Quote Originally Posted by Arphene View Post
I just don't understand their train of thought on this, honestly. Everyone agreed EW was the best version of BLM and they listened to that feedback and... decided to butcher it?
It is the best version, sure, but that doesn't mean it was perfect. It is certainly true that the mana ticks can be unpredictable (for example, you might be able to use Thunder immediately in ice phase, or you might have to wait a GCD) and this just cleans it up so you know exactly what you have to do.

They obviously want to move away from DoT-gameplay so that change most likely wasn't related to whether it was good in EW or not. And obviously they want to give it the standard 2 minute burst.
Casuals still won't play the job because at the end of the day it still is BLM.
Maybe. I think new players get up through level 50, but after that I stop seeing them using this job. They probably get overwhelmed, die a lot due to the cast times if they can even work out which of their fire and ice spells to press, and see a free Red Mage and just switch to that.

But I think what might actually help is the new gauge. It shows fire slots that you are meant to fill so the gauge will clearly reflect if you're doing it correctly or not, whereas in Endwalker it's only communicated you're doing it right by the fact you haven't let Astral/Umbral Ice expire and by MP management going down to 0, regenerating, repeat and I would expect odd people get stuck here and either just stay in Umbral Ice or can't figure out why they run out of MP or let Astral Fire expire. That is when they're not dying to the cast times.
Hardcore players will now drop the job because they've killed off non-standard and most optimization you could do, making it less enjoyable for them.
I think they said they wanted to make it possible to express skill in other ways in the patches, but I doubt this will be damage-related necessarily, or not in a way that means a gap of 20% damage. Trouble is all these intentions are going to take time (the next 2 and a half years into 8.0), so some players will probably want to check back at what's changed then.