Frustrations with BLM immobility

[OgruMogru]

Hard disagree about the timers being bad design. What is it about the timers you think need adjusting? Or what would you propose to replace that aspect of their gameplay? I'm curious because I have really fond memories of HW blm where we had TWO timers to juggle so the current iteration already feel streamlined to me. I don't want the job changed to appease people that do not play the job. They should absolutely do more to communicate to players how to learn a job but unifying every job to some nebulous standard fit has already caused way more problems for job identity health than it has solved. See tanks, healers, 2 min meta dogma.

[Taranok]

Hard disagree about the timers being bad design. What is it about the timers you think need adjusting? Or what would you propose to replace that aspect of their gameplay? I'm curious because I have really fond memories of HW blm where we had TWO timers to juggle so the current iteration already feel streamlined to me. I don't want the job changed to appease people that do not play the job. They should absolutely do more to communicate to players how to learn a job but unifying every job to some nebulous standard fit has already caused way more problems for job identity health than it has solved. See tanks, healers, 2 min meta dogma.

Alright, starting from the top.

• It is an old ARR design element that has been coopted into a primary structural mechanic.
• As an ARR element, it almost exclusively existed to buff fire 1 damage/enable ice regen.
• Because of complaints about cDPS having 'static' rotations (my speculation,) the devs wanted to add rotations to the classes moving into Heavensward. Summoner got the very badly designed (for the time) Dreadwyrm Trance, Black Mage got fire 4 at level 60.
• The timers at this point were coopted into structuring the AF3 rotation. It is why you don't cast fire 4s, effectively. Note, my complaint with timers is not that it forces you to cast something other than fire 4. The standard rotation as of EW would have you cast 6 fire 4s, one paradox, and 1 despair regardless of timers existing, because paradox is higher DPS than fire 4.
• Going back even to ARR design, but also including level 60+, people still don't understand how fire 3 and fire 4 fit into the rotation, with fresh to 35 black mages regularly chaincasting fire 3, and fresh to 60 either chaincasting fire 4 until they drop AF/UI timers, or sometimes never casting fire 4 outright, because of the timers. Yes, I have seen people like this and told them they should be using fire 4. This translates into: "Players don't understand how the rotation works, and timers as a structural mechanic fail to convey the intended rotation to players." This by itself is worth completely throwing them out.
• The timers eat up a significant amount of bar space. Transpose and Umbral Soul are mechanically redundant. No, I don't count GCD vs oGCD in this case. Blizzard 1/fire 1 are redundant. Fire 4 and blizzard 4 are redundant. Fire 3 and blizzard 3 are only not redundant because you use them to swap between rotations and start up the rotation, at least post 35 (another problem of the class.) Freeze could be deleted and no one would actually care provided blizzard 2 had freezes functionality.
• The timers restrict what the devs can actually add to the class. There's a reason why the core rotation hasn't seen anything significant added since HW's launch. It got despair, polyglot, and paradox on the UI rotation, that is it.
• Because the timers are such a poorly designed structural component, it adds in 'nonstandard' rotations like hypermeme, which are in many respects mandatory to learn now. These all represent significant design problems by themselves as it becomes very difficult or impossible to design a class when people use nonstandard rotation. See summoner in the HW era. The devs even keep trying to fix it, yet keep failing.

Timers massively ramp up the skill floor of the class, don't touch the skill ceiling at all beyond meme rotations thatr shouldn't exist, make the class exceedingly difficult to understand, nevermind play, especially in high-end content like savages and ultimates, restricts future job growth, eat up a ton of bar space, and especially now, make the class so unapproachably difficult to play that the playerbase is actually abandoning the class. Or, to put it another way, the timers are the reason that black mage's DPS spread is "Almost literally the worst DPS to bring," all the way to "Literally the best DPS to bring." Having a range in numbers that large is, by itself, awful design since it means the skill ceiling is very far apart from the skill floor, and the skill floor itself is also astronomically high.

Just like Monk lost greased lightning, but gained masterful blitz, Black Mage needs to lose timers and gain an actual structure with a core class gimmick that isn't something that other classes should also enjoy.

Timers are a mechanic that date all the way back to 2.0, and it's time they were thrown out and replaced, with the class brought up to the same standard as other jobs.

[fulminating]

Just like Monk lost greased lightning, but gained masterful blitz, Black Mage needs to lose timers and gain an actual structure with a core class gimmick that isn't something that other classes should also enjoy.

Timers are a mechanic that date all the way back to 2.0, and it's time they were thrown out and replaced, with the class brought up to the same standard as other jobs.

Do you honestly believe SE is capable of that?

By the by, old and bad are not synonyms in the same way new does not mean good.

[OgruMogru]

Alright, starting from the top.

I'd argue the timers have not been coopted, they were developed and iterated on. You are neglecting to mention the inclusion of Enochian at lvl 60 in HW which like I said added another 30s timer that refreshed upon casting B4 minus 5 seconds of duration as the refreshes were reapplied 30, 25, 20, 15 etc etc The only problem with this system at the time, imo, is that once the timer ran out you were locked out of using F4 and B4 until it was off cooldown. This went on to be removed/relegated to a passive in later patches. While I miss it, it was probably a good thing for people struggling with the job but it's not just some clumsy holdover from ARR. If anything the fact that the timer gimmick has endured for so long is a testament to it's success. The devs are not shy about removing skills or outright gutting jobs on a whim and if there was ever any doubt about the core Af/UI timer it would have been nuked just like the Enochian timer was. They even doubled down on the timers in SB and again in Shb with the addition of the polyglot stacks [foul in SB, Xeno in Shb] with each charge taking 30seconds to generate requiring the AF/UI to be kept running consistently.

Frankly the fact people can't get the basic rotation correct is user error. Like I said above the game could do a better job in explaining how ALL classes work but that doesn't mean everything should be doomed to braindead gameplay. Some amount of non-standard lines are clearly the expected way to play - Yoshi P was using transpose lines in the most recent liveletter in the new trial preview. Using one meme rotation that is completely impractical in most scenarios and requires way more attention than watching a 15 second timer is meaningless, imo, and is a dishonest representation of how Blm optimization actually plays out. Blm is the only job left in the game with such a high ceiling for optimization and that is a good thing, more jobs should have that. We have been given a lot of tools to compensate for the seeming difficulty of the job - insta casts, longer procs, 2 charges of triple and sharp - I'm sure there are other things they could do too like making AF para instant so people that *want* to try to keep their timers up have more breathing room. Or adjusting the way we regain mana in UI phase so we aren't at the mercy of server ticks. Sorry if you're unwilling to utilize or just plain do not appreciate transpose and umbral hearts - I do not consider them superfluous actions at all but umbral hearts could do with "locking" after 3 uses or something so it's not a spam fest during downtime. They have limited applications but they are still really useful. The reason people have been "abandoning the class" is because people just herd into the newest, shiniest or easiest option. This time it's Smn and next exp all those fairweather babies will flitter off to the newest shiniest toy.

What do you think should replace timers? not just a cop out "something better and new" like, mechanically, what would you like to see instead of timers that would interact meaningfully with their kit?