Black Mage Casting Glitches

[XiXiQ]

Even after playing 60 BLM for quite a while, I find the delay in availability of B4/F4 the most annoying thing, because it stops the smooth queueing of spells.

[Rongway]

2. When casting fire 1, firestarter procs are delayed such that it is possible for 2 firestarter procs to merge into a single firestarter opportunity because the firestarter opportunity only becomes available once the next fire 1 cast is in progress.

At 60, there's no reason you should ever be in this situation; if you're casting Fire twice in succession, you failed to execute your Enochian rotation.
Sub 60, if a lost Firestarter opportunity is the deciding factor in a fight, the party has bigger problems than "BLM only got to use Firestarter once".

3. When astral fire 3 runs out during the cast of fire 1, the BLM is returned to an unpredictable astral fire state. It would feel better if I was always put into the AF state in effect at the beginning of the cast.

5. If astral fire, umbral ice or enochian drops in the middle of the cast of a dependent skill, the cast is interrupted. Again it would feel smoother and be less susceptible to latency if it simply prevented the skill from being used again rather than interrupting the current cast.

Try moving your buff bar somewhere you can see it without moving your eyes too much. It tells you how much time is left on your buffs; plan your casts accordingly.
At 50, you'll never cast Fire as your Astral buff is wearing, since the BLM MO is to spam Fire.
At 60, because of MP constraints, you shouldn't run into any (rotation-normal) situations where Fire IV -> Fire -> Fire IV will result in being able to cast more Fire IVs than just casting Fire one action early. Cast it while there's still time, instead of trying to shoehorn it in as your buff's wearing.
But it's not the Fire part you really need to worry about; it's the Ice. If Umbral Ice wears mid Blizzard IV cast and everything before that went normally, then you need to drop an earlier action from your rotation. If Umbral Ice wore because of interruption/dodge, then make better use of your arsenal of BLM abilities with "Additional effect: What mechanics?". Eat a hit with Manaward/Manawall, slide-dodge to a party member with an Aetherial Manipulation macro, or prevent interruption with Surecast.

4. It is possible for astral fire to run out during a transpose (an instant cast skill) leaving the BLM in what is usually a state where they have 0 mana.

Every job has this problem, and it's a result of having every action validated by the server. It's more than an annoyance, sure, but it's working as intended.

[ChakoTako]

I am a ps4 player, and something I noticed is that sometimes when I get a fire starter proc, and I press it, it'll start hard casting a fire3. Is that commonly known to happen?

[JackFross]

I mean...

I haven't hit 60 on my BLM yet, but I'm fairly certain that every issue in this thread is solved by simply... dealing with it?

1- You can't F3>F4 so just do F3>F1>F4. It doesn't change much *and* gives you the potential of a F3 proc, which lets you use an additional F4 before having to cast another AF spell.

2- Firestarter isn't a thing at 60, since you should never be doing F1>F1 anymore. If you are, you lost Enochian, which is another way of saying "you messed up." Punishment for failing to properly execute your class.

3- You should really not be casting Fire that late in AF that you are left wondering which state you'll be in. It all depends what the state is when the cast finishes. If you don't have enough time left to finish the cast, don't cast it. Easy. Or just... don't get yourself in that situation. Swiftcast is a spell you have.

4- AF doesn't run out during Transpose. It runs out before you clicked Transpose. You need to be quicker hitting it, though I'm honestly very curious as to when this would ever be an issue, since your AF/UI should never be close to 0s when you use Transpose.

5- You shouldn't be casting B4 or F4 if your UI or AF or Enochian is going to wear off during the cast. You should have been using B4 a cast sooner. You should have been in UI two casts ago to re-activate Enochian. You should have been casting F1 or F3 a cast ago (or this current cast) to maintain stacks.

All of it is solved by simply dealing with these intended consequences for screwing up the way you're playing the class.


