What are your impressions of BLM's current "game feel" ?

I made this thread because I wanted to share my own impressions about BLM's current game feel, after having played the current normal raid tier and extreme trial, and also see what other players feel.

What do you currently enjoy about BLM's gameplay, and why ?

Similarly, what do you currently not enjoy, and why ?

Now for my impressions :

I currently feel like I'm a Fire 4 machine gun, and every 2 minutes I become a Xenoglossy machine gun for 10 seconds. It's not very engaging or interesting.

I think the Astral Fire timer had the huge benefit of adding some amount of stress to the rotation, making me feel like I'm taking some risk when I almost run out of time, and feel very rewarding when I can refresh the timer just in time.

I very often forget to cast Paradox and cast an additional Fire 4, because Paradox doesn't feel useful since we don't need it to refresh Astral Fire anymore.

I often feel lost in my fire phase, because I don't realize I have already cast six Fire 4.
I think this also comes from the removal of the Astral Fire timer, because before that I had to keep track of it and there was some rhythm to the "Fire 4 casts -> refresh -> Fire 4 casts -> fire finishers" line.

I don't like that I can't use Thunder spells without the Thunderhead buff being active. It just doesn't feel good or natural for me to have to wait until I switch to Astral Fire or Umbral Ice to do it.

For example on the latest extreme trial, often just after the adds phase I just can't apply Thunder to the boss because I have already spent it on an add and I can't just switch to UI to get Thunderhead because I'll lose my Astral Souls stacks. It just feels bad when stuff like that happens.

I still find some enjoyment in the core gameplay of alternating between Fire and Ice phases, but now that the "pressure" of the timer is gone, it just feels really bland to me.

Current BLM now feels like a healer, where you just kinda zone out spamming whatever key your fire 4 is on because you don’t have to pay attention to anything

At least with a healer there's the occasional pressure of keeping the rest of the party alive to add some variety to things...

I agree with OP, BLM now feels very bland and boring. I've been progging Omega (O12S) with a couple of statics, and the difference between BLM before 7.2 and BLM after 7.2 is extremely noticeable. In a bad way. We're at the point in prog where we're working on getting a clear, so now there are just huge swaths of time where I'm doing nothing but casting Fire IV, and I realized that I'm just straight-up *bored,* which never ever happened when I had a timer to keep an eye on. There's no pressure keeping me on top of things, so my attention drifted and I actually performed Worse than I did before the timer was removed. Honestly at this point I'm considering swapping jobs so that I have *something* to do.

Honestly, if the future fights are gonna be so movement heavy that keeping enochian up is impossible even with umbral heart freezing the timer in ice phase, then instead of removing it from BLM entirely, they could've just added a trait or something at level 100 that does the same job without removing the complexity of gameplay at lower levels...

Its hollow and any game feel was wiped. Everything is handed to you on a silver platter and you just watch the fireworks.

The ticking timer and 2.50+ GCD did so much in conjunction with XIVs encounters, theres nothing like it anymore.

New BLM feels like a WHM without the heals. Almost the entire rotation is just spamming Fire IV non-stop, especially at anything below 100.

BLM feels soulless right now. There is nothing to think about besides overcapping Polyglot. Triplecast and Swiftcast can almost be removed too.

Don't intend on touching it again unless it gets changes, but from what I've played it felt utterly dull.

I mean that's what happens when you take away any room to mess up, it's not like they even bothered to try and give it something else to manage.

If SE is so worried about movement, just allow blm to move while casting. They can keep some of the big hard hitting spells as stand to cast, but there is no reason we should have to sacrifice complexity for movement, esp if it means more interesting battles. And its not like being able to move while casting would be as disruptive or controversial as just dumbing the job down completely.

I picked up BLM in Shadowbringers, and continued with it into Endwalker and Dawntrail. I'm no raider; I prefer to do high end content as a sort of silly group activity with friends, BUT I've gotten pretty efficient with it in other normal content and extreme trials. I still had, and still have quite a bit of room to improve, but I think I'm pretty much the kind of person the devs were thinking about with this rework.

Some QoL stuff is nice. Not spamming Umbral Soul is great, and having Triplecast be a movement tool is good. Rotation also feels more straightforward and, admittedly, there is comfort that I can stop and think and regain my bearings without dropping Enochian and having to restart my entire combo. Not having to worry about Firestarter and Thundercloud is also nice.

