How is BLM?

[NYCLouisGamer]

Good morning! Please explain what I am missing. Why is BLM considered easy to learn or even moderate in difficulty? It seems very hard to reach a base level of competency, considering the length of the opener alone!

https://www.akhmorning.com/jobs/blm/...eners/#openers

And the opener is something that can be memorized. I cannot imagine what happens when you have to then use a bunch of split-second decision-making for other stuff while using to tricks to squeeze out multiple Flares, unintuitive but brilliant ways to use low-level spells to take advantage of server ticks, etc.

Seems hard.

[Frizze]

Good morning! Please explain what I am missing. Why is BLM considered easy to learn or even moderate in difficulty?

It really is easy to learn though. If played right you have infinite resources so you always want to be casting if you can(and since you usually cant cast while moving, that means standing still as much as you can). You use fire stance to do damage, ice stance to regen mana(your entire bar in 2 server ticks at higher levels) - switching back and forth throughout the fight. Theres one DoT you should maintain for additional damage. Different spells are used in different situations(fire 2 isnt an upgrade of fire 1 - its an aoe spell instead), so you need to learn what they do and when they should be used. And then at higher levels you get one buff to maintain(buffs damage and gives access to strongest spells), and a couple others to learn when to use(with a couple different effects). And thats the whole class. Mastery is harder, as there is a lot of optimizing that can be done in terms of when you use skills and learning fights to allow for the most uptime. But at its most basic you spam a fire spell to run out of mana, then use ice to get back to full before you repeat - thats pretty easy to pick up.

[LilyPendragon]

Good morning! Please explain what I am missing. Why is BLM considered easy to learn or even moderate in difficulty? It seems very hard to reach a base level of competency, considering the length of the opener alone!

https://www.akhmorning.com/jobs/blm/...eners/#openers

And the opener is something that can be memorized. I cannot imagine what happens when you have to then use a bunch of split-second decision-making for other stuff while using to tricks to squeeze out multiple Flares, unintuitive but brilliant ways to use low-level spells to take advantage of server ticks, etc.

Seems hard.

Compare that to a SMN opener and you'll see why people say it's easier to pick up. Rotationally BLM is not very complex, the complexity comes in decision making of when to use your abilities to mantain casting.

Essentially you want to fit as many Fire IV's into your Fire phase as possible, casting a Fire I when the enochian timer ticks to around 3-4 seconds, and despair when you can't cast any more Fire IV (usually at 800 MP). After that it's Blizzard 3, a sharpcast (the blizzard 3 casts quickly enough for you to weave sharpcast without clipping your GCD), then Blizz IV > Thunder IV > Fire III (I believe this is also a weave window) > Repeat Fire phase.

The complexity is positioning yourself in such a way that you can cast Leylines as close to on cooldown as possible, and stay in them as close to their entire duration as possible as Leylines is a massive damage boost. Along with other things like only casting a single Fire I in your fire phase, not refreshing Thunder IV early without a damn good reason etc...

There's a reason there's a massive discrepancy between top Black Mages and bottom black mages (I think it's actually the biggest DPS discrepancy of all classes?), and that's not because of rotational complexity, it's simply because you have to know the fight inside and out, so that you can map out all of your instacasts and leylines to maintain as much Fire IV spam as possible.

[NYCLouisGamer]

All of you should write ads for FFXIV

Now I am even more excited to try BLM! Thank you for clearing up my questions on BLM mechanics. I know there is more to learn but you definitely explained the toughest parts for me. I had no idea that only some of the Fire spells extend the astral timer.