Black Mage Job Changes Wishlist for 4.25 or 4.3

[Seraphor]

Yes, let's over balance the game for the 0.1% who are affected by the meta, and make the game even simpler and more boring for the other 99.9%

[EllieShadeflare]

Yes, let's over balance the game for the 0.1% who are affected by the meta, and make the game even simpler and more boring for the other 99.9%

Nice little strawman you have there. Unfortunately for your argument, the thing we're more focused on is making the game balanced so that people don't feel forced to follow the meta, not to oversimplify overbalance it. Also, quick question, do you know what "balance" is? Simplification doesn't instantly mean balance (just look at how broken Warrior is).

Honestly though, I do think something ought to be done with the damage buffs in the game. I feel like the more the game relies on these specialized buffs (especially piercing) the more it incentivises specific groups over others. And because of these incentivisations, certain jobs get discouraged out of various groups. This has been the case for Black Mage and Samurai for some time, where a large chunk of statics will sneer at players playing these classes until they're shamed into playing something closer to the meta (such as Summoner for the former, Ninja or Dragoon for the latter).

This kind of situation (I like to call it "Hardcore Casual Syndrome") generally occurs due to the trends being done by the highest level of play, and certain players (those afflicted by "Hardcore Casual Syndrome") will actively exclude those they feel won't work... even though the game is balanced to work with almost any composition. When we ask for balancing, we're mostly doing this to circumvent "Hardcore Casual Syndrome", and not trying to dumb the game down.

Hope that helps you understand our viewpoints and why we discuss balance.

[Remedi]

I know comparing to other games isn't a good thing, but there's a reason WoW struggled so much with dps and group balance. They simply couldnt balance buffs. You always had some optimal composition. And they solved the problem very easily, no more buff. Everyone is self sufficient. I don't say Ff14 has to go as far, but there are things that should be removed, and damage type is one of those things.

They didn't solve anything some classes still vastly overperform others like rogues having nearly a permanent aoe dmg reduction or immunity classes beign vastly preferred over anything else to cheese mechanics, not to mention that the delta of dmg is quite big.
In fact you might say that removing dps buffs made utility skills the new meta and that is why I don't believe that it's the best option to remove what is believed to be the problem anything can become THAT thing that tips the scale of the balance
Also of note BFA is bringing back buff too

[Seraphor]

What's wrong with incentivising specific groups?
Obsession with meta is a cultural thing, and it's not shared by the Japanese.

Take away damage types and you just end up with the same debuff on everyone who has a debuff, which either becomes pitifully small or unstackable.

You still then end up with two tiers of jobs, those with the debuff and those without. Black Mage would still be second class.

Just balance the debuffs, add in more magic vuln. up, give samurai either a potency buff or some kind of utility.
If people want to shame others ibto using other jobs despite them all being viable, theyre still going to do it.

[EllieShadeflare]

What's wrong with incentivising specific groups?
Obsession with meta is a cultural thing, and it's not shared by the Japanese.

Incentivising groups will cause party exclusions, as YoshiP explained in the live letter:

A: We believe everyone is very focused on their main job right now. However, we’re making sure that each job feels different to play, so we do not have any plans to add any new support abilities to black mage in the 4.x series. As with samurai, we believe jobs with high DPS are supporting their party by dealing high damage.

Also, there seems to be a trend where players believe they are at a disadvantage when there is a certain job in the raid. There won’t be a major advantage or disadvantage no matter what setup you have. This type of trend gives a negative impression to specific jobs. We would appreciate if the community would stop being swayed by this trend.

Take away damage types and you just end up with the same debuff on everyone who has a debuff, which either becomes pitifully small or unstackable.

And we've seen this isn't the case for a large majority of the debuffs and buffs. Just look at Trick Attack. Trick Attack maintains its whopping 10% damage increase despite being a universal DPS buff, and it's been this way since... its inception if I remember right. Not to mention, the only debuffs that couldn't be stacked were the type-resistance debuffs (like on Samurai, Ninja, and Warrior's shared slashing debuffs) and stat reducing debuffs (which we only saw with original Delirium's INT decrease and Dragon Kick) outside of stacking them with Virus.

You still then end up with two tiers of jobs, those with the debuff and those without. Black Mage would still be second class.

On one hand, yes. One COULD argue that certain jobs would be more valuable without the damage to pull them up if they can provide more buffs than damage. However, BLM would now benefit a lot greater from a more universal debuff system, since it already has naturally high damage, and since each debuff is a multiplier, it'd only sky rocket its damage further.

