Dear SE, BLM is great, but please consider the following

[Lyrai_Celestine]

Sure, BLM is a harder class to play, and you guys kept complaining about potency and utility, but let's not talk about balance for a bit and bask in the glory of simply achieving victory with a BLM.

It is sure damn satisfying to clear Savage maps as a BLM. I gladly welcomed a BLM into my raid party a few hours ago, and he dished out some serious damage. I took whatever problems he had to face as a challenge, and he did overcome it when we finally beat the boss. All in all, BLM's in a good position, and a BLM player shines at what they do best; pure destruction. I believe it's best to just enjoy the class you love and do your best to optimize your play instead of complaining or theorycrafting.

[Llugen]

Well yea. I love this job.

And like -I- said, all it would take is a little imagination to justify having a raise on BLM, hence "shadow raise" or "void raise" or some kind of black magic style thing, with a different function than the others, hence my suggestion to make it a long cooldown off-gcd rather than requiring MP (Paladin should get the same kind of thing, in my opinion) And in case you didn't read the rest of the thread (which I totally get, tl;dr is a real thing), I do like the identity of BLM being high damage low utility, but right now its "high damage" isn't high enough to justify taking over having a RDM that does almost as much, is much easier to play, and has mad utility/mobility.

Asking for surecast to let you move while casting is hardly "mutant RDM", and we are in agreement on the umbral heart stacks already. The first set of suggestions in the OP were the only "serious" ones anyways, if you read it.

[Galvuu]

snip

This is not Black Mage's identity. Not the way you wrote it.
It's high damage/low utility turret mage.
We're defined by our need to stay still to do damage.
Every one of your suggestions except the raise one goes against the "turret" part of our identity, and the raise one goes against the utility one.
Fixing Black Mage should reinforce its strong points and identity- sure, buff the numbers, make UH give a damage buff to F4, make Foul 700 potency, anything you want along those lines.
But I really feel that people that ask for mobility buffs on Black Mage miss the point.
What exactly do you like about Black Mage anyway? From someone who came from loving this job in HW, I can feel that we're so much more mobile now. It's night and day.
I can run around now. Actually run around while casting. This would've been unthinkable a year ago.

Edit: the mutant RDM thing was for your suggestions combined. You're basically making so you have a mobility ogcd every 10 seconds. This is getting very close to dualcast. When you add Between the Lines and Aetherial, you can probably move around every 8 seconds. That Black Mage would be more mobile than Summoner...

(For everyone one else, I don't think we really need fixing- maybe a tidbit more damage to go toe-to-toe with Samurai, but the fundamental issue is that caster-centric comps are inherently weaker than physical ones in this game. So the real way to "fix" Black Mage involves also fixing Summoner (who needs way more help) and all around rebalancing so that you can bring two casters in a comp that's quite competitive. This is less a "fix Black Mage" thing and more of a "rebalance everything" thing that will probably never happen).

[IllyriaKnotfred]

Well yea. I love this job. Your suggestions (like for Surecast) are not only completely broken, but it destroy our identity of high skillcap turret mage.
And, like I said, slapping a Raise is about as unimaginative as it can get. And an ogcd raise is kinda broken too, especially for a job with infinite mana.
In fact, now that I think of it, that probably was the reasoning behind us not having a Raise- we don't incur the hefty mana penalty since we have unlimited mana.
Your suggestions will literally turn BLM into a mutant RDM. If I wanted that I'd... play RDM :/

And no Mhachi brother or sister of mine would say "raise fits the BLM lore".
Did you not heed lady Shatotto's words? Destruction is our creed. Raising doesn't have the same ring to it as "cinder everything in sight" for me.

Ah the voice of reason.

[Llugen]

Your post is too long, so I'm just going to say again that BLM is very strong. It needs no potency buff of any kind, it JUST needs more mobility. Plain and simple.

In a raid tier where mobility is king, "turret" is just not going to pan out. The same thing happened in second coil, BLM was designed for AOE and literally no fights were AOE so it suffered.

