Frustrations with BLM immobility

[JacobNewblood]

They should disappear manually by using Transpose and they should follow you when using Aetherial Manipulation.

This would be horrid for transpose lines, cause at times its optimal to use transpose within an rotation,

In general I can see where you come from, but BLM is most mobile out of a majority of the casters for the reason being they can use it when they deem so.

RDM while every other spell is instant, still has to cast, and melee combo requires melee and you can store up to two, but you cant hold 2 cause you'll overcap

SMN while having mainly instants within its rotation, you do have to hardcast eventualy, like BLM, and there isnt any way to skirt around it.

For example in p10s, a mech called shadowed messengers summons two adds so i need to be on my side to avoid then solve the following mech. as a BLM my Leylines come up then so I pop them. then right as they end i use a xeno or thundercloud and Zooom over to my light party, then i use another instant and cast triplecast and solve the rest no problem. The thing is, I had to learn the fight and learn what, where, and how I can use my tools to my benefit. Thats what fun about BLM, imo.

others here have shared great insight as well!

[OgruMogru]

I believe although not really needed that making AF paradox an insta cast may help people feel more comfortable with keeping their AF timer running whilst dealing mechanics. It would allow for more weaving opportunities too. I at least feel like this is a reasonable and realistic change that can benefit both people not yet confident enough and people who are skilled enough to capitalize on the opportunities it would provide.

[Taranok]

Welcome to Meleewalker, where the balance between job difficulty and fight difficulty has completely fallen off a cliff so now they need to make you run zigzag patterns across the arena every 30 seconds to avoid instant wipe mechanics, just so you don't turn your brain off.

Thanks. I hate it.

"BLM Immobility"


Triple cast allowing 2x 3 spells to be cast on the move.

Aetherial Manipulation basically being an Icarus on a shorter cd.


> Immobile.

So, speaking from my experience in dragonsong reprise, there is literally no amount of movement BLM has that can help them clear phase 6 and phase 7 of that fight comfortably. I've heard this fight is especially friendly to RDM, and I do agree with this sentiment somewhat, but this is in no way enough movement to handle the mechanics the devs are actually designing. Nevermind the fact that the class has to choose between a not-insignificant DPS steroid and being able to play the class like an awful ranged phys.

And if anyone dares to mention 'nonstandard rotations,' I will point to that as proof of just how badly designed the class actually is, because people shouldn't need to play the class in clearly unintended ways to be able to play the class effectively.

I believe although not really needed that making AF paradox an insta cast may help people feel more comfortable with keeping their AF timer running whilst dealing mechanics. It would allow for more weaving opportunities too. I at least feel like this is a reasonable and realistic change that can benefit both people not yet confident enough and people who are skilled enough to capitalize on the opportunities it would provide.

I feel this is somewhat treating the symptom and not the disease. The AF/UI timers are a bad design practice of the class, and them being used to structure the classes rotation leads to untold confusion in new players of the class. Black Mage needs a rework. Not a summoner-level rework, but a monk-level rework. And for the first time in the history of the game, the class is played to such a low degree the devs might finally give it the attention it deserves to not only breath life into its playstyle, but to also bring it up to the same standards all other classes are built with right now. Well, mostly. Dragoon, Ast, Bard, and Ninja all have something to say on the matter as well, but most classes aren't so badly designed that players still struggle to deal with design elements that have been on the class for over a decade.

I digress.

[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.

[Hasrat]

Aetherial Manipulation basically being an Icarus on a shorter cd.

I love knowing I have the tool and can usually greed an extra cast or whatever... but damn do I hate discovering the party as moved out of range and now I'm screwed with no target to jump to. Or I end up selecting somebody that's already dead. Or worse, someone just not doing mechanics and I get caught anyway.

More range on AM wouldn't go amiss at all. Maybe solve the first problem.. not so much the other two.

[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.

[Nizzi]

Black Mage needs a rework. Not a summoner-level rework, but a monk-level rework. And for the first time in the history of the game, the class is played to such a low degree the devs might finally give it the attention it deserves to not only breath life into its playstyle, but to also bring it up to the same standards all other classes are built with right now.

People still aren't playing Monk even after its numerous amounts of reworks. If your argument hinges on "nobody is playing it, that's proof it needs a rework!" then you're going to get the Summoner-tier rework and you're going to enjoy it. In which case, have fun I guess when they do that?

[Taranok]

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.

Yes, I do believe it, because they've done it in the past. I also believe that if they made a new caster in BLM's general playstyle, BLM's population would completely plummet into the dirt.

The only actually bad reworks in the ShB+ era were Summoner being turned into a ranged phys instead of a caster, with fight design that is extremely hostile to everyone with a cast bar, oddly including samurai, reaper, and to an extent Summoner. Where SMN's advantage over everyone else is that it can choose exactly where to place its cast bars within a relatively large amount of wiggle room, and can swiftcast out of 1 of them every minute anyways.

While I don't play every job for progression, I do regularly dust off and bring out every job to try, see what they're like, find out their pain points and etc, and there's only a handful I flat out refuse to play. Most of the reasons are due to button bloat issues and clunky design. BLM is the only one where the game feels like it wants BLM mains to quit.

People still aren't playing Monk even after its numerous amounts of reworks. If your argument hinges on "nobody is playing it, that's proof it needs a rework!" then you're going to get the Summoner-tier rework and you're going to enjoy it. In which case, have fun I guess when they do that?

Monk is hard to pin down exactly why, since its rework is actually good and legitimately brought up its numbers from where they were, but I'd suspect it's directly related to a bad opening rotation and incredibly stale animations on a somewhat 'meh' aesthetic moreso than anything else. Monk just isn't a popular aesthetic. It also has an overcapping problem for chakra that the devs didn't bother addressing for some reason, and has direct competition with Samurai and Reaper, which are extremely popular aesthetics with similar rotation design and without dragoon syndrome on the opener.

[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?