Latest and Greatest Information on Black Mage

[Neophyte]

And on Phantom Ray... 477 dps.
Four Hundred Seventy Seven... That. Is. Pathetic.
So the question becomes why did I do literally half as much dps on Ray as I did on Minotaur?
Simple, every single time he did his aoe which divides the room in quarters, it was aimed such that I was at the center of a slice. Every. Single. Time... I counted...

You should be able to place your leylines (i.e. the place where you want to stay) so, that it's half on the first cone and half on second cone.. so that you're able to minimize movement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EvqyEVIY60#t=6m20s

Like were the AST in this video is standing.


You may get those annoying circle AoEs to dodge, but if ppl are smart, they won't screw you additionally by placing their AoE on top of you, too.
My motto is "Never stay between a boss and a BLM, behind a BLM or on top of a BLM". Their life is hard enough.
I love A3, when all ppl stack (foolishly) at the beginning and all blueish "push-away"-cones are aimed in direction of the poor BLM.

[Egnasya]

I love A3, when all ppl stack (foolishly) at the beginning and all blueish "push-away"-cones are aimed in direction of the poor BLM.

Hrhr, I once got yelled at because I dared not to stack with everyone else in center. I usually stand to the side of the boss with not a person between me and boss, and far away from center. It's sad that such things are necessary in order to play BLM with as little disruption as possible. To think developers at SE approved this...


@ topic
BLM does not need buffs. What it needs is reduced button bloat, smoother selfbuff management, and gameplay that allows you to concentrate on fight mechanics every once in a while instead of rotation demanding all attention. They could buff all damage by 5000% and still have a clunky mess of a class that simply is less fun to play than it was pre 3.0 (careful; this might be the author's subjective opinion).

Problems are not solved by sugarcoating numbers.

[Granyala]

@ topic
BLM does not need buffs. What it needs is reduced button bloat, smoother selfbuff management, and gameplay that allows you to concentrate on fight mechanics every once in a while instead of rotation demanding all attention. They could buff all damage by 5000% and still have a clunky mess of a class that simply is less fun to play than it was pre 3.0 (careful; this might be the author's subjective opinion).

Problems are not solved by sugarcoating numbers.

I completely agree. BLM is stationary/hardcast dependant that makes any movement intense encounter an exercise in frustration.
Also why the hell do we need 4 different fire/ice buttons that essentially all do the same thing?!

[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.

[Cynfael]

Funny how the 2.x rotation feels closer to the 2.x BRD than it does to 3.x BLM. I took the freedom of movement granted by frequent proc activation for granted.

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.

[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"?

[hallena]

Nothing has been announcement when it come to blm getting a buff.
However if they do get a buff, it'll most likely be an aoe buff or an indirect dps buff with mobility/enochian QoL changes

[Kenji1134]

At this point I would like to at least have some comment from the devs as to the current QoL state of BLM.

Beyond that, a step-by-step approach to making the rotation less of a migraine in endgame content would be good.

As a potential first step, make the following adjustments to B4.
Instant cast, applies UI3, affected by AF3 Ice penalty and cost reduction, can only be used under Enochian, 230 potency (280/3*2.5), refreshes Enochian to previous duration-5s.

This change would keep dps the same when refreshing Enochian "correctly" from UI, but also allow you to refresh Enochian while running for your life.

And before anyone asks, from a PvP standpoint you would be able to spam this while running a grand total of 6 times. Each time you use it you lose 5s on Enochian, so the durations would go 25-20-15-10-5-0... once you hit 0 on the 6th cast, you no longer have Enochian and cannot use B4 again.

Put this change in, see how the rotation feels, see if it is "too easy", etc, etc.
The Fire phase stays the same, but if you mess up there, you can generally recover at a dps loss. However this change will primarily remove situations where you are forced to move when you have to refresh Enochian and are basically locked out of doing so.

[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.

[laanz]

BLM single target numbers are fine. They mostly need buffs to AoE and fun. Yeah, I know Enochian isn't that bad, but I did enjoy the 2.x gameplay more.

2.x blm were like fire1 fire1 fire1 and hoped for firestarter or Thunder procs .. xD enochian made it all more interesting imo