Just balance the debuffs, add in more magic vuln. up, give samurai either a potency buff or some kind of utility.
If people want to shame others ibto using other jobs despite them all being viable, theyre still going to do it.

Okay, but magic vuln up would only boost half of the party AT BEST, and you'd be arguing for the utility meta with that Samurai suggestion. You're also arguing for homogenization of the jobs by suggesting Samurai getting a utility buff (as every other melee DPS job already has utility of their own). The way to boost Samurai and maintain its identity is to allow it to have a good raid DPS without making it heavily utility based. After all, its original intention was to be a heavily selfish, no-utility DPS job.

At least there'd be less of a mono-build meta which relies on a single job's buff boosting two other DPSes, and instead allow more variety in what we see in party composition.

[Alexalibur]

Nice little strawman you have there. Unfortunately for your argument, the thing we're more focused on is making the game balanced so that people don't feel forced to follow the meta, not to oversimplify overbalance it. Also, quick question, do you know what "balance" is? Simplification doesn't instantly mean balance (just look at how broken Warrior is).

Then you need to find a new cause to fight for because what you're trying to seek is impossible. There will never be a time where the game wouldn't have a "meta" comp that people will follow just because it is meta. Look at Creator; MNK was excluded, even though a good MNK will outparse everyone, but people still ran delete mnk memes to the ground (it had problems I agree, but it wasn't 100% useless as the community wanted to believe). PLD, as well.

Complete and absolute balance will never happen. The only thing you should fight for is fixing things that don't work, like Scathe, Freeze, and such, as those are obvious broken items that need fixing and there is no argument against that. Buff BLM's damage, and now you are faced with other classes being excluded because BLM right now does a monstrous amount of DPS. Only a fool would deny BLMs the slot in PF.

Please, let's not pretend BLM is a deadweight right now. We need to tread lightly since BLM is really freaking strong right now.

[Seraphor]

Trick attack gets a whopping 10% because it\\'s one of the few debuffs like it.
The other one is MCHs turret overcharge at 8%.
Convert every debuff into all damage and allow them to stack, you could end up with a cumulative 30% increase in light party or 60% in full, which would be op.
Allowing them all to stack would mean any class that can\\'t debuff would have to be excluded.
If they don\\'t stack, because it\\'s so op, then you still only get the jobs that can debuff, because now you have to coordinate and weave your debuffs to keep that 10% increase on as long as possible.


Your quote from yoshi if anything supports not doing this.
All jobs are already viable, the meta is a cultural thing that people need to get over, not force the developers to oversimplify things for them.

Utility can still be selfish, Ninjas trick attack is selfish utility, so Samurai wouldn\\'t have it\\'s identity ruined by it.

[Seraphor]

Add in a magic vulnerability debuff, doesn\\'t have to be on BLM, could be on DRK or even RDM, then you get a secondary caster "meta" which is just as viable as a predominantly physical one.
Then you don\\'t get jobs that are universally panned, just with different strengths in different set ups.

[EllieShadeflare]

Then you need to find a new cause to fight for because what you're trying to seek is impossible. There will never be a time where the game wouldn't have a "meta" comp that people will follow just because it is meta. Look at Creator; MNK was excluded, even though a good MNK will outparse everyone, but people still ran delete mnk memes to the ground (it had problems I agree, but it wasn't 100% useless as the community wanted to believe). PLD, as well.

Monk's problems in Creator had a lot to do with its kit being almost incompatible with Creator's, while Paladin's damage was so abysmal that its defensive utility didn't make up for the lack of damage (not to mention, PLD barely had an identity other than "I can heal! And I can use MP... less than DRK ever does!") When it started to look like it was the case for Black Mage in Omega, they decided to boost Black Mage to be a bit more mobile, and make Sigmascape just a teensy bit easier for Black Mage to cast better.

Complete and absolute balance will never happen. The only thing you should fight for is fixing things that don't work, like Scathe, Freeze, and such, as those are obvious broken items that need fixing and there is no argument against that.

Strawman in believing that's what we'll find or are demanding. All we want is less emphasis on a mono-build meta so that classes aren't excluded because one set of jobs work far too well with each other.

Buff BLM's damage, and now you are faced with other classes being excluded because BLM right now does a monstrous amount of DPS. Only a fool would deny BLMs the slot in PF.