However, it comes with downsides. Paradox is just movement tech, as is Thunder. AoE Fire/Blizzard feel weak especially compared to your main Fire IV line. The fact you only get a single Flare Star out of an full AoE Fire combo but easily get two out of a single target combo feels bad. Leylines conflicts more than ever given how short it is and how much BLM can move now. Firestarter and Thundercloud also feel silly now; what's the point of them when other classes can shift between their combo lines and apply dots at will?

But most importantly, it's lost the brutally honest method by which it taught its players. Black Mage has always been exceptionally harsh in terms of its toolkit; you either adapted to it, or switched to another job. You could absolutely make it work, but the onus was entirely on you, the player, to make it shine. Other jobs you could get away with being mediocre or even bad with; it was fully apparent when someone fumbled BLM. It has lost a lot of its skill ceiling and player expression in how people could react and improvise with BLM in adverse situations.

To offer a counterpoint as an example, I look to my experience as WHM. #HealerStrike besides, at min ilvl WHM can be demanding when things go belly up in any form of content. It is those clutch moments, knowing that you were skillful enough to fend off the jaws of defeat and help your party claim victory when a wipe would have been ensured that give a certain dose of dopamine and serotonin, even if no-one else saw it.

BLM before this rework had that intrinsically. How long can you keep Enochian up? Can you dance through all these AoEs without dropping your combo, or dropping Enochian? Can you dance between your allies and your leylines to do mechanics while keeping your uptime? It was certainly not for everyone, but BLM had for those willing to be honest with themselves, a built-in intrinsic motivator to be better, to constantly improve. THAT, in my humble opinion, is what BLM lost this patch, and I do hope it finds it one day.

I don't mind current BLM. But I don't have nearly as much of a reason to keep playing it.

I played blm because I enjoyed the challenge of keeping timers up while moving. Aetherial manipulation is on a 10 second timer. I loved sitting still and greeting my casts before clicking on a party member and nyooming over, only to immediately between the lines back to my leylines to keep turretting.

I gave 7.2 blm an honest try and... it's boring. Mistiming my attacks thanks to the shorter cast time is frustrating and it's not fun to lack a fail states

I got a chance to sit down and play it again on my alt... I felt how I expected to feel about it.

For me, there's three things that make a good class;

1. Clear feedback. It should be obvious when you're playing the class well, and obvious when you're playing it poorly. ChidoriYumitori explained this perfectly in the above post. When mastered, black mage felt totally different than when you first picked it up. It wasn't really an awkward class-- you were just an awkward player. Other classes just didn't "tell" you that like black mage did.
2. Synergy between class systems and skills/abilities. Without enochian, a lot of black mage's abilities have lost their utility. When half your class is a system and the other half is abilities & skills that interact with that system, you can't just take out one half. Doing so removes both halves. This isn't a redesign, as much as an undesign.
3. Meaningful interactions with encounter design. Leylines, retrace/btl, aetherial manipulation, manaward, and triplecast all impact how you engage with an encounter. But a lot of these have been made less impactful or less necessary to Black Mage's success. Classes & encounters are siloing away from each other, increasingly becoming two mini-games that you play at the same time.

I'm not someone that believes black mage can't ever be changed, but I miss when my skills and abilities were more consequential. In other words, It feels like I have lost toys/tools that were fun to use.

The response appears to be "well, now you don't NEED to use them," but what good is a game that doesn't need me to play it? Black Mage was a power fantasy unlike any other, and it's sad to see it go.

Regardless of whatever changes they made in 7.2 I still am wondering exactly what the hell their endgame is with superfluous buttons such as:

Scathe
High Blizzard II
High Fire II
Blizzard

With the potency or skills as they are there shouldn't be any reason they should take months, or even years, to address. And this is coming from someone who didn't really play BLM much (but did start the game as one back in HW).

I would actually fold a lot of those buttons. BLM in particular, aesthetically and also lore wise, would be entirely understandable as a job who always deals AoE damage. Very few abilities would have a dedicated single-vs-AoE version, just for reasons that "big badaboom mage does big badaboom".

Ofc, these would all need to be of the type "X potency and Y% less in a radius".

I'd combine:

* Freeze/Blizzard IV
* Flare/Fire IV
* The thunders. The AoE High Thunder II animation is dope, just make the main target be hit by the larger bolt from HT1.
* The stance-switching spells, which also eliminates HB2 and HF2, though I'd probably use those visuals instead as they're pretty damn nifty.
* Xeno and Foul I'd merge into a two-step automated sequence spell because I feel both animatiosn can combine well. On press you cause a (reduced damage) Xenoglossy to a target, the end-animation gathers the visuals into a single point, then ~1.5s after pressing the button initially this explodes into Foul, which on the main target happens to exactly equalize the damage to one target.

