Astral Fire/Umbral Ice timers are actually bad mechanics at a meta level.

[Makrar]

But I am getting really sick and tired of people defending an awful mechanic because they can't imagine a better class than what we have. And in order to move the class forward, you have to rip out every last tiny bit that is actually holding it back. And the timers are the biggest thing restraining the classes future and making the class unapproachable to most players.

I always got the impression that Black Mage design was well liked by most. I think you're looking for a solution for a problem that doesnt exist. Theres some small issues but the AF/UI timers isnt remotely one of them (Slightly undertuned in DPS and damage profile that runs counter to the 2min burst window design pushed on this xpac)

[Ferrinus]

This is how the devs want it to play, this is how it already plays unless you break the rotation with something like hypermeme, which the devs then work to destroy anyways (paradox says hi.). It would change nothing to remove. Literally, the inclusion of Paradox, by itself, removed anything but the single solitary rotation.

Which, by the way, is what every single class in the game has.


...

Here's the thing. You remove the timers and none of that changes. Remove the timers as is, right now, and you will still do every AF phase outside of burst as 6 fire 4s, 1 paradox, and 1 despair.

No, this is false. That's not how the job plays right now, today, unless you're fighting a training dummy.

Sure, in Stone, Sky, Sea, you're just going to do the same AAA-B-AAA-C astral cycle over and over again. But the timer is actually generous enough to allow you to do AA-B-AAAA-C, or AAAA-B-AA-C, especially if you have decent spellspeed. Why is this important? Well, you might have procs expiring or important oGCDs coming off cooldown in the front or back half of your astral cycle, and you don't want to let them lay fallow, so you do like AAXY-B-AAAA-C. Maybe you have to do something crazy like AXY-B-AAAAA-C, enabled only by Triplecast. Maybe you have to bite the bullet and just do AAA-B-AA-C.

You are missing (deliberately ignoring?) the fact that a black mage has to make substitutions and contractions in their spellcasting sequence. They're not just casting the same spells in the same order over and over again. Your characterization of the job is manifestly wrong.

[Makrar]

You are missing (deliberately ignoring?) the fact that a black mage has to make substitutions and contractions in their spellcasting sequence. They're not just casting the same spells in the same order over and over again. Your characterization of the job is manifestly wrong.

Agreed. This is why i believe the basic rotation is so simple. Its not designed to rotated through ad infinum in exactly the same order regardless of the fight like some other jobs are designed. If you remove timers then I really think you need to do a heavy redesign.

BLM is slightly different in this regard to other jobs and thats ok.

[Raikai]

My issue is not the timers per se, but the fact that losing Enochian for whatever reason completely demolishes your dps on a skill floor level even. The threshold on how that would impact the lower end of dps spectrum shouldn't be as bad, especially on a job that only brings "firepower" to the equation. I'm all for the very high skill ceiling that optimized play might entail though.

Said that, I wonder what lies beyond for the future of BLM... Enochian should pose as a design wall the same way the old Greased Lightning did? How much can you expand the job with the Enochian the way it is?... Honestly one way or another I feel that given how XIV handles vertical progression, a redesign is due sooner or later.

[Ferrinus]

It's not hard to tweak the mathematical effect of losing Enochian up or down. You can just improve the numbers of F3 and B3 to make them come out quicker and/or hit harder, as well as reduce the potency of Foul/Xeno relative to other spells. However, I don't actually think that there's a magic number past which people who don't like Enochian will suddenly like it again because now they're only losing 200 potency instead of 250 or whatever. It's like the rolling argument about positionals for melee classes - you either appreciate the challenge or you don't.

[Kabooa]

My issue is not the timers per se, but the fact that losing Enochian for whatever reason completely demolishes your dps on a skill floor level even. The threshold on how that would impact the lower end of dps spectrum shouldn't be as bad, especially on a job that only brings "firepower" to the equation. I'm all for the very high skill ceiling that optimized play might entail though.

Said that, I wonder what lies beyond for the future of BLM... Enochian should pose as a design wall the same way the old Greased Lightning did? How much can you expand the job with the Enochian the way it is?... Honestly one way or another I feel that given how XIV handles vertical progression, a redesign is due sooner or later.

This is frankly no longer a concern.

