Ideas to Improve The Black Mage (for 4.2 and beyond!)

[EllieShadeflare]

Blm mobility is perfect as it is to me, i do not want to be able to run around like a redmage or SMN, the difference between a bad BLM and a good BLM is largely dependant on movement, and i like that. it tells me "hey, that BLM really knows his job and the fight and can optomize around it"Pls do not add more mobility to blm.

You might not have played in Savage, then. Particularly, Omega 3 Savage, where Black Mage's lack of mobility kills its ability to make much of a contribution. And besides the point, I'm not saying "let BLM run around and do whatever", my issue is "don't punish us for having to move when mechanics force us to."

Besides the point, there's a reason why the dev team highly suggested players not to play BLM in Ultimate Bahamut.


[QUOTE=LeeraSorlan;4517237]Rng is Rng, its whatever, i dont like it, but ive accepted that nearly every job nowdays has it, with few exceptions, if anything, instead of changing how thunder 3 RNG works, just default it to a 20/30s timer to use the proc instead of the short time its at now, as it is, theres alot of thunder 3 procs i dont use from time to time because im in my astral heart fire 4 phase/dont want to overwrite a buffed T3 tick when it still has over half its duration left

The timer is definitely the biggest trouble, but RNG in general is really bad design. To be honest, I would replace the RNG mechanics for Bard with something similar to Aether Static for the same reason. Red Mage's Verstone/Verfire, Summoner's Ruin IV and the Astrologian cards are basically fine though... and they're the only other jobs besides BLM, MCH and BRD that seriously rely on RNG but they use Positive RNG, rather than negative like BLM, MCH and BRD, which practically require RNG to function.

Blm dmg is great, you dont even notice the loss of raging strikes due to the expansion boosting our dps by default, but more dmg is always nice anyway, so i wont disagree

I noticed pretty quickly back while levelling BLM. And remember, it wasn't just the loss of Raging Strikes, we outright lost a whopping 20 base potency on Fire IV/Blizzard IV. 20 potency sounds like nothing, even on a base spell but Astral Fire + Enochian has a 1.85x modifier to the damage. What would been 518 in Heavensward (Through Fire IV's original 280 potency) turned into only 481, a whopping 37 potency less per cast. Granted, we get 13 potency back, but we're still down by 24 potency per cast. In addition, while every other class in the game has a burst phase, Black Mage's own burst phase was utterly removed due to the removal of Raging Strikes from the Cross Role bar, and the difference becomes even higher once you do factor in that loss. Heck, I didn't even touch on Flare's increased dropoff versus Heavensward, nor did I touch on Fire II's reduced potency!

Dont really have an opinion on enochian, it does feel harder to keep up than 3.0 enochian, but at the same time its also easier? transpose keeps it up, and while its preffered you never have to use transpose, sometimes u just get those unlucky set of mechanics that refuse to let u cast. but the cooldown enochian itself is so short, youd have to mess up shortly after u used it for it to even matter nowdays, this is a non issue to me.

Transpose is indeed an option, but it's still not the best and still fallible to server lag. As for the Enochian cooldown, it's actually really easy to mess up in Savage in your opener. Even the most BLM friendly Savage boss, Catastrophe will cause troubles to a BLM's opener if they're not careful.

Im unsure how well you blm (hell even im not the best, far from it) but idk, BLM is more about knowing the fight rather than knowing the job, i feel like. minimizing movement and planning ahead is fun to me, thats what blm is to me, and i dont want that to be changed, and most of your issues seem to be fixed by doing just that, knowing the fight better

I know the fights that I'm in to the best of my ability, since my static is progressing through Deltascape. However, "knowing the fight" only goes so far in a boss that also has its own RNG (Hi Halicarnassus! Hi Alte Roite and your Roulette Classical Elements!) and Black Mages are outright punished for being in a fight with any sort of RNG mechanics. For mechanics that you have to "roll with the punches", BLM is by far the harshest job to work with. And even so, my suggestions don't remove the strategic movement aspect of the job, but they mitigate the sheer punishment for playing it. Like the game actively mocks you for wanting explosions.