Black Mage

[Tzain]

(Disclosure: this is a copy/paste from another post I made, but I feel it's going to get buried/ignored and I'm really curious about what more experienced Black Mage players think of it.)

What if Sleep and Freeze applied debuffs to a target when their Control effect ends or is resisted?
Like Sleep decreases auto attack speed, skill speed, spell speed by X% (Effect Named "Groggy")
And Freeze causes the target to take extra damage from all sources (Effect Named "Fragile")

It occurs to me that Control is really the utility of the Black Mage (like how Recovery is Red Mage Utility) given how over the top powerful Sleep is on paper. And DCUO had a neat trick with Control abilities where they also provided debuffs for times when Control was immune or not needed (like a boss fight with only one target). So If I took those concepts and applied them here, it might work.
No one would really care that much if you toss a sleep into an AE pack, they'd break immediately and now they're all debuffed so it's still valuable. And if you were using kill priority single target it works just as well.

Thoughts? I'm genuinely curious.

[Zerathor]

This thread needs to stay alive. Blm needs to be a viable raiding option.

Can blm clear all savage and ultimate? Yes, but that's a terrible argument when every other dps job is a better option by a lot. Nobody wants a dps that is crippled by comparison to other jobs.

[Altera]

Yeah the, Can a BLM etc clear savage or Ultimate, is kinda like saying a person on crutches can finish a marathon. He will manage to finish it, but he will be most likely the last one to finish.

BLM needs something to make them more equally desired in a raid team. Like Freeze, or maybe Blizzard 4 also puts on the effect Fragile as Tzain mentioned.
I still feel Umbral Hearts needs a buff, to compansate for the loss of Raging Strikes.

The useless spells we have also need some love, either change them completly or add effects to them.
Sleep could make Bosstargets Drowsy, and on every other normal mob it still does sleep. Drowsy could make Bosses hit weaker. 10-15sec duration
Remove Blizzard 2, and replace it with Burst. Though i think asking for such a change midexpansion is too much.

[Remedi]

aside beign late for extreme changes I don't see them give us access to an ancient magic before unlocking BLM

[Llugen]

Oh look, this thread is still going


Yep, Freeze should get a trait letting you use it at zero MP (after flare) to give you immediate Umbral III, and at level 68 with Enhanced Umbral Heart, it should also give you 3 umbral hearts. Boom, aoe damage issues fixed.

Still a proponent of heightened mobility complimenting heightened damage and against "flat" potency increases as they don't solve real issues with the class. For those of you who are "newcomers" to the thread, consider my (abbreviated) suggestions list from page, like, 30 of this thread:

-Thundercloud refreshes Astral/Umbral timer
-Thunder dots of all grades are additive up to 60 seconds (vs. "refresh" of the timer as is now)
-Convert reduced to 60 seconds recast, removed HP cost (call it Indulge, if you will). Alternatively, Convert stays 180 seconds recast, gives you a full bar of MP, and a set of procs
-Upon obtaining (not using) a proc, 5 free seconds add to the Foul timer, also perhaps giving a "free" foul every time the Enochian buff is used.
-Foul double potency single target
-See the above Freeze suggestion
-Umbral hearts give +10% damage for the spell consuming the heart, also the consumption of all three hearts could give a Firestarter proc, or insert other incentive here
-Firestarter "chain" from free Fire III into free Fire IV
-Aetherial Manipulation recast reduced to 15 seconds

Also, as was established some 15 pages back, one of the biggest issues with the job is that it has no real two minute synergy that can be lined up with Hypercharge/Stratagem/Trick Attack/Foe Requiem/Devotion. One of the reasons that jobs like SMN are so strong is that it can utilize burst windows very effectively and minimize weaker windows. BLM has none of that.

Ultimately all we can really do is toss out suggestions and see what they do, but just about everyone is in agreement that it's in dire need of attention at this point, so I'm glad we've made progress.

[Sfia]

Well our point of wiew is very biased tbh, we always say the gap is big but never quantify it really, which tends to blow things out of proportions.
I mean if parses are something to go by the difference on using a BLM or meta is about some secs shaved off from the kill.

It's worrying that ppl say that utility jobs will always be chosen in comps but never actually talks about the hardle that comes with it.
If you fuck up your ley lines timing the dps loss is inferior to fucking up trick attack or foe or any other raid buff.
It's possible that SE consider this when they speak about jobs beign fairly close, we don't know exactly what is their metric on job balance which in leads us on having hard times on giving feedbacks.
That said there also the fact that the community is not mature enough

I'm gonna expandon this a bit to give some idea of how bad the situation really is.
I said earlier in this thread that if BLM were to get a flat 10% increase in it's damage it would be a contender for the top damage contributor in a raid team. Which as a"pure DPS" job I would assume they should very much be.
Now, saying the only benefit to having more damage is "shaving seconds off a kill" is very misleading. Higher damage does much more than just a slighty faster kill time. Even in ultimate there are mechanic skips that are possible which free up cooldowns and healing. Pushing phases faster can also provide more efficient timings of cooldowns, and in many cases skip difficult mechanics entirely (think a12s).