You always have Enochian because you always have your timer, and you have a bevy of tools to keep your timer. Greased Lightning was never at the level of comfort AF/UI has been, because even in baseline ARR you were only ever one GCD from maximum power.

Seeing as transforming abilities are being experimented more in FF14, I have little concern for black mage moving forward. The next logical step for them is a new transformative skill, likely on Thunder as it's now just a bit too static.

[Raikai]

This is frankly no longer a concern.

You always have Enochian because you always have your timer, and you have a bevy of tools to keep your timer. Greased Lightning was never at the level of comfort AF/UI has been, because even in baseline ARR you were only ever one GCD from maximum power.

Seeing as transforming abilities are being experimented more in FF14, I have little concern for black mage moving forward. The next logical step for them is a new transformative skill, likely on Thunder as it's now just a bit too static.

I feel that there's a misconception with Triplecast (bevy of tools). A lot of people say that BLM basically have 7 insta cast windows, but those are more geared towards planned movement. If you use Triplecast because you "messed up" and can't get out in time, or that you won't have enough time to finish a Despair cast... added with slidecast, you only need in most cases 1 insta cast to avoid losing Enochian. Those remaining casts won't probably matter much in that regard. So there's realistically just 3 opportunities to fix mistakes like that (2 triples and the swift).

However, given that you don't have those available at the time... It is a concern indeed, just because to recover you need to interrupt your rotation with a slow cast spell, to restore Enochian and get back stacks of AF (in case you dropped at that phase).

I'm not suggesting that Enochian should be removed, though, however one small thing would ease up the gap towards the skill floor... Maybe Xenoglossy/Foul could refresh, or add 4 extra seconds to your Enochian timer. Yes, one extra tool to help with Enochian uptime, however this would only affect the skill floor positively while changing little to nothing on the skill ceiling.

[Ayche]

You can always trade one Fire 4 for a Fire 1.
Sure, you quite a lot of potency doing that, but you get to reset the clock and reassess the situation.

[Ferrinus]

Yeah. Fire (with a firestarter used immediately afterwards taken into account) has something like 30% less PPS than Fire IV, but it's only for one or two GCDs and then you're back in business. There's also the decision to just end your fire cycle early by going straight into Despair.

I suspect that F3 and B3 could use potency boosts in general (and/or maybe a way to dodge the "opposite element" damage penalty?), both to make picking yourself up off the floor or cutting a cycle short less punishing and to make weird Transpose rotations less attractive. But some people just don't like timers, whether that timer makes the difference between 5 potency or 500.

[Taranok]

I always got the impression that Black Mage design was well liked by most. I think you're looking for a solution for a problem that doesnt exist. Theres some small issues but the AF/UI timers isnt remotely one of them (Slightly undertuned in DPS and damage profile that runs counter to the 2min burst window design pushed on this xpac)

The way I see it is people who enjoy a class, such as myself, don't critically think about the class, try to digest what's good or bad about the class, and then deconstruct its problems. I've mained the class off and on since ARR. I've seen the ARR design, which was a proc based thing. The HW design, which I had to set the class down for a month upon getting fire 4 because of how much it altered the rotation. Then came back to it at the tail end of HW and liked it. The SB design, which fixed a lot of HW faults while trying to address core issues (lack of mobility) by adding triplecast. ShB, which is when the timers were stretched to the breaking point in the rotation, where your ad hoc movement abilities couldn't be used ad hoc. And finally in EW, where everyone heralded a nigh-useless change as a huge QoL improvements while haphazardly trying to fix a rotation that the devs heralded but clearly didn't want (hypermeme), and not addressing the core issue timers creates while also introducing new issues, such as Manafont drifting being an actual problem or being able to do a transpose firestarter proc due to the 30s duration. Something that hasn't been part of the class since A Realm Reborn.

Here's the thing about Black Mage. The true issue with the class. The class is so difficult to learn and understand that it naturally self-selects very, very specific people to play it. People who can get over the astronomical gate-keeping timers. It took me, by my own admission, literal years to even parse exactly what I didn't like about the class. And once I had realization of the mechanic that was making the class so frustrating and annoying to play despite doing just fine on the class (as in, cleared Kefka, cleared Neo-Exdeath, Titan Savage, and several phases of ultimates before people want to push me onto an actually good class, all without dropping timers) that I started trying to actually show people this flaw.

