I'm having a hard time understanding how people enjoy the BLM...

[Viviza]

BLM gets a lot easier once your basic rotation becomes muscle memory and you start learning a set of responses to being interrupted.

For example, if you have to run around on your second f4, maybe just skip it and move on to the f1 to keep astral up, since you know the astral timer is coming up. Also no need to check the eno timer at this point, since you're back on track. Use swiftcast and teleports to cheat occasionally. You'll only need to manually check things when you start pushing limits ('I got interrupted but it was only a second and I think I can still get that f4 off...') or things just go terribly wrong and you need to reset things.

You'll occasionally be knocked out of eno entirely. Revert to your lv50 rotation and wait out the timer. It happens. Monks have been dealing with this sort of mechanic forever.

[Kenji1134]

As another poster mentioned, one of the other "issues" with BLM is our love for High-HP targets.
We are punished rather harshly for not finishing a cast, be it due to movement, buffs expiring, or the target dying or being immune. Of course you can say this for all casters, but show me a caster, or any class, that can lose a primary buff 2.5s AFTER they make the decision to use it? It is one thing to not be positioned correctly for a potency bonus (like DRG), it is another to not reapply your rotation buffs due to an event that occurs well after you pres the button.

One often proposed solution, which to be fair was partly implemented, is to frontload the effects of all our spells. (The partial implementation was that they are applied ~90% of the way through the cast)
This means that like DRG (for example), a BLM can begin casting Fire, instantly get the AF refresh along with the GCD starting, and not lose their place in the rotation regardless of whether the cast finishes or not. (You still eat the GCD loss so breaking a cast is still punishing)

This would have some repercussions for the standard AoE rotation, as you will not be able to squeeze out an extra tick of UI while slow casting F3, but we'll deal with that... Not like BLM is AoE king anymore anyway.

[Bebekurenai]

BLM gets a lot easier once your basic rotation becomes muscle memory and you start learning a set of responses to being interrupted.

For example, if you have to run around on your second f4, maybe just skip it and move on to the f1 to keep astral up, since you know the astral timer is coming up. Also no need to check the eno timer at this point, since you're back on track. Use swiftcast and teleports to cheat occasionally. You'll only need to manually check things when you start pushing limits ('I got interrupted but it was only a second and I think I can still get that f4 off...') or things just go terribly wrong and you need to reset things.

You'll occasionally be knocked out of eno entirely. Revert to your lv50 rotation and wait out the timer. It happens. Monks have been dealing with this sort of mechanic forever.

I'm so with you on this. Also, let me tell you my story:

In v2 I mained whm and blm. I loved the healing power of whm and the boom-boom power of blm. I know it felt like a dull job for some, all this fire spam and the ocasional ice-mages to make us lol. But I loved it, it was simple, powerful, and very fun without much head-squeezing. Just like whm, or you heal, or you nuke, not much thinking or preventing unlike sch which required more knowledge of mechanics, when to cast succor and why, fairy managing... and smn I found just boring. All these dots and wait for the ocasional fester, and the pets were just meh. More like a dotter than a summoner I thought.

Then came HW. Getting my mages to 60 was my first goal and of course I kept on with my beloved whm and blm. Whm still was awesome and even more so as I got to 60... until I met astrologian. The beauty of the spells, the cards, the choice of being almost a whm and almost a sch within the same job! I fell in love. You can imagine what happened to my whm >_> yeah, stored, substituted by ast.

Blm... I farmed Bismarck and Ravana X until I hated them. I did all my important fights on blm. I followed rotations seen on guides and videos, by people nuking dummies and never really understood what I was doing. I then became disheartened, like you guys. I thought, damn, I only really can do good damage at the beginning of fights, but when I have to move or the boss depops (damn Ravana) I have to go back to 2.0 rotation and fall from position 4 to 8 in the party list. I wondered, how can SE create such a job that requires so much attention on buffs and stacks, and so little movement? With the game being all about dodging and moving and jumping out of red telegraphs and such, come on SE!
So while my boyfriend kept on blackmaging, I switched to smn. I found it suddenly a lot more rewarding, the boom-boom effect was there again with deathflare, I could melt groups of mobs while the dots were still active, and it was a lot more movement forgiving.

So tl;dr, I switched my mains from whm and blm to ast and smn. I even complained about blm in these forums. But these days I've decided I want to give it another chance. Now I'm practicing again on our dummie, this time understanding what I'm doing, and I will do the 24 mans today as blm. My weapon is the upgraded eso staff, so I will work now on getting the primal one. But I will give it a try. It was my love in 2.0 and I see no reason to not have 3 mains

So people, please give it a try, ignore the haters and elitists who bash you for low dps. Practice, be comfortable, start with a basic opener, and adjust as you go. Cross every bridge as you reach it, not before. It's ok if for whatever reason you have to go to 2.0 rotation. Understand what you are casting and why, so you can change whatever you feel is wrong. It's a very challenging job, but it's also just as rewarding.

[Bebekurenai]

We are punished rather harshly for not finishing a cast, be it due to movement, buffs expiring, or the target dying or being immune. Of course you can say this for all casters, but show me a caster, or any class, that can lose a primary buff 2.5s AFTER they make the decision to use it?