Next up, you talk about the burden of correct play with utility jobs, as if one class has a harder time playing correctly than others. While the total dps loss of missing a trick attack is indeed larger than the loss of missing a ley lines, outside of trick attack every single raid dps buff is simply activate on target. Instead of requiring smart usage within the buff duration, you simply press it once and your team benefits.

If you are talking about how these jobs function at a high level of play, it is safe to assume these abilities won't be missed.
If you are talking about how these jobs function at a lower level of play, the difference is even larger between utility and "pure DPS" jobs. While the individual damage contribution of the BLM/NIN player will be lower, the potential gain from the damage utility remains the same.

[Remedi]

I was using examples on a broader sense, while I don't agree that it's safe to assume that we won't do mistakes even at higher end, especially in pugs you see ppl not lining cds perfectly or using them at all, I don't think it's fair to say that using raid cds wrongly is not a big deal, I've seen plenty of litanies used during a boss jump (or chain strategem/trick attack applied on the heart instead of shinryu)
I don't think that while talking about game balance we can seriously think only about high end when making an argument to SE, because honestly that's a part of the game too and quite frankly if the meta comp would require a more careful playstyle to reach a certain height of dmg I could actually accept that but I don't play ranged so can't really say

I do agree about what you said about phase skips, but I was talking about the speed kills done with or without meta groups tbh, though ye shoul've been more precise

[Galvuu]

snip

The only thing that could justify a bad litany like that is a random skip, and you can normally predict those accurately (Creator gave me a lot of training there, thanks A11).
When Sfia says "high level" he doesn't mean a god-tier player somehow playing with 7 idiots.
He means a party of skillful people playing together. Which is what you see in serious progression, high-end speed kills and more recently, Ultimate.
This "pug" example in the vacuum where everyone is bad except for the subject of the argument doesn't mean much. Of course if you're shoved into a terrible party things go South fast. That's why Hashmal is such a clown fiesta.

This kind of balancing is always meant for the top cut of the playerbase. This is simply because it's only at that level that the issues become apparent, when people are fully utilising the resources they have available (and optimally) that the discrepancies become visible.
It's these heavily invested, heavily devoted people that become disenchanted when the state of the game balance bodes ill.

Someone who's on the 50% of any job (and that's the majority of the playerbase) can get better just by reading basic guides about their job and try to have good uptime.
Someone on the 75% percentile can start to keep track of their buffs/dots and do the rotation as well as possible while keeping those up.
Someone on the 90% percentile can now optimise the rotation for each specific fight and alter it with regard to skips/timings and make sure the little things are all done perfectly on top (weaving ogcds and stuff like that).
All of these happen regardless of the state of game balance. You have so many avenues of drastic improvement before these imbalances become a critical issue that they honestly make no difference.

But if when you start nearing the 95%+ you still see a big gap between your job and the others, you realise that all your investment was a waste. It's here that balance becomes an issue- you're suddenly limited by the game itself moreso than your execution. This is actually the worst feeling ever.
Especially in a game like this, where we play a self-insert avatar. Oh look, my catgirl witch now has to be a bard in Ultimate. So much fun >.>

[Komaru_Tatoro]

those percentile for the avg player should be shifted to 35%tile now because some many players on fflog are starting to do optimization/speed kill/whole team buffs 1 sole player to boost/padd numbers.
plus ppl getting better gears.
if you look back just a shy few weeks ago logs the todays equivalent %tile is much lower

[TsuKoj]

That's why fflogs snapshots your percentile from when you cleared it and doesn't devalue it over time. Also that's how percentiles work. 50% is the average, if more people learn the fight better/more people have gear, obviously the averages will go up. The only time the percentiles aren't reliable imo are the first few weeks when someone who got super lucky with drops will be much higher than someone who got shafted on drops, around week 10ish it mostly evens out due to books.

But, I agree, jobs should be balanced around 95-99% and nothing lower. In competitive games, fighting games, mobas, fps, rts; the successful ones are always balanced around top level play. Ffxiv isn't a competitive game, but we are still competing for spots in raid groups. If you balance around lower level play, it limits player growth. You can't balance around zerg rushes or fireball spam, if you do then once the player outgrows the level of the strategy they will either quit since they hit a wall or they will be forced to switch and resent the game for it.