Latest and Greatest Information on Black Mage

[Sacerdos]

The best change would be Fire 4 refreshing AF, so when you have to move during a Fire 4 cast you don't have to replace it with a Fire 1 to keep up AF3. I feel like that would solve 90% of the issues with the Enochian.

The rotation is still pretty simple. Its just that whenever you're forced to cancel a Fire 4, you need to cast Fire 1 instead to refresh stacks or you drop AF3, which is both a pain to keep track of and a annoying dps loss when you have to 3xF4 2xF1 instead of 4xF4 1xF1.

Though I guess it would just take all the skill out of the Enochian rotation.

[Egnasya]

The best change would be Fire 4 refreshing AF, so when you have to move during a Fire 4 cast you don't have to replace it with a Fire 1 to keep up AF3. I feel like that would solve 90% of the issues with the Enochian.

It probably would yes. Generally classes have too few full replacement abilities, which is one of the inherent design flaws of FFXIV. Look at WHM's DPS abilities for example; Stone II replaces Stone in the sense that you never touch Stone again for DPS once you learned Stone II, Stone III does the same with Stone II and Aero. Lower tier DPS abilities are simply cut out, and do I hear any WHM complain? Probably not. Yet BLM still uses all 4 tiers of Fire and Blizzard in some way. Why? It's no miracle that things become pointlessly complex by the time you learned 35 abilities since you still need to use nearly all of them all the time. You'd think someone among devs would notice that.

I'm not entirely sure that Enochian needs to be made easier somehow, but it's fair to say that the new rotation is far less forgiving of errors and flukes.

Errors the player made, no issue. Flukes that are out of your control, big issue. Punishing the player via RNG leads to incredible frustration, and I dare say nobody plays the game to become frustrated.



BTW, what happened to "we don't want players to not recognize their class anymore"?

[Thorsparkle]

The best change would be Fire 4 refreshing AF, so when you have to move during a Fire 4 cast you don't have to replace it with a Fire 1 to keep up AF3.

Definitely not my preferred option. The problem is not the cycle. The problem is mobility. In the 2.0 rotation, we could almost always count on procs when we needed to move to sustain dps. In 3.0 we don't.

I suggest that fire IV should be able to trigger firestarter proc (with a 40% chance like fire1). It would help a lot to maintain the cycle as you could use to move away from aoe while keeping AF up OR use it in your standard cycle to cast an extra fire IV.