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

[Tzain]

Edit: Tzain... you're really suggesting a ground up rework to Black Mage!? That's... not gonna work well in the end.

Its not that much of a rework when you break it down.

What do you normally cast during umbral? Blizzard III, Thunder, Blizzard IV (if Enochian). By making the Blizzard III a DoT I'm simply moving the spell effects around and making the spell a bit more useful.
By using the 'coldsnap(formerly thunderstorm)' proc stack it would look like this. (assuming a 3 stack)
Blizzard III, Coldsnap, Coldsnap, Coldsnap, Blizzard IV
Which is a nice little burst damage phase.
And Astral is similar. You're casting your Fire I spells during Astral, and the blizzard DoT is procing Firestarter for you. This extends your Astral phase MP pool and prevents you from 'double procing' Firestarter when having queued a Fire I, not that it matters as much since it now stacks. But in the end, it's not really that much of a change. spam Fire I and instant cast Fire III.

And by putting the procs on opposite skills I'm setting up a cycle. Astral feeds the Umbral Burst, Umbral extends the Astral gatling gun ammo supply.

The Enochian change is just a side effect of removing the timer. Now the Blizz and Fire IV spells add to the enochian guage, so instead of Foul being 'Timer based every 30 seconds' it's 'Action Based every X hearts' (which you can balance depending on the number of hearts/minds needed to fill the gauge).
Fire I, Fire III, and Fire IV still need a little bit of work in my mind, but that's just because they just lack something to really differentiate them beyond Potency.

EDIT: Actually, what if Umbral hearts only affect Fire IVs and Astral Minds only affect Blizzard IV? This would keep the Enochian effects self contained to the IV spells. Then Firestarter can go back to only affecting Fire III (and II? that might be good for AE)

So 50 rotation would be
Blizz I/III, Coldsnaps, Fire III, Fire I/Firestarter spam till OOM
60 would be
Blizz I/III, Coldsnaps, Blizz IV x 'Minds' (to eat the minds, and generate hearts), Fire III, Fire I/Firestarter, Fire IV x 'Hearts' (to eat the hearts and generate minds)
Then 70 would just add the Foul into the mix as an end-cap then the guage fills.

[Dzian]

Mentioned in a couple of threads
I think enochain should reset the astral/umbral duration to full whenever used.

As yeah it's annoying to press it when astral has 2 seconds left and watch it drop straight off. So allowing enochain to refresh the timer to full would be more of a safeguard than anything

It could also boost blm dps slightly by allowing slightly extended fire 4 bursts. Not majorly as mp is still the main governing factor in how many fire 4s you can push out.

Regarding thundercloud procs my only wish is the duration was longer. Kinda sucls to get a proc off the first tick and the effect is gone by the time the dot is wearing off. The duration of thunderclouds buff should be the max duration of thunders dot. Making sharpcasting thunder actually viable

And firestarter procs I don't really have an issue with as its usually just an extra cast for me before going into umbral and restoring mp. The fact it restores astral fire is only ever usefull if i have convert up to knock out a couple of extra fire 4s. And in those cases I can simply sharp cast it.

Triple cast Is mostly fine I would like a slightly lower cool down though.

And leylines needs maybe a longer duration I think. Full minute perhaps. Or even hundred percent uptime possibly.

[EllieShadeflare]

Its not that much of a rework when you break it down.

No offence, but you seem to have such a flagrant lack of understanding of Black Mage that if this is "not that much of a rework", you might not be thinking straight. I don't want to sound rude, but... it's basically as different to Black Mage, as Black Mage is to 1.0 Thaumaturge. And mind you, 1.0 Thaumaturge WAS A HEALER.

What do you normally cast during umbral? Blizzard III, Thunder, Blizzard IV (if Enochian). By making the Blizzard III a DoT I'm simply moving the spell effects around and making the spell a bit more useful.

Freeze and Blizzard II are useless, yes, Blizzard has its function as an extension when you're forced to be moving because it's better to be stuck in Umbral Ice than to lose Foul.