As for Chako above - no. That shouldn't be happening. The only reason it does is because you cast your F1 and waited for the proc to activate before hitting F3 immediately, which, besides being the wrong way to play the class, can result in the above issue, since you hit it in the time between "i saw the proc" and "the server registered the proc." The game functions on a heartbeat. You see things happen in real time, but the server only updates the information that i has once every 400-ish milliseconds. This means that, if your proc appears at the start of a heartbeat, you have 400ms where IF YOU HIT IT, the server will think you did not actually have that proc.


And last - Transpose and Convert sharing a cd is the absolute worst possible idea. Convert on a 12s cooldown would allow you to stay in Fire literally forever by just constantly using Convert, casting more fire spells, waiting a couple seconds, and converting again. Like - it should probably have a somewhat shorter cooldown, sure, but not the same length as Transpose - and Transpose shouldn't be any longer than it is, due to the reason you use it and how frequently you need to use it at lower levels to not be shit.

[Judge_Xero]

I am a ps4 player, and something I noticed is that sometimes when I get a fire starter proc, and I press it, it'll start hard casting a fire3. Is that commonly known to happen?

Yes that is typical. Even if you Sharp Cast a F1 and then immediately que F3 it will hard cast the F3 regardless of the guaranteed proc.

They really should address that like they did with the Straighter Shot proc timing for Bard while under WM. It is apparent they have the ability to do so, so why not.

[WeekendSoja]

When I played BLM my biggest thing was during my initial activation of enochian, when casting 5-6 fire 4's, when working on the transition from astral 3 to umbral 3, knowing full well that the astral 3 casting buff for ice spells would drop mid-cast of blizzard 3...on occasion...my blizzard 3 would get interrupted.

It wasn't all too regular of an occurrence but it was still sad because when pushing fire 4's out and leaving yourself 4-6 seconds to cast blizzard 3 into blizzard 4 and buff drops and you see your blizzard cancel. Blargity!

[Waliel]

I mean...

I haven't hit 60 on my BLM yet, but I'm fairly certain that every issue in this thread is solved by simply... dealing with it?

1- You can't F3>F4 so just do F3>F1>F4. It doesn't change much *and* gives you the potential of a F3 proc, which lets you use an additional F4 before having to cast another AF spell.

Don't do that unless you have Sharp available. It turns your rotation into F1 - F4 - F4 - F1 - F4 without a Firestarter.

Yes that is typical. Even if you Sharp Cast a F1 and then immediately que F3 it will hard cast the F3 regardless of the guaranteed proc.

They really should address that like they did with the Straighter Shot proc timing for Bard while under WM. It is apparent they have the ability to do so, so why not.

Because arrows don't have travel time, duh.

[ChakoTako]

[QUOTE=Judge_Xero;3489777]Yes that is typical. Even if you Sharp Cast a F1 and then immediately que F3 it will hard cast the F3 regardless of the guaranteed proc.

Ya, I was going to say it's happened a few times when I've sharp casted a fire starter too. Well it's not a huge deal, I still love the class and plan on keeping it my main

[Rongway]

They really should address that like they did with the Straighter Shot proc timing for Bard while under WM. It is apparent they have the ability to do so, so why not.

They don't, really. Nothing is different with the proc time. It's the ability timing. Wanderer's Minuet and Guass Cannon give waste-less procs because their abilities are 1.5s cast, 2.5s recast. Having a 1.5s cast time on Fire would make Lv50 sync content stupid easy on BLM.

[Aurelle_Delacroix]

The best response to this thread would just be time and skill management. I mean, any of those changes and BLM would just blow everything up at all times with no consequences. I've mained BLM since 2.0 and never have a problem. I mean, if there is a bit of latency? Maybe I needed to move? Or maybe I clipped my spells too close and my Enochian timer fell. Guess what? You deal with it. Sometimes you can pull yourself out of it and sometimes you have to do your rotation of shame (2.0 rotation).

Honestly, none of this should be a big deal. And really, if you hit the Sp.S threshold (which I think is like 670 something? I can't remember) then you should be able to do your rotation just fine with no issues. Practice more. That's all I can say.