SE, the 7.0 BLM changes will not increase engagement. They are completely-pointless.

[Ferrinus]

I don't think the changes are meant to make new players previously intimidated flood into the job, precisely because the astral/umbral timers (which I like) are being kept and in fact being made more strict in some ways (messing up your astral phase such that you cast less than the absolute maximum possible F4s is now even more punishing than before).

I think the changes have three main goals: first, they streamline and make automatic things that were effectively already foregone conclusions/almost totally deterministic. This is why you just get a free thunder cast per phase for a predictable amount of damage: all the buffs to Sharpcast and the difference between the value of Firestarter and Thundercloud meant that you were already just throwing a free, instant Thunder every ~30s, which Sharpcast's recharge timer lined up with, and if you weren't doing that you were probably losing damage, so the actual utility of even having a separate Sharpcast button was highly marginal. It wasn't zero, but it might not have outweighed the hotbar space, weaving, and just straight-up button pressing it demanded.

Second, the changes make it some combination of rewarding and mandatory to actually use all your core spells. "Nonstandard" rotation wasn't used because it was weird or quirky or personally expressive; it was used because, by only casting strong spells and not weak spells, you could deal more damage per second. However, for what you might call the average or midcore BLM player (and what I would call myself; I'm good enough to do Savage raiding but I'm not at the absolute bleeding edge of the job), someone who likes the feel of the cast times and timers but doesn't want to install third party tools to keep perfect track of the server's mana tick and therefore know when or when not to make certain shortcuts and substitutions, it feels bad to know that casting Blizzard 4 or otherwise using your spells in an intuitive way is secretly only the second- or third-best thing you could be doing, and in fact that you're a chump for swapping to UI3 by casting B3 when you could instead be cobbling together something jankier out of Transpose, Lucid, and Paradox. So, they've firmed up the utility or the necessity of the spells that the very best players were skipping, so that no one actually wanted to skip those spells, because otherwise why are they there?

Third, freedom from the mana tick is a reward in and of itself, because especially if you itemized for spellspeed even an average player like me could find themselves depending on or getting screwed by the server's 3 second timer. I don't know all the nonstandard tricks but I do know to Transpose-Firestarter out of Umbral, and it's very common to wind up in a situation where that may or may not be a good idea purely based on when I'm getting my next lump sum of regen. As well, at the end of EW, it was entirely possible for me to be in leylines, do B3-B4-Paradox-F3, and discover that I only had 60% of my MP bar at the start of my next astral cycle. Awful!

There's some stuff I don't like about the DT changes - I want to cast Paradox in both my ice and fire phase, I want to use High Fire II for damage and not just for phase change, I want some kind of fun proc, time, or meter-based reward for using thunder spells that has a big up-front damage number - but I've been a BLM main since I started playing in ARR and I largely appreciate all the changes being made here. On top of everything else, I'm really looking forward to the button consolidation; as soon as I saw how various iterations of the PvP BLM worked, I was always annoyed that I couldn't have any of my pairs of PvE mirrored, phase-exclusive spells on a single, auto-swapping hotkey.

[HikariKurosawa]

Nah. Standardization is better. Why would I play BLM in the content I care about when I am unwilling to play non-standard and will therefore be doing less than I should be doing relative to if I were to pick another job? It's a team game and that's called letting the team down for selfish reasons. It makes me feel things like "Black mage isn't really the job for me. I really want to play it, but mechanically I have gripes with the playstyle at the limit so I shouldn't play it. I am not a true black mage" and that's just poor design.

If you can't adapt to the changes, maybe you're the one who isn't a true black mage. The job is about maximum explosions, not esoteric math and addon abuse to track mp ticks.

[wildvenonat]

Third, freedom from the mana tick is a reward in and of itself, because especially if you itemized for spellspeed even an average player like me could find themselves depending on or getting screwed by the server's 3 second timer. I don't know all the nonstandard tricks but I do know to Transpose-Firestarter out of Umbral, and it's very common to wind up in a situation where that may or may not be a good idea purely based on when I'm getting my next lump sum of regen. As well, at the end of EW, it was entirely possible for me to be in leylines, do B3-B4-Paradox-F3, and discover that I only had 60% of my MP bar at the start of my next astral cycle. Awful!

The biggest problem with the proposed DT changes, though, is they did not free BLM from the mana tick. Blizzard II requires a target these days. Umbral Soul is level 76. You need to use an Ice action, specifically, during Ice in order to restore your MP, and there is no free Ice action or even something you can swiftcast if the boss has gone untargetable for ten seconds and you're in ARR, HW, or Stormblood content.

I agree that some of the MP changