Black Mage

[Ferrinus]

Firestarter II should, of course, allow casts of Fire IV to proc free, instant Flares.

[Kabooa]

Firestarter II trait is another thing I'd like. F4 can proc it with 30 increased potency or so. Pretty please?

It locks Black Mage's damage ceiling behind procs then. It also removes some level of thought from Black Mage's play and that's the bigger sin of it in my opinion.

plus10char

[Llugen]

BLM's damage ceiling used to be locked behind procs in 2.x anyway, now it's locked behind really getting screwed with movement and standing there casting Fire IV which quite clearly is not working.

Besides, most classes have some kind of damage RNG to them (bloodletter, chakra stacks, Ruin IV procs, etc) and this would be no different. It's already fairly proc based with firestarter for movement and thundercloud, this would just make those more useful and more prevalent.

[NovaLevossida]

Just take a look at Rabanastre logs at the 50 percentile and below (that is half the BLM population doing rabanastre !) the class is literally the last in personnal dps.

This raid was my breaking point with BLM. It's not a hard raid (no 24-man ever really could be), but I got really, really frustrated with the amount of movement, mechanics targeting me, people running over to my leylines to have their mechanics target me, etc. I just got to the point where although I like the concept of the job, I just grew really, really annoyed with the frustrations that easy content like that had for the job. The worse your team is doing / the more they die, the more you get targeted and hit, and the more you can't cast when swift/triple are down. I don't think the amount of annoyance with the job in that raid is anywhere close to proportional to the difficulty of the content.

[Remedi]

BLM's damage ceiling used to be locked behind procs in 2.x anyway,

But in ARR ppl were not happy about that, often ppl asked SE to gave us the possibility to allow us to store 2 stacks of firestarter/thundercloud to avoid wasting procs.

If we agree that there is a huge gap between low play and high play we should aim to fix that first

[zuzu-bq]

But in ARR ppl were not happy about that, often ppl asked SE to gave us the possibility to allow us to store 2 stacks of firestarter/thundercloud to avoid wasting procs.

ARR people were unhappy at Firestarter because of how late the proc happened back then, and not because of the randomness itself. And everyone loved Thundercloud because you could pretty much use it forever without ever worrying on Astral Fire. You can run back and search for old BLM posts, they are all about annoying MP ticks, late Firestarters (the practice of fireweaving and discussions about it), and MP pools for different Thunders hard cast usage.

[Kabooa]

Besides, most classes have some kind of damage RNG to them (bloodletter, chakra stacks, Ruin IV procs, etc) and this would be no different. It's already fairly proc based with firestarter for movement and thundercloud, this would just make those more useful and more prevalent.

And Black Mage has some RNG to it right now, but it doesn't feel mandatory. It's a bonus where it happens, and the primary focus of Black mage's damage is on positioning, timing, and maximizing uptime of Non-RNG elements (T3 DoT and Fire 4).

The moment we go back to 2.0, your damage ceiling is almost completely dependent on on Firestarter (if it procs from F4 like suggested) and TClouds (if it extends AF as suggested), because both of them cause maximum uptime in AF while being almost completely out of the player's control. It would be a much larger swing than Bard, Machinist, Summoner, or any other job's 'RNG' mechanic.

[OgruMogru]

We're still worrying about mana ticks 3 years later. It's just a slightly less prominent problem that's been joined by lots of other small annoying issues. Hence this entire thread and hence why it's so frustrating to see people saying that we shouldn't worry as much because we can still clear content. That fact is taken as a given and is independent of the problems people are discussing here. Maybe Enochian could grant a % damage increase on top of it's base dependent on how long you stand still up to a cap?

[Ryi]

BLM's damage ceiling used to be locked behind procs in 2.x anyway, now it's locked behind really getting screwed with movement and standing there casting Fire IV which quite clearly is not working.

Besides, most classes have some kind of damage RNG to them (bloodletter, chakra stacks, Ruin IV procs, etc) and this would be no different. It's already fairly proc based with firestarter for movement and thundercloud, this would just make those more useful and more prevalent.

I've been watching you complain about blm mobility this whole thread, and at this point I think I just have to recommend bard to you. Honestly, there is not a single fight or mechanic in this raid tier where blm gets absolutely shafted by movement. Im sorry to break the news for you, but you seemingly just have a very poor resource management. Triple/swift/sharpcast and aetherial manipulation are plenty of tools to keep up the uptime on casting. If you still have to rely on firestarter/thundercloud for movement, i think a change of jobs is in order.
This whole thread was meant to address the problems in very high level of play and you keep derailing it by babbling about mobility and the difficulity of keeping astral stacks all the time. No offence.

[Llugen]

No offence.

I feel like I SHOULD be offended by your comment but I'm not at all, for obvious reasons.

It's also quite plain that you haven't read at all what I've said/laid out, because if you did, you'd understand that the suggestions that I've made regarding mobility have significant implied increased potency behind them as well. "Plenty" of tools with those four is a stretch.

But thanks for your suggestion! I've switched to Summoner for now because it's really useful for groups, very mobile, and insanely strong. Until BLM gets a significant buff it quite literally has no place in endgame. So yep.

ARR people were unhappy at Firestarter because of how late the proc happened back then, and not because of the randomness itself. And everyone loved Thundercloud because you could pretty much use it forever without ever worrying on Astral Fire. You can run back and search for old BLM posts, they are all about annoying MP ticks, late Firestarters (the practice of fireweaving and discussions about it), and MP pools for different Thunders hard cast usage.

So much this. When they finally fixed this issue, it was just too late.