Except all a person has to do is point out that a Black Mage needs to be at 99-100 percentile while everyone else is at 80-90 percentile to do anything close to the same raid DPS.

Take a looksie here, for example. BLM is doing pretty darn good here! It's dealing high damage, high enough to be 300 points of DPS above everyone else in the rDPS section!

However, this showcases the necessity of looking at both Heroku and FFlogs at the same time, since it tells the full story. The Black Mage is a 99 percentile (meaning they're better than 99% of Black Mages), whilst every other DPS is 79 percentile to 95 percentile, meaning that the Black Mage has to be one of the best at the job and dealing with people who aren't as good with their jobs to deal even close to damage.

Here is another example only this time, with all players at a similar level. While Black Mage is still a 99 percentile, the Dragoon is a mere percentile behind, with Bard at 97, and Ninja at 95. BLM is expectedly higher than BRD and Ninja, but is almost below 200 rDPS versus Dragoon.

Please, let's not pretend BLM is a deadweight right now. We need to tread lightly since BLM is really freaking strong right now.

I know that BLM is strong. This is why I've said before:

Don't get me wrong, Black Mage is in the best place it's been since maybe the start of Heavensward or the end of ARR. Unfortunately, Black Mage is simply not going to be a job that's valued until they can boost the damage output.

However, my suggestions have not been to boost the flat potency and call it a day, I've tried to find solutions involving implementing BLM's kit and expanding on it. Such as making the Umbral Hearts have an actual reward for single target rotations. Boosting the flat potency can overpower the job and not fix the base problems with the job, and my goal had been to make it less clunky and still deal more damage.

Convert every debuff into all damage and allow them to stack, you could end up with a cumulative 30% increase in light party or 60% in full, which would be op.
Allowing them all to stack would mean any class that can\\'t debuff would have to be excluded.
If they don\\'t stack, because it\\'s so op, then you still only get the jobs that can debuff, because now you have to coordinate and weave your debuffs to keep that 10% increase on as long as possible.

They're all multipliers on top of multipliers, so you're wrong on that front. However, multiple jobs have these buffs already and the classes that benefit the most from extensive multiplying are, you guessed it, the classes with already high native potency.

Your quote from yoshi if anything supports not doing this.

Explain to me how, then. Removing the type advantages (save for classes that can buff one kind of damage or the other at a time, like Machinist or Summoner) would allow for more diverse compositions as players could become more focused on bringing different combinations of jobs instead of relying on the DRG + MCH + BRD + NIN meta.

All jobs are already viable, the meta is a cultural thing that people need to get over, not force the developers to oversimplify things for them.

...what the hell is this argument, even? Like... what!? You're honestly saying words to say words and it's not even coherent! But let's break it down one by one to try and see any logic.

All jobs are already viable,

And yet people still exclude jobs because they're not the most overpowered. The goal we have is to not let that happen.

the meta is a cultural thing that people need to get over

The meta isn't cultural though, unless you're solely talking about the playerbase as a whole. Meta refers to the absolute most optimized parties for whatever situation (and in this case, people mostly focus on the speedkill meta of DRG + MCH + BRD + NIN), which even the Japanese use as well.

not force the developers to oversimplify things for them.

This was never the argument in the first place. This is disingenuous at best.

Utility can still be selfish, Ninjas trick attack is selfish utility, so Samurai wouldn\\'t have it\\'s identity ruined by it.

It's not selfish by the mere fact that everyone else can benefit from it, and its primary purpose is for said players to benefit from it. One of the most important things to learn as a Ninja is to line up their Trick Attack with their static members' burst phases to maximize their damage. To give better examples of selfish and not-selfish by using the Caster role, Enochian and Dreadwyrm Trance are selfish because they benefit ONLY the user, and not anyone else. Embolden and Contagion are NOT selfish because they buff more than their casters.

[Karshan]

"Hardcore Casual Syndrome"

I'd like to make that a thing. With it's little nickname "metaslave" :P

Also, though all gamers use the concept and usually go by your definition, metagame becomes cultural in the sense of "abiding by it no matter what" : it's typically a western way of thinking. A hyperbolic one : meta is the way, everything else is shit. No moderation of thought.

Your signature even is a testimony : JPN players and devs don't understand the obsession of EU teams for a few %, as if their life depended on it, and this "absolute", childish if you ask me, this or nothing because it's the best.

I would think on the contrary, doing it with the least favorable comp would be the feat worth of praise. Western obsession with numbers, and Japan focused on fun, goes against typical stereotypes...