When I talk about the class with my friends, the first thing the non-mains bring up is how difficult the class is to play. When a class is difficult to play, it's usually not the skill ceiling they refer to, but rather the skill floor. When I refer to class difficulty, I usually stick to ceiling but I try to state it's the ceiling I'm referring to. For example, Samurai is a difficult class to master, but not a difficult class to play. If you fire every cooldown on cooldown, you'll do decently well even if you haven't mastered its finer points. Black Mage is a difficult class to play, and a difficult class to master. Just to get past the gate you have to scale a cliff. That's what the timers are. This is the difficulty they refer to when talking about BLM. I've tried bringing some of those friends in to bring up this point, and the BLM mains casually ignore them because, why address someone who's not a master of the class already?

And the amount of times I hear friends talking about dropping timers while leveling or learning or going into X content, the more I realized how big a problem the timers actually were. But as I said, BLM self-selects people who can scale the cliff. Every single person who defends the class or says it's perfect, literally never once has thought about the cliff they had to scale to play the class. Worse yet, others use it as a method of gatekeeping. "I scaled the cliff and did fine, you should too!" Everyone else, those who can't scale the cliff, level the class and leave the class. I still see people at level 80 who spam fire 3 one after another, or blizzard 1 over and over. This classes skill floor is astronomically high. If you have no idea what you are doing, even reading tooltips doesn't teach you how to play the class. I never had this problem because I could step over the cliff. But every single time I had to deal with it, it got progressively more and more and more and more and more frustrating and annoying to deal with. If I take a break and come back to the class, every time I drop the timers it grates just a tiny bit more. Every time I try to fit the class into a new fight, it gets slightly more annoying. This annoyance grew to the point where I had to basically try to find what was creating this problem, and what needed or could be done to fix it. Because, by my own admission, this is my main class. I love it. But the straw that broke the camel's back was spamming Umbral Soul 100 times in a single dungeon between pulls because I needed to maintain the timers. That's when I started realizing just how flawed the class was.

As I said, it took me years to even recognize this problem was actually a problem. So there's a reason why I'm so belligerent in trying to raise awareness of this problem. And I use Monk as my prime example because Monk is the closest class to sharing BLM's actual structural problem. I didn't hear a single monk main complaining about Greased Lightning, because, like Black Mage, it self-selects out people who don't like the mechanic. I am a paradox in this regard, because I didn't self-select out of the class, but came to realize just how harmful it was to my personal enjoyment of the class. As well as how harmful it was to other people's enjoyment of the class. When I hear constant complaining on discord while leveling classes with a friend who is on BLM about dropped timings, and I specifically draw their attention to this fact, it becomes far clearer. The timers are an actual, massive problem on the class. It's just a problem the playerbase hasn't realised because you either recognize it as a problem early and swap classes, or don't reccognize it as a problem because it's the barrier for entry into the class. You either bounce or you stay.

This is made moreso clear when I try to get other people to enjoy the best aspects of this class. It is an absolute thrill doing pixel perfect dodging of mechanics, minimizing movement, outsmarting the bosses mechanics. That is the joy of the class. That is what makes me want to play it more. But the timers are just there to provide structure to the class, and they're the yoke the class has to drag around to get to the fun. Just like monk, when you remove the yoke, the class is freed up to be so much more than it currently is.

Because I remember Monk. No one complained about it beyond the class not getting anything new that was useful. They repeatedly extended the timer because people kept dropping it. They had to extend it more as they changed the class. No one complained because the people who would self-selected out. It's a gatekeeping mechanic. You must be this tall to enjoy Black Mage. Dropping out the skill floor of monk actually made me enjoy melee for the first time since stormblood launched. Not dealing with the yoke of that class is the first time I've enjoyed Monk since ARR.

And I know, with certainty, because it was done with monk and summoner and machinist, that it can be done with Black Mage and actually massively improve the class. And just as with Monk and Summoner and Machinist, when you remove things holding back the class, which are almost always things that have their design dating back to ARR, the class massively improves. Across the board this has been true on almost every single class in the game. Why are you so afraid of improving BLM?