A few questions for the BLM mains/enjoyers

[Taranok]

Semi-ironically, for the devs to design fights closer to Stormblood or early Shadowbringers, rather than Endwalkers absolutely awful, unsatisfying, anti-caster fight design.

More specifically to black mage:

1. Remove AF/UI timers, and restructure the rotation in a better, more user-friendly and intuitive way. This is literally the greatest flaw in BLM's design and one of the biggest reasons the class is so low-play.
2. A massive pruning of redundant, mutually exclusive, and dead skills. Why does Scathe still exist in its current form?
3. To get the monk treatment. Trimming and pruning its awful, redundant, or otherwise low use skills, giving the class a real class mechanic, and making it actually fit in the game the devs are actually making, while also creating room for new growth in the class.

What do I mean by mutually exclusive skills? Things like ley lines + between the lines, Transpose + umbral soul, fire 4 and blizzard 4, foul and xenoglossy (man, remember when foul was a hybrid button instead of just for aoe?) Even blizzard/fire 1 are all (mostly) mutually exclusive, and you can trim a lot of bloat just off these abilities.

Redundant would be things like Amplify and Manafont. They literally do the same thing. Amplify gives you the ability to cast an extra xenoglossy, Manafont lets you, if you can line up your rotation (which is a problem unto itself,) cast 2 more astral fire GCDs of your choice.

Then there's the plethora of dead skills, including but not limited to things like sleep that every job has, as well as scathe, blizzard 1 (if you prune your own bars and get used to not having it when downleveling.)

Low use skills would be things like fire 3/blizzard 3 in a world where you also use fire 1/blizzard 1, as well as things like Freeze which, as far as I can tell, exists just to bloat the bars. Having a handful of buttons you use every 30s or less often is great, when half your toolkit is abilities you use less than once every 30s, there's kind of a bigger issue. Nevermind when you have 2 2m cooldowns that are basically the same skill.

Then there's the whole: "ACTUALLY FIX THE LEVELING EXPERIENCE ALREADY!"

[OgruMogru]

Fire 4 and Blizzard 4 consolidation is about the only thing I agree with D:

They already consolidated fire1 and blizzard 1 into paradox.

Transpose and umbral soul being paired like this would be awful, I'm sorry I don't wanna be a shitter, but it would really mess up how we manage alternative lines in our rotation.

[Raikai]

I think outright removing the Enochian timer would be bad, because it removes a core identity of the job, which is playing around the strict timer.

If it's to address the timer newb unfriendliness, I'd rather have either of those:
a) A trait that makes Scathe add in 3 seconds to the timer
b) An instant cast oGCD that refreshes the timer, but at the cost of one polyglot

For what BLM currently is, the thing I really want to change is Thundercloud, simply because how pointless it became with Sharpcast lasting for so long and with 2 charges. The idea of a non-rotational proc is at its best when it becomes an exciting thing to use when it procs, and it's just not the case, and it's kinda painful to see all of the procs for nothing.

Maybe if the Sharpcasted T3 was a different buff than Thundercloud T3 or something like that (much like how good the DNC Flourish rework was regarding their procs).

[OgruMogru]

Maybe if the Sharpcasted T3 was a different buff than Thundercloud T3 or something like that (much like how good the DNC Flourish rework was regarding their procs).

Having some kind of variation in thundercloud proc depending on if you used it in AF or UI would be interesting. Maybe if used under ice it gives the benefit of refreshing a bit of mana to help if you get a bad server tick.

[Llugen]

THWACK

buff blm autos!

THWACK!

Fully embrace the fake melee label

THWACK!

I hate when I crit DH autos and just get 1!! in a bigger font.

THWACK!

This guy GETS IT.



But in all seriousness, lower level BLM needs help, it is annoying to play the job at anything lower than level 72, and below 60 is abysmal.

There should be a pre-Despair (call it Sorrow if you will) at level 30 that functions the same but is lower potency and then upgrades to Despair at 72. This would clean up the pre-72 rotation quite a bit.

See my other thread I just bumped regarding a fix for Manafont (TL;DR, consolidate it into the LL button and instead of giving you MP it gives you a buff that restores your MP when you hit zero (like Excog), to reduce drift, but read the thread)

I also really want Between The Lines to reset the cooldown on Aetherial Manipulation, for super badass movement strategies.

