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  1. #11
    Player
    AnaseSkyrider's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2022
    Posts
    7
    Character
    Ryosen Aogane
    World
    Brynhildr
    Main Class
    Warrior Lv 72
    Introduction
    Sprout here. Joined FFXIV from the WoW exodus in summer 2021, currently working my way through early SB, have BLM to lv70, and have personally witnessed some of the ShB->EW changes that have been discussed.

    Way too many people are completely missing the point and it's extremely aggravating to read, so now I'm going to try explaining it as best as I can from my perspective as a competent (but still new) player who also sees these problems trying to get into BLM while leveling and perform well in the duties I'm able to queue for.

    The timers are an archaic system that is being phased out from many jobs because they're bad for the enjoyment of actually performing the rotations in a real-world manner. For a BLM, they're unnecessary to create a job that does this rotation and are actively damaging to the gameplay.

    The core loop of a BLM
    The timers are the current system that facilitates this rotational loop in the same way that the combo system is what facilitates the 1-2-3 for melees -- with stuff like Storm's Eye, Armor Crush, and Disembowel to break up that loop. Once you've reached lv60+ and BLM starts to actually become distinct from THM, your loop is something like this:
    - enter UI to restore MP, apply DoTs, press a big ice button, and generate UH
    - enter AF, burn MP on your most powerful explodey buttons, break it up with a spell or two so that it's not "Spamming Ruin for 10 years", end on a finisher
    - repeat.

    At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what the names and icons are of the buttons you press to accomplish this. As long as you have that brief ice phase to regen MP, followed by the fire phase of big fireworks that ends in an even bigger firework, you have a black mage. Everything else like Triplecast, Manafont, Thunder, all the procs, Scathe(lol), Polyglot, etc is just fluff that (if they were all properly designed) adds more icing on top of that explodey cake.

    Why the stance timers are a problem
    The timers come with weaknesses that lead to problems from both the player end and the developer end. Simply put: Using these timers to facilitate the modern BLM is like using duct tape instead of reinforced steel for a skyscraper. It might have been passable in a pre-F4 world, but not now, not since HW.

    The pros and cons are such that:
    - the timers are basically non-existent for competent players who basically ignore the timers or are capable of reflexively doing whatever their muscle-memory tells them to do to maintain their timers
    - for new players, it's a gatekeep; it's unnecessarily easy to lose hundreds and thousands of potency of damage.

    It's a disproportionate punishment that *does not need to exist*. It offers no benefits; when everyone is playing competently, the game is pretty balanced, and your DPS is not proportional to the added effort it takes. All it does is offer an arbitrary feeling of skill for being better at solving an unnecessarily hard problem that relies on excluding others. The fantasy of being an explosion mage should not be locked behind arbitrary timers that are both bad game design and unnecessary to the fantasy itself. Seriously: why does a stance have a timer?

    The timers are also clearly a problem to the design of the job itself when you have:
    - weird goofy broken rotations like hypermeme
    - the messed up AoE rotation in ShB
    - the improved EW procs leading to Transpose -> F3P interactions instead of your B3/F3
    - wasted procs as a proc-based caster because the timers and low-mobility supersede the most intuitive way to use your procs: when you get them

    Clearly, they are extremely fickle and easily broken with the slightest change to the job's design. That's not good job design, that's a house of cards. The timers *do not robustly sustain the intended rotation*. The rotations that keep coming out are *circumventing* the intended rotation because of how the timers work, something that inevitably gets patched out later. Just fix the core problem instead of patching the holes.

    Conclusion
    The timers are indefensible in a modern FF14, and to the people who "like the constant anxiety", I can't convince you. For those who think it's necessary to make the rotation work, however, I implore you to take the time to come up with a way to maintain the actual rotation itself -- making it as wholly unchanged as possible -- all while removing these extremely unnecessary timers. A BLM still wants to ABC, still wants to optimize their weaves, minimize movement, not waste polyglots. Just remove the stupid stance timers so that you don't lose thousands of potency because of anything from "I messed up" to "They designed a fight that exclusively punishes me".

    There's been dozens of posts in this thread suggesting how to do all of this, if that isn't good enough, then try it yourself instead of dishonestly insisting it's impossible.
    (2)
    Last edited by AnaseSkyrider; 01-18-2022 at 03:48 PM.

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