Blizzard III should NEVER. EVER be hardcasted outside of Astral Fire. It is used to put you back into Umbral Ice and that is it. I don't care it's 60 more potency, it's an extra second over Blizzard's cast.

By using the 'coldsnap(formerly thunderstorm)' proc stack it would look like this. (assuming a 3 stack)
Blizzard III, Coldsnap, Coldsnap, Coldsnap, Blizzard IV
Which is a nice little burst damage phase.

Hilariously, Umbral Ice being the polar opposite of a burst IS THE POINT. It's designed so that Black Mage, if it's balanced properly, doesn't turn into a broken easy mode DPS with no breaks. Even Samurai, Summoner, Monk and the Meta Four have off time. This is a terrible idea.

[QUOTE=Tzain;4517409]And Astral is similar. You're casting your Fire I spells during Astral, and the blizzard DoT is procing Firestarter for you. This extends your Astral phase MP pool and prevents you from 'double procing' Firestarter when having queued a Fire I, not that it matters as much since it now stacks. But in the end, it's not really that much of a change. spam Fire I and instant cast Fire III.

The problem was never about the Fire MP pool. IT HAS NEVER BEEN ABOUT THE FIRE MP POOL. NOT TO MENTION THE FIRE PHASE IS THE "BURST" PHASE SORT OF HAVE EXCEPT NOT REALLY. At LEAST when I came up with the Astral Hearts mechanic, I thought of a way to make it fit yet still unique to the theme of Astral Fire, as well as provide the way to get Firestarter. Not, as you later put it, turning Astral Fire into a gattling gun.

And by putting the procs on opposite skills I'm setting up a cycle. Astral feeds the Umbral Burst, Umbral extends the Astral gatling gun ammo supply.

I hate to be borderline a jerk, but... you're basically answering a problem that nobody asked.

We already HAVE that cycle. It's the Astral Fire six-eight round rocket launcher and the Umbral Ice coolant and shotgun.

The Enochian change is just a side effect of removing the timer. Now the Blizz and Fire IV spells add to the enochian guage, so instead of Foul being 'Timer based every 30 seconds' it's 'Action Based every X hearts' (which you can balance depending on the number of hearts/minds needed to fill the gauge).
Fire I, Fire III, and Fire IV still need a little bit of work in my mind, but that's just because they just lack something to really differentiate them beyond Potency.

There wasn't anything wrong with the nature of Foul, it was the way Fire IV interacted with the duration.

And you have no clear understanding of the class if you don't know how Fire I, II and IV differentiate, but let me spell it out.

Fire IV is the proverbial rocket, the thing that makes the explosion that does the biggest chunk of damage.

Fire is an extender, designed because Fire IV cannot be designed to just be limitlessly spammed.

Fire III is designed as a further extender through Firestarter or as a phase shifter.

EDIT: And let me actually deal with the idea further. Just for fairness sake. italics for my edits.

I see the major points as these.
Astral/Umbral timers double penalizing a moving mage (casters already cant do damage while moving, which means the penalty is already there):
Solution - remove the Timer entirely.
New problem: Now there's no sense of difficulty to the class. The double penalty is fine, the trouble is they make certain spells too stringent.
Procs cannot stack and cannot be used tactically.
Solution: Procs now stack so that they can be stored up, duration is removed or set to a very high value.
The only thing that makes sense, but stacking would remove the urgency of using it.
Umbral Ice spells and phase are not helpful. There's no reason to WANT to cast a Ice spell, it's a universal damage loss.
Rebuttal: As mentioned earlier in the post, they're a deliberate downtime specifically designed to balance Black Mage. Not to mention, you can think of it as a proverbial coolant to an overheating gun.
Solution - Remove all Blizz spells, rename the Thunder DoTs to Blizzard and change their damage type to Ice. Change Thunderstorm to Coldsnap (same effect, new name).
Dilemma: Even if this works, Coldsnap isn't a very good name. Hailstorm or Deep Frost would be better. Also, you utterly destroy the flow that most players had been used to, forcing them to relearn the entire class from day one. Bard and Monk had done this,
in 3.0 and in 4.0 respectively. Look how much complaining had sprung up as a result!
Blizzard DoT ticks proc Firestarter to extend Astral Fire phases, Fire spells proc Coldsnap(formerly thunderstorm) to make Umbral into a sort of Burst Damage phase depending on the number of stacks in play. Coldsnap and Firestarter only affect Ice I,II,III or Fire I,II,III spells that are cast while under the effect of Umbral Ice or Astral Fire respectively. Remove all damage penalties from Umbral Ice, have it increase the ice damage same as Astral does for Fire.
Missed the point: You basically don't know what Astral Fire is, if you think that you needed to turn Umbral Ice into a burst phase. Mind you, it's still not a dedicated burst phase, but you have to be blind to not notice the effects of the spells. The way you're making this sound is a class that has nothing but high damage all around to the point that no matter what kind of support they get, they will be far weaker than Black Mage ever will.