I've given up hope for this as well, but they should also put Firestarter/Thundercloud procs on the job gauge and therefore let them each stack to 3. It baffles me that this hasn't already been done. "But Llugen, the BLM job gauge is already so complicated to look at" I can hear you say, and yeah sure it is complicated to look at but that isn't an argument; you're either looking at the job gauge and at your buff bar (2 different places) or you're looking at your job gauge. Either way you have to keep track of the same number of things.


What I really DON'T want is for BLM to get the SAM/DNC treatment where Ley Lines now gives you a "Nuke Ready" buff that enables you to use a single spell once every 2 minutes. I really don't like that design, it's not compelling, and unless it's some INSANE damage like demi-ultima doing 1200 potency to all enemies in a 30 yalm radius of the caster or something then it probably isn't even going to feel very good anyway, and they almost certainly wouldn't make it that strong.

[Valence]

What I really DON'T want is for BLM to get the SAM/DNC treatment where Ley Lines now gives you a "Nuke Ready" buff that enables you to use a single spell once every 2 minutes. I really don't like that design, it's not compelling, and unless it's some INSANE damage like demi-ultima doing 1200 potency to all enemies in a 30 yalm radius of the caster or something then it probably isn't even going to feel very good anyway, and they almost certainly wouldn't make it that strong.

Yeah it's the new lazy design that came with EW on a lot of jobs. Either a 2min buff unlocking your capstone attack, or a second attack finisher coming after the capstone from lvl80 from an earlier expansion (Blast Arrow for example, etc). Instead of introducing new and interesting capstones with their unique mechanics.

SAM's is the most hilarious since it got the treatment once already with Tsubame, and this expansion with an EVEN BIGGER clone of midare on top of it.

[Llynethil]

Wouldn't mind seeing the timer extend from 15 to 20 seconds, think that's one of the big things people trying out blm get put off by and would make it a bit easier to get into the job while not hurting people who main blm at all neither.

That or at least freeze the timer during dumb cutscenes or w/e in bossfights, so stupid you have to start all over again because of something you have no control over, all other jobs get to keep their gauges, why not blm?

And make umbral soul a lvl 10 spell or something, it just plain sucks doing any content below lvl 76 where you can only juggle your 1 stacks over and over between fights.

[Post]

Can't believe we used to play around a 10 second astral/umbral buff that refreshed when your spell did the DAMAGE, not upon or slightly before the cast bar finished... I guess before Fire 4 it was still among the easiest DPS jobs though.

[Hasrat]

Biggest BLM change I want is Aetherial Manipulation getting the healer range treatment. Massive buff to the range you can zip to party members. Cuz man is it awful to think "I'll just greed one more cast and Manip for this mechanic" only to find the party is now out of range and now you're on the ground.

Suppose too this would need to be paired with a buff to Between the Lines for getting back.

[Llugen]

Wouldn't mind seeing the timer extend from 15 to 20 seconds, think that's one of the big things people trying out blm get put off by and would make it a bit easier to get into the job while not hurting people who main blm at all neither.

That or at least freeze the timer during dumb cutscenes or w/e in bossfights, so stupid you have to start all over again because of something you have no control over, all other jobs get to keep their gauges, why not blm?

And make umbral soul a lvl 10 spell or something, it just plain sucks doing any content below lvl 76 where you can only juggle your 1 stacks over and over between fights.

Umbral soul probably doesn't need to be level 10 (I think it's good that BLM starts by transpose juggling and then gets more powerful as the job progresses) but it should at LEAST be pre-70, not getting to use it in ultimate feelsbad, never mind that so much of BLM damage is tied up in Xenoglossy.

I think the 15 second timer is plenty, but I wouldn't mind a "stasis" GCD that basically works like Anatman until you press either Fire III or Blizzard III (or Fire II or Blizzard II I guess) on like a 30-60s cooldown. The Catch™ is that this stasis GCD would need to work even through movement or cutscene triggers, and I don't think Anatman even does that.

So the way I envision it, it would work like a mixture between Anatman and Perfect Balance "finisher" where it locks your current timer and buffs, but ONLY B3/F3 or B2/F2 are lit up to use. If you don't use one of those (applying the fast cast if the AF/UI was level III), then you lose it. And yeah something like 60s CD would probably be fine.