Quote Originally Posted by Reinhardt_Azureheim View Post
It's in the state of sharing a dps slot with the Caster that you can teach a lab rat to play that still produces acceptable DPS numbers at lv90 and borderline broken numbers below 80.

The reason why BLM is in such a state is because people will go the path of least resistence when having to learn a Caster job by choosing the Caster that essentially doesn't cast.

If melee wasnt so dominant that you do double melee or bust AND if Summoner wasn't disrespecting the role by essentially being a physical Ranged DPS in caster gear and actually had a modicum of casting let alone skill requirement, you'd see a better balance between Caster jobs. It would also help if they axed Resurrection and Verraise since that heavily skews reason to pick the other two over Black Mage.

BLM has issues, but none of them big enough to be "the reason" why participation is low.
This would only be true if people didn't regularly also play jobs that were hard. Samurai is not an easy class to play but is overwhelmingly the most popular melee. Back in stormblood, when it was arguably the hardest DPS class to play (tied with BLM,) it was also overwhelmingly the most positive.

By the end-cycle of a patch, parse groups tend to bias higher-DPS jobs because bored people like getting big numbers. Classes people favor for parsing tend to be used a lot more. We're not seeing jumps in play rates of BLM, like we did in Shadowbringers. The class is, simply, not being chosen or played right now except by the few die hards. It's not as dire as Machinist during stormblood as it's hard to break a class that badly, but it is very reminiscent of Machinist in Stormblood in that something is fundamentally broken.

It being hard doesn't explain people not playing it, since even with the requirement of being hard, people still played it in savage in SB and ShB. Hell, I saw it even in HW when its gameplay could best be described as broken by design.

The only thing that accurately describes the play rate of BLM is that the class doesn't fit the game the devs are making. The reason why I further bring this up is because both BLM and RDM have seen massive drops in play rates going from ShB into EW. And you can't use the argument that RDM is somehow a hard class to play, because it's truly not.