What about Thunder?
Thunder spells are now instant Direct Damage spells for use in high mobility situations. They have no effect on, nor effected by, umbral or Astral phases. Thunder II is a copy of Blizzard II changed to Lightening damage and without cast time.
Okay, but New!Thunder II is still useless. Also, more forcing people to relearn the class.

Ok...what about Enochian?
Enochian is now a trait.
Blizz IV works the same as it did before: It's a Direct Damage spell that creates Umbral hearts.
Fire IV works a little different. It now adds 3 Astral Minds, which increase the potency of the next 3 Ice Spells cast.
Missing the point because Umbral Ice is not supposed to be a burst phase.
Each time a heart or mind is consumed, it adds to the Enochian gauge. Which when full allows the casting of Foul.
Already mentioned it, but the problem with Foul is the stringency of the things around it, not foul itself.

And lastly.
Sleep: No change to sleep itself, but when the spell is resisted or breaks it causes the effect 'groggy' which decreases the enemies offensive capabilities for a time. This gives it usefulness when CC is not useful. Also, remove the HW and SB obsession with Adds or Trash being Sleep immune.
Don't 100% disagree with making Sleep not useless.

[Kabooa]

Raging strikes was 20% on a 180second CD, (Only Bards got the 120 second variant through a trait). This is a 11% uptime on a 20% damage buff, so effectively about a 2.2% damage boost. This is made up with Improved Enochian, which puts the black mage from 105% to 110%, an increase of approximately 4.5%.

Likewise, we are comparing 286 potency (260 x 1.1) to 294 (280 x 1.05)

With the current cast time of 2.8s (compared to 3.0 in HW), this means the potency loss is ~3 potency per second in the grand scheme of things.

Foul is 680 potency every 30 seconds + cast time, so we'll use 32.5 seconds per Foul, which is a potency boost of 20.9 potency per second.

In terms of 'losing damage' in the transition, black mage lost none, and the changes in 4.05 only cemented that further. We gained in damage and mobility. That isn't to say we aren't in a less than stellar spot at the moment, but don't spread misinformation.

Stormblood is an improvement in terms of damage.

[Llugen]

...an improvement in terms of "sustained" damage, yes, but the reason that NIN/SCH/SMN work so well together is their two minute burst window synergy. This has been completely lost on BLM, because it has no real "burst" damage window anymore, save for convert which is laughable.

When I'm on SMN, just about every time I'm going to tri-disaster and deathflare, or going to enkindle bahamut and fester, trick attack is up. This is super significant; so significant that I don't think it can really be understated to either the devs or the "midcore"/casual players. Sustained damage alone is not as good as everyone's burst windows stacking together for dramatically powerful effect(s). It's the same concept with why you give the empowered balance to the strongest DPS and not the weakest, the gain is larger.

BLM deserves a "burst window" buff. They could give it back its own Raging Strikes, or they could adjust convert to fit it in, even a % damage increase on umbral hearts would be welcomed.