Yep, the other caster, smn, I lose stacks and deathflare chance on Echidna every bloody time. Or Cuchulain when he summons his puddings, Tree/Dog when they do their LoS thingy, Ravana when he jumps or untargets (wtf SE?), the bloody spider in Weeping City, last boss in said City... pretty much a lot hehe. The general party/alliance dps is greater every time which pushes the moment bosses turn invulnerable or detarget or dissappear even more.

[FunkyBunch]

I stopped BLMing for the very reasons in this thread.
It was frustrating as hell to lose Enochian or F3 or B3 due to silly mechanic.

I now NIN and find the playstyle both more interesting and less frustrating.
Though I'm still learning to cope with occasionally dropping Huton.

[Maero]

I am sorry but mostly agree with Randy here. However i will say if one does mess up, blm is probably the job that gets punished the highest.
There are some fights were a boss will go away and re-appear 20 or so seconds later so you may loose your enochian but it really comes down to knowing the fight.
Also if you all did not know, leylines= instant mechanic about to happen were you lay them down, haha
With all this said though i do not find other jobs as rewarding as blm

[Fyce]

Learn the fights.

While true, it's nevertheless a complete U-turn from 2.0's BLM, which is by far the first reason why people dislike 3.0's BLM.
In ARR, you could just know the very basics of an encounter and still do great DPS. In Heavensward, you need to know 100% of the fight and do lengthy experiments to know "how many Fire IV can I pop in this phase?". If you don't do that, you'll probably do very average DPS and be constantly furstrated because of dropping enochian all the time.

This change surely adds a great layer of complexity the job didn't had before, but a lot of people didn't asked for that.
2.0 BLM felt rewarding to play. You were happy each time you had a proc and liked how much freedom this system was giving you. You could answer mechanics on the fly with it.
3.0 BLM is only "rewarding" after getting a lot of an encounter experience, when you finally finish theorising about the correct rotation to use during the whole encounter. There's almost no room for improvisation.

[Gallus]

Yep, the other caster, smn, I lose stacks and deathflare chance on Echidna every bloody time. Or Cuchulain when he summons his puddings, Tree/Dog when they do their LoS thingy, Ravana when he jumps or untargets (wtf SE?), the bloody spider in Weeping City, last boss in said City... pretty much a lot hehe. The general party/alliance dps is greater every time which pushes the moment bosses turn invulnerable or detarget or dissappear even more.

No no I completely disagree with this! SMN is nothing like BLM... every time you use an aetherflow stack your aetherdam refreshes to 30 seconds! And you have 30 seconds before you use your third stack of aetherflow until your aetherdam runs out to cast dreadwyrm trance (you can use it immediately after having 3 stacks or wait a bit, up to you). The thing is...if you use your dreadwyrm trance and wanna make sure you won't miss out on that deathflare, you can always cast it instantly, but your rotation doesn't change entirely because boss goes immune or because you do not land a cast XD.

[rblyell]

No no I completely disagree with this! SMN is nothing like BLM... every time you use an aetherflow stack your aetherdam refreshes to 30 seconds! And you have 30 seconds before you use your third stack of aetherflow until your aetherdam runs out to cast dreadwyrm trance (you can use it immediately after having 3 stacks or wait a bit, up to you). The thing is...if you use your dreadwyrm trance and wanna make sure you won't miss out on that deathflare, you can always cast it instantly, but your rotation doesn't change entirely because boss goes immune or because you do not land a cast XD.

That's incorrect. I play both, and as a Summoner, a boss going invulnerable or disappearing can make you waste an aetherflow ability. And then it's not only losing out on Dreadwyrm, it's waiting for Aetherflow again to be able to start over. Both have very similar issues, but SMN has the more mobile leg up for them. But as several others have said in here, the way to do it effectively is to know your rotation and have awareness of the fights so you know the right times to pop those cooldowns and get the most out of them. No one walks into a new fight with no problems, the folks that make it look easy spent hours learning the fights to be able to do good dps with them.

To answer your original question though, I love the 3.0 playstyle of BLM versus the 2.0 one. You have to actively participate and pay attention in every fight. In 2.0 you could just go on automatic and never have to think about anything other than procs. I've loved the new version since the first time we got to see exactly how it all worked together.

[Gallus]

That's incorrect. I play both, and as a Summoner, a boss going invulnerable or disappearing can make you waste an aetherflow ability. And then it's not only losing out on Dreadwyrm, it's waiting for Aetherflow again to be able to start over. Both have very similar issues, .

No way... you can't put them on the same level, not even close. A boss going immune or disappearing right in the same second you spend one stack of aetherflow is rather coincidence and bad luck, not saying it cannot happen, it happens, but it's very easy to avoid. Meanwhile, a BLM is screwed over a million of mechanics that turn simple boss fights into a chess game. A boss disappearing or going immune, a not landed cast because an add dies too soon, an add interrupting a cast (either autoattacking you cause tank lost aggro or moving out of sight), a boss disabling you, a lethal aoe forcing you to move, phase transitions...I could go on...