I'm not sure whether I'd prefer the AoE rotation to then also be the "full" rotation, but it'd make sense I guess? In any case, so many cool AoE-seeming visuals, it'd be a shame to not make the entire rotation on all targets essentially be also an AoE rotiation.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

Current BLM now feels like a healer, where you just kinda zone out spamming whatever key your fire 4 is on because you don’t have to pay attention to anything

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As someone who has mained healer and dps caster since ARR, this is exactly how I felt when trying the new BLM out.
Playing the occasional BLM with the slow weighty casts and threat of dropping the astral/umbral stacks, along with actually having to think about how to keep them in moments with high movement, was a very fun escape from the boring healer rotation. SMN used to be a nice escape too with complex rotation and dot upkeep.

All my favorite classes are being slowy butchered over the lifespan of the game, even Picto now I hear has become more spammy and simpler, I can't bring myself to test it.

Only RDM remains, though I'm sure the class will have something "pleasing to look forward too" in the near future, get ready for the jolt III spam...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kurado

I love the 7.2 BLM changes. It feels fun and flashy. I've been using BLM for all sorts of content now after barely touching it since 1.0

Thank you to the devs for making SMN, AST, and BLM more accessible and fun.

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Great bait!!

b8 aside, I don’t do savage anymore (scared of other people) but I played BLM (not religiously) for EW & DT extremes and normal content and post 7.0 it became my second favorite job only behind Ninja.

I hate the changes.

To me, (someone who isn’t 100% optimal or doing freaky nonstandard rotations) it feels the ~~same~~ but the same as it did when I was playing “perfectly” and not messing anything up.

My favorite part about black mage was the fail state. There was a way to destroy your rotation and making a bad move or positioning yourself poorly meant you had to try to correct your mistake. Again, I was never playing “optimally” but doing something like using an ether to correct almost dropping enochian and missing a flare star charge or whatever felt FUN. it felt so fun!!! I had so many options and progging a fight and crafting the perfect rotation with each attempt was rewarding and satisfying. No other job had a sense of mastery to it. You were able to improvise and adapt to the situation. Manafont pre-7.0 was fun too because it was just another option to either squeeze out more damage or save your rotation from a mistake.

My question: What purpose does Paradox serve now? What about Umbral soul? Why even change Leylines’ duration? The job feels incomplete. I don’t like to criticize developers harshly or be dramatic but they legitimately did a terrible job. Removing a fundamental aspect of it without really reworking anything else just felt lazy. Why even do it in the .2 patch and not as part of some huge .0 patch rebalance instead?

I think CBU3 should allow at least ONE job in this game to be difficult and require actual mastery. I originally picked up Black Mage because I assumed incorrectly that it’d never be gutted and I’d have a fun job for boring normal content and extremes.

I want to fail. Let me fail. I have 18/21 combat jobs to max level. I am tired of pressing your buttons in the same way you want me to every single time I want to use my brain and think and adapt to the fight I’m in.

I am not BLM main and when I play BLM I just run normal content.

That being said I have a mix feeling about the change.

Although I don’t play BLM for challenge, I do found keeping the timer unique and fun even in normal content.

On the other hand I am not a fan of “memorized” the fight. Yes, fight have been DDR since ARR, but it is clearly getting toward more memories game than the more reactionary we had early in FFXIV, this is always one of the biggest reason I do not like bringing BLM in higher content, and the recent change in BLM just hints we are moving towards more to that side.

So on one hand I feel BLM not as interesting but on the others hand it feel less punishing if I do not memorise the fight and keep check on boss health like an accountant

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kurado

I love the 7.2 BLM changes. It feels fun and flashy. I've been using BLM for all sorts of content now after barely touching it since 1.0

Thank you to the devs for making SMN, AST, and BLM more accessible and fun.

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Almost had me until you said SMN more accessible. If you mean to the point where a 10 year old could figure out the rotation without a guide then congrats

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Kurado

I love the 7.2 BLM changes. It feels fun and flashy. I've been using BLM for all sorts of content now after barely touching it since 1.0

Thank you to the devs for making SMN, AST, and BLM more accessible and fun.

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Please explain how BLM was not flashy before, they are the same animations.