Also, the "standardization" of getting procs through guaranteed means as I suggested a few times would be extremely valuable for both movement and damage. Again, currently the Astral Fire MP table is 3x Fire IV > Fire I > 3x Fire IV, but if my proposed "Firestorm" trait (successful usage of 3 Umbral Hearts grants a Firestarter proc) was implemented, it would be 4x Fire IV > Firestarter > 3x Fire IV, for a reasonably significant damage increase (and no more need to cast Fire I to refresh Astral which feels weak at level 70). Also, an increased DoT timer on Thunder III would imply +160 total potency to Thundercloud, and if they went as far as to give "Thundersting" (previous remaining Thunder DoT timer is applied to initial damage of the next Thundercloud), there would be zero wasted ticks, EVEN IF you got back-to-back Thunderclouds (significantly increasing the value of Sharpcast Thunder more than it already has).


Honestly I really hope the devs read this and consider more than just flat potency increases.

[Komaru_Tatoro]

Ellie, im curious what kind of numbers (rough avg) you getting for your current rotation on o3s?

im with leera here in term of his/her ideas of balancing blm. just want to add a qol change is to make transpose recast 10s or make af/ui 15s. i hate the current transpose recast is at 12s where af/ui is 13s. they only leave us 1s window to refresh af/ui during like long transition.

[Kabooa]

Sustained damage alone is not as good as everyone's burst windows stacking together for dramatically powerful effect(s).

Raging strikes was up for one in every 3 trick attacks. This means of the 10% boost to the 20%, it only applied 33% of the time to half the buff, turning the 2.2% average damage increase to 2.23ish%. No amount of stacking party buffs increases Raging Strike's efficiency by 100%. (To match improved Enochian's increase of 4.5ish%)

[Llugen]

But Battle Voice, Battle Litany, and Foe Requiem ALSO have three minute synergy. This is all part of the point of why burst+"filler" classes synergize better than sustained+"consistent" ones.

Granted I'd prefer them give a 2 minute cooldown damage buff over a three minute one. Or even a 90 second one, although that throws in the trick attack towel again.

[Kabooa]

But Battle Voice, Battle Litany, and Foe Requiem ALSO have three minute synergy. This is all part of the point of why burst+"filler" classes synergize better than sustained+"consistent" ones.

You still benefit from them without Raging strikes. This is why it's disingenuous to say we're somehow in a worse position without it. We are, on average, doing more damage than we were before from a strict potency / second view.

-This only causes the other raid buffs we are provided to be more effective no matter how timers line up-

I am not saying Black mage is in the best spot. But to claim we are doing less damage compared to a Heavensward Black Mage being imported into 70 is straight up false. We have improved.

[EllieShadeflare]

Raging strikes was 20% on a 180second CD, (Only Bards got the 120 second variant through a trait). This is a 11% uptime on a 20% damage buff, so effectively about a 2.2% damage boost. This is made up with Improved Enochian, which puts the black mage from 105% to 110%, an increase of approximately 4.5%.

Likewise, we are comparing 286 potency (260 x 1.1) to 294 (280 x 1.05)

With the current cast time of 2.8s (compared to 3.0 in HW), this means the potency loss is ~3 potency per second in the grand scheme of things.

Foul is 680 potency every 30 seconds + cast time, so we'll use 32.5 seconds per Foul, which is a potency boost of 20.9 potency per second.

In terms of 'losing damage' in the transition, black mage lost none, and the changes in 4.05 only cemented that further. We gained in damage and mobility. That isn't to say we aren't in a less than stellar spot at the moment, but don't spread misinformation.

Stormblood is an improvement in terms of damage.

You. Missed Astral Fire in your calculations, Kabooa. Not to mention, you're assuming a run that's not going to mess up your rotation.

Foul makes up a lot and may seem bigger, but beyond the existence of Foul, our numbers have dropped. We're objectively doing less damage per Fire rotation than we would have done if we had our old damage. And this is for a class that was already ridiculed for having terrible mobility.

Essentially, in that 30s, you lost a good chunk of potency and only gain Foul to make up a mere 650 per 30s. Wooo. Improooooovement.

Ellie, im curious what kind of numbers (rough avg) you getting for your current rotation on o3s?

I don't know. I'm at i338, in not entirely the most optimized gear (I think my lodestone has my gear) but I don't parse because I'm on PS4. With that said, I'd be onboard with a increase to the timer, but I'd certainly hope that wouldn't be the only improvmeent.