Black Mage's quirky cross class abilities

[Umo]

I'd gladly trade second wind and feather foot for cure, stoneskin and protect....

I'd gladly trade Cure, Stoneskin and Protect for White Mages knowing how to play their job...

[Riaayo]

According to today's announcement, equipping the Black Mage soul stone will limit cross class ability choices to Pugilist and Archer.

While I'm pleased Black Mage will be able to retain some of the abilities we find most useful from Pugilist and Archer, I'm also somewhat baffled by the combination. Class differences aside (mage versus melee), limited to choosing Archer and Pugilist abilities for your Black Mage only provides 4 abilities out of the 5 available ability spots:

Feather Foot (PUG 2)
Second Wind (PUG 6)
Decoy (ARC 2)
Chameleon (ARC 42)

Quelling Strike (ARC 22) and Hawk's Eye (ARC 6) are also available to us, but to what benefit? I would just like your thoughts on whether these 4 abilities will be enough.

As others already mentioned Quelling Strike is highly useful and will help you out with utilizing Second Wind. Chameleon is also extremely useful, and I would say Decoy is not bad either.

Don't forget you have an ability to heal yourself with your own nukes, so that ontop of Second Wind and not standing in fire / pulling hate will keep you from sustaining damage. Sanguine Rite is also your own little personal Sentinel, so you're more lucky than some of the other classes as far as some people are concerned I think.

You could say Feather Foot is kind of meh, but it does give you mp back when you evade, and it's a tool for surviving if you pull hate for a moment.

In the end, if you hadn't gotten Archer you'd be pretty upset at your lack of Chameleon I would think, and no pug would = no second wind, tp source aside.

[tachi]

I love the idea that you can convert on BLM then pop a nice necrogenesis>nuke>2nd wind to top off. Dealing with the hate afterwards will be fun. Push the current tanks to do a better job then the voke/flash/afk 30 seconds we get now.

[Firon]

I love the idea that you can convert on BLM then pop a nice necrogenesis>nuke>2nd wind to top off. Dealing with the hate afterwards will be fun. Push the current tanks to do a better job then the voke/flash/afk 30 seconds we get now.

Wonder how much hp burst would give off necro.

[Wevlum]

Someone mentioned possibility of switching between class and job on a regular basis. I think it's highly likely that going from class->job and vice versa will reset all the timers on your abilities so it probably isn't going to be something you'll want to keep doing all the time.

Obviously I'm just imagining what might happen, changing from class to job might not reset your timers.

[Krausus]

Archer damage is not higher then PGls atm. 1 Vs 1 Pgl will blow archer away. The only Reason Archer is favored for moogle is because its much easy to hit combo's. Same reason people favored lancer for Ifrit and now thm. not because its the strongest DD. But because it's the easiest.

^^^ This Sorry KumaAkuma but you are wrong in this argument, though I do agree bard will still be able to play somewhat of a DPS role they are going to loose quite a bit of it due to loosing invigorate, keen Flurry, and blood for blood. If Bard wants to keep up in damage they will need to unequip the job stone.

[Krausus]

I'd gladly trade Cure, Stoneskin and Protect for White Mages knowing how to play their job...

man you must play with some really bad players, currently CNJ is by far the easiest class to play. I play it so I can get **** faced drunk and not effect the party.

[Conradus]

Quelling Strike (ARC 22) and Hawk's Eye (ARC 6) are also available to us, but to what benefit? I would just like your thoughts on whether these 4 abilities will be enough.

Hawk's Eye is not of much use, but Quelling Strike works with spells, getting you reduced enmity and earning TPs to use with Second Wind.

[syntaxlies]

I learned something today!

But still... I'd gladly trade second wind and feather foot for cure, stoneskin and protect....

if you wanna be a nuker and a buffer you could just stay thm.

[elreed]

Well, a lot of discussion on bard job, one thing that everyone is forgeting is that we dont know how much the song buffs last, if they give 10min like in the begining of the game we had a few buffs that lasted that, we wouldnt have any trouble focusing on DD, but if those spells last what the speed buff last then we have a problem, im still reluctant for having thm and conj only subjobs, if only they left lancer and conjurer as subs then we could have a good damage dealer and support/buffer job.

Right now only a few classes exceed archers damage and not always, i think with this kind of setup we have with bard we wont have the best DD, but ill wait and see, in any case i like a lot the archer class and wouldnt mind being a support job, this is the first wave of jobs so i know we'll get a bad ass ranged DD in the near future.