Any chance of an Enochian qol fix?

[Ishkar]

It disturbs me how many people think in a purely meta-mentality kind of way.
I've read so many posts on these forums, and replies so often come in the form of "it works" / "learn to play" / "the dps isn't bad" / etc.

It is my belief that outside of progression content right after release -where maximizing total group DPS and performance is crucial- any job is viable for any situation. And yet that seems to be the only basis of argument that most people bring to the table here. People seem to forget that the relevance of meta-content doesn't apply to the general gameplay outside of that meta-content. And meta-content is a very limited portion of the total gaming experience for many of us.


Yes, Enochian works. Yes, you can learn to manage Enochian. Yes, learning each fight inside-out will make you a better Black Mage. Yes, practicing your timing with Enochian will make handling it more fluent. But I think that way before we start thinking about those things, we should be thinking... What is Enochian (and the other new changes to Black Mage as well) bringing to the job? How is it making the job more interesting or fun to play? How is it further extending the basis of the job that we got in 2.0?

To me, it seems like it fails in all of these points. The way Black Mage feels in 3.0 as opposed to 2.0 is that it's exactly the same class, only now you need Enochian up as often as possible. Nothing more. We got Fire IV and Blizzard IV, which feels exactly the same as Fire III and Blizzard III back in 2.0. Out of all the possible additions they could have made, they chose to give us more of what we already had too much of. While I accept that some people enjoy it and approve of it, it feels incredibly lazy in terms of design to me. Some people mentioned Dragoons being in the same spot, but as I also play Dragoon, I severely disagree. Blood of the Dragon changes the Dragoon rotation much more dynamically than Enochian does. Also, Blood of the Dragon doesn't lock you out of skills you received earlier! You're still using your old combos, you just have an extra 4th ability to end each one, as opposed to Fire III and Blizzard III losing effectiveness (and becoming less fun to use). And Geirskogul is an extra ability to use on your oGCD, as well as make the timer component of BotD more interesting (which BLM has no equivalent for). And what's more, it feels rewarding to keep it up. There's a certain sense of achievement for keeping up BotD for an entire fight, and you feel it each time you pull off your 4th combo chain or a Geirskogul. When you lose it, you actually feel the loss in your playing. But Enochian doesn't add any flavor or dynamic to the old Black Mage rotation. Just instead of version III, you're now using version IV of a spell. It also severely diminished the appeal of Fire III or Blizzard III, as you now feel like it's a 'filler' spell you just use to provide a basis for your Fire IV and Blizzard IV. And when Enochian falls, you feel upset for having to use them. At the end of a fight, I'm not especially happy I kept Enochian up. I just feel like I did what I should have been doing because the game design forced me to. That's the problem with Enochian for me, the fact that it's uninspired and a terribly boring addition to a job that already suffered from a lack of diversity in the first place. I know a lot of people complained about this prior to 3.0, and I also know a lot of Black Mages who gave up on the job after 3.0 failed to provide 'more' to the job (me being one of them).

As for me, I won't be asking for them to change anything as I know that there will always be differences in opinions and experiences. I realize some people like and approve of the additions. I simply stopped playing the job, even though I've always loved the glass-cannon Mage archetype in any MMO I've played. But it bothers me to see opinions dismissed purely because "it works." I think a lot of people would benefit if they changed their priority from: Does it work --> Is it fun, to: Is it fun --> Does it work.

There is more to MMORPGs than min-maxing and parsing highest.