcomings in its current iteration, unless they keep making drastic negative changes. Let me know your thoughts on the 7.2 black mage now that its live. Do you think SE will admit their mistakes with the changes or will they double down more until they drive everyone away?

Playing BLM at lvl 50 in ARR was the same situation: casting so much fire the astral fire timer just never ran out, then umbral, clean, repeat. Blm is still more interesting than that old rotation. Lore wise I like to think wol has outgrown the need for a timer to able to handle astral/umbral phases. Getting rid of it so suddenly is disregulating but I'm one of those folks who doesn't mind. My biggest hope was at least some kind of sound indicator for the timers you can elect to use, I'm indifferent overall on the removal.

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Originally Posted by DeathNoodles

Playing BLM at lvl 50 in ARR was the same situation: casting so much fire the astral fire timer just never ran out, then umbral, clean, repeat. Blm is still more interesting than that old rotation. Lore wise I like to think wol has outgrown the need for a timer to able to handle astral/umbral phases. Getting rid of it so suddenly is disregulating but I'm one of those folks who doesn't mind. My biggest hope was at least some kind of sound indicator for the timers you can elect to use, I'm indifferent overall on the removal.

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I can justify that lore explanation, sure. But aside from it dumbing down the class and making it braindead...they didn't replace it with anything. SMN at least got built from the ground up. BLM feels, legitimately, like an incomplete job now.

Taking the timers away makes it feel like getting synced down to level 50 used to feel. There doesn't feel like theres any substance in the rotation, just filler. Seeing buttons light up feels more like a chore than being something special from planning sharpcast or getting a proc.

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Originally Posted by Edgowo

Taking the timers away makes it feel like getting synced down to level 50 used to feel. There doesn't feel like theres any substance in the rotation, just filler. Seeing buttons light up feels more like a chore than being something special from planning sharpcast or getting a proc.

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There I completely agree. I've been telling others who don't play the spec that BLM feels like white mage without the healing.

https://i.imgur.com/kYM7QU7.png

Playing Black Mage now feels like I'm playing Machinst, except it's stronger. AoE damage feels so weak, all my skills are disconnected and some have been made meaningless. And all the real damage comes from single target damage.

That's not even mentioning the awkwardness of not having the timers on any of your skills to keep you in check and Flare Star still having no build up connection to High Fire 2.

Devs need to revert the changes and go back to the drawing board on this "rework", because clearly it wasn't thought entirely through and just feels like a giant mess.

You say that, but I'd say Endwalker is the worst thing that has happened to BLM. And, indeed, casters in general. I was calling out the terrible position BLM was in back at the start of EW. When you design dungeons like Tower of Zot, where classes like RDM or BLM can struggle in but classes like Summoner just kinda vibes through, there's only one logical conclusion you can draw from it. That is the systematic destruction of cast bars across all classes. Instant Despair? Class casts too much. 2 charges of triplecast? Class has a ton of movement. 3 charges xeno? Better bank up that movement!

There were 3 things that Endwalker did that has fundamentally destroyed casters as a role.
1, They gave every caster too much mobility. From SMN being reworked into an rphys to healers getting 1.5s GCDs all the way to triplecast getting 2 charges and ice paradox being instant. Casters were given an absolutely massive amount of movement.

2, They made every arena became absolutely gigantic. Go into TEA. Go into O12S, or E4s. Go into literally any dungeon or raid that predates tier 2 shadowbringers. Look at the size of the arenas. Then look at any dungeon, raid, trial, etc in endwalker and dawntrail. Notice anything? They are absolutely massive. And not just a little bit.

3, They started making every mechanic a lot faster, a lot trickier with worse telegraphing. And, every mechanic forced you to run across these absolutely gigantic fights.

So, when I look at DT, I see the natural conclusion of the devs holding the entire caster and healer role in abject contempt. They don't want cast bars, and they're designing a game woefully disconnected from the game that helped make FFXIV the awesome MMO that catapulted in popularity in ShB: Stormblood.

Taking each other point line by line.

Sharpcast: BLM hasn't been a real proc mage since Heavensward, and by the time EW rolled around, Thunder had a ~68% chance to proc and fire a 40% chance. You could almost rely on thunder proccing, and firestarter was always a good choice, especially if you like safety. Pressing sharpcast was always a silly button, I'm glad it's gone.

AoE rotation: The AoE rotation for BLM has always been a complete disaster. This version is no better or worse than every other awful iterations BLM has ever had. Though my personal favorite is ShB, despite still being an unmitigated disaster.

Cast Lengths: No notes, as I brought up earlier, this is the logical conclusion of endwalker's disastrous encounter design philosophy. And if they continue this in DT and into 8.0, I wouldn't be surprised if the devs actually removed all cast bars. The encounter design is forcing them to.

Scary Timers: These things should have been killed off as soon as Endwalker rolled around. All stupidity revolving around nonstandard aside, these timers massively constrain job design. While I'd personally wish they added any other structure back into it, these timers have needed to go for a long, long time. Dropping timers is just icing on the cake of bad design these represent. The only thing I'm worried about is this feels like a 5.4 monk rework. Until we know 6.0 monk is going to happen to BLM, the class lost a lot of its complexity and the structure it has now will have extremely silly design consequences. But then again, if the encounter design keeps going the direction the devs keep taking it, they're going to kill every single class because you can't have complex fights with complex jobs.

BLM never needed timers to be a complex job, 90% of its difficulty was always sitting still and casting. But the fact that cast bars in general are too complicated for their encounters? That's the actual problem.

After just finishing the new dungeon, honestly might go back to Pictomancer or go back to healing jobs. It's so funny how weird BLM feels without the sense of urgency. I thought for sure I'd be on board with the changes, too, but it has no satisfying kick to it now.

I think removing the timers revealed a flaw in it that I could never feel because of those same dang timers taking up so much of my thinking while playing. Could also just be my ADHD brain begging for dopamine and not getting the same zap now.



And also, why have Leylines anymore? The increase of basic cast speed and movement demands has nuked any incentive to use it.

You know they make all these changes to BLM to make it "playable" for their new fight content, then you have situations where you need to watch a guy's fingers snapping...but your attack graphics practically cover the area you're supposed to be watching. Good job SE.

Honestly, they need to completely dismantle BLM--remove every spell except for Fire, Thunder, Blizard, Flare, and Freeze, and literally rebuild the entire job from the ground up if they're going to remake it for current fight design. This current iteration is not acceptable. Zoraal Ja was a better villain than BLM is a job right now.