Black Mage Revamp

[Jennika]

DoH/DoL farming tomestones for gear? That sounds terrible. What's the point of crafting if you don't even make your own gear?

[Tsukino]

FYI, the bottom parts say "by equipping '[ice/lightning] staff' the magic roles automatically change."

Basically, you get to pick from the three which one does high damage, which one is a DoT, and which one switches you back to MP charging. If you choose lightning for instance, Thunder deals high damage, Fire regenerates MP, and Blizzard becomes the DoT.

They're not suggesting adding elemental resistances for bosses or anything, but allowing players who prefer one element or another to use that as their primary damage spell. So Ifrit wouldn't take more damage from Blizzard, but if you hate how it looks to use Fire spells on him, switch over to the ice attribute staff rotation.

[Airget]

DoH/DoL farming tomestones for gear? That sounds terrible. What's the point of crafting if you don't even make your own gear?

It could be from the equality of gear distribution as it currently stands there is a mismatch in a sense.

Artisan gear:
Leather=1
Weaver=1
Carpenter=3
Blacksmith=6

Forager:
Weaver=2
Leather=2
Blacksmith=2

Out of the 8 craft classes 3/8 are used for both sets and 1/8 is only in artisan.

They most likely want to create an opportunity for all craft classes to gain their gear in an equal manner in a similar way as the ixali gloves which imo makes sense.

More time can then be spent actually making the new recipes than building the necessary building blocks to be eligible for those synths.

[Teryaani]

DoH/DoL farming tomestones for gear? That sounds terrible. What's the point of crafting if you don't even make your own gear?

I'm suspecting that the best gear would still be crafted and that this is to help those of us that don't hyper specialize in crafting. I'm all for them doing that (my wife and I submitted suggestions to this effect). Players who push the envelope get the top crafting gear. People like me who want to be able to have crafting relatively current and usable are able to.

Ack!
/10notsureaboutthis

I'm with you on that. Hopeful though as this is Yoshi's favorite class. The developers don't want to mess up the bosses fun.

[M0xie]

Did somebody say "Attribute System"???

SQUEEEEE

[Lemuria]

...elements? Could this possibly be a return to elemental weaknesses and resistances? Could BLM become my new favourite DPS job all over again? If so, then this has been a long time coming. One of my biggest gripes about Black mage is how they're basically just fire spam-bots and the only use of ice spells is for MP regeneration. If this change is coming, it's going to be a HUGE shake up of the gaming mechanics we all know and love... and I daresay it may well be for the better.

I think some existing BLMs will resist the changes, but anyone who's played a 'REAL' Black Mage from previous games knows what they're missing out on. Time will tell whether or not my imagination is running away with me, but either way it all sounds very inviting so far!

[Teryaani]

I think some existing BLMs will resist the changes, but anyone who's played a 'REAL' Black Mage from previous games knows what they're missing out on. Time will tell whether or not my imagination is running away with me, but either way it all sounds very inviting so far!

You could change the background color of the icon picture and people would resist the change. The push back will depend on how major of a change they're making. If they're allowing element swaps but keeping the rotation basically the same (Elemental Stance > Dot(s) > Spell to trigger stacks, damage spell > mana regen spell to reset rotation), I don't think too many people will complain. The single target and AOE rotations are already (among) the easiest in the game.

[Duelle]

Ack!
/10notsureaboutthis

Well... from squinting at the slides some more, the rotations themselves look just like what we use now, but we would have the option to use blizzard or thunder instead of fire as our big damage move. And what refills mp as well as the dot is changed accordingly.

That's what it looks like. Existing spells trading places to make your main nuke different, your DoT different and so on. A little wasteful if you ask me.

I think some existing BLMs will resist the changes, but anyone who's played a 'REAL' Black Mage from previous games knows what they're missing out on.

You mean "spam thunder because that's the strongest nuke in the game on everything but token mobs that absorb thunder"? Or the FFXI "real" BLMs that were basically 5/5 Thunder or Ice potency and gave the middle finger to every other element?

[jomoru]

It could be from the equality of gear distribution as it currently stands there is a mismatch in a sense.

Artisan gear:
Leather=1
Weaver=1
Carpenter=3
Blacksmith=6

Forager:
Weaver=2
Leather=2
Blacksmith=2

Out of the 8 craft classes 3/8 are used for both sets and 1/8 is only in artisan.

They most likely want to create an opportunity for all craft classes to gain their gear in an equal manner in a similar way as the ixali gloves which imo makes sense.

More time can then be spent actually making the new recipes than building the necessary building blocks to be eligible for those synths.

If I have to tome up for each class in crafting I'm going to be really pissed.

[Nalien]

I'm suspecting that the best gear would still be crafted and that this is to help those of us that don't hyper specialize in crafting.

I find it much more likely that they're going to use it as a way for force specialization of crafting the same way people have a "main" for raids due to being limited on the best gear...

3.0: You get i90 DoH/DoL gear from a weekly activity which is class specific.
3.1: You can now craft i90 Forager/Artisan style set which is non-class specific and a new i100 DoH/DoL set gets added to the weekly activity.

Forces people to specialize in a specific thing for an update, with next update kicking anyone who didn't pick Weaver/Leatherworker in the crotch while forcing you to specialize once again.