Also the raise idea is purely to give it the option to do it, since it is the only disciple of magic, not just magic DPS, the only DoM in the entire game that doesn't have a raise of any kind.

[Psycofang]

Repurpose scathe to ff12 status. High potency laser but ogcd that applies magik down.

Or capitalize off turret mode and delete scathe bring back manawall and repurpose both wall and ward to block infinity damage 3 times.

Wall blocks physical damage 3 times exception

Ward blocks magic 3 times without exception

Sure cast stops forced movement without exception

[Psycofang]

And no Mhachi brother or sister of mine would say "raise fits the BLM lore".
Did you not heed lady Shatotto's words? Destruction is our creed. Raising doesn't have the same ring to it as "cinder everything in sight" for me.

Except thaumaturges and blm have been literally shown to not only raise the dead but summon literal element armies and greater golems.

Shantoto is a hypocrite in that regard.

[Llugen]

Repurpose scathe to ff12 status. High potency laser but ogcd that applies magik down.

Or capitalize off turret mode and delete scathe bring back manawall and repurpose both wall and ward to block infinity damage 3 times.

Wall blocks physical damage 3 times exception

Ward blocks magic 3 times without exception

Sure cast stops forced movement without exception

Sure, I'll take it, as long as it actually works. No vuln stacks, no dots, none of that. I only just discovered that Surecast is in fact not broken, but the effect only works BEFORE you use the spell, which is completely stupid.

The point I'm trying to make is that if they are going for "high damage, low utility" on BLM, then the damage needs to make up for the utility (2+2=4), but BLM loses damage while moving, so to make up for that it needs something. Again, If BLM isn't doing significantly better than a RDM damage wise, then "damage" is not its utility, and from what I've seen and been able to do myself on the two jobs, the damage is not significant.

[Galvuu]

Except thaumaturges and blm have been literally shown to not only raise the dead but summon literal element armies and greater golems.

Shantoto is a hypocrite in that regard.

These are all unrelated things.
Golems are inanimate constructs. Even if you were to infuse consciousness into one (and the golems we see in the BLM storyline for SB are certainly not sapient), this process (of pumping aether into an inanimate entity) has nothing to do with raising the wounded/dead. The only golem we see like this is that face-wall thing in Mhach, and it was very clearly a construct no different from an automaton.
Even the Amdapori golems (that did use life force from the woods) wouldn't fit the bill for "raising" an actual living thing.

Thaumaturgy in the world of FF14 is a much later thing- it's from the 6th era, and it developed after the great Flood by descendant of Mhach that came to Belah'dia.
It's ties with "raising" and "undead" come from necessity after the disaster that struck Sil'Dih. The reason why the thaumaturges' guild in Ul'Dah has ties to funerary rites is because they were the only available experts in any magical field that could study methods to prevent a raising of undead like the one that destroyed Sil'Dih (this is also why there are a bunch of zombies in Qarn).

Any other ties with "immortality" or "demon armies" by "black mages" are all connected to void pacts- summoning and stealing power from the voidborne (which always seems to backfire).
This is often not regarded as true Black Magic (hence the term "void mage" used in Shadows of Mhach), and is surely not what Shatotto envisioned for the art. Cessair herself thought that Mhach was tapping too deeply into the powers of the void.
Is there any mention of a Mhachi summoning any "elemental" anyway? I'm almost completely sure it's all voidborne fiends. There may be a "corrupt elemental" that spawned from poisonous aether that spilled from the void and tainted something, but that was unlikely to have been a Mhachi goal.

[Psycofang]

With those changes compounded with scathe i feel blm will out do rdm but if i were to give blm "utility" id enter dangerous territory with wall and ward.

Instead of buffing damage how about wall and ward puts down a leylines like aoe but wider and prevents all damage of either magic (ward) or physical (wall) for the raid.

This in turn means rather than a dps buff its a dps anti-interuption tool. This in turn raises everyone's dps artificially as healers can dps for a little bit too but the timers for how long ward and wall are active needs to be reduced to say

10 seconds each?

Sounds fun. I can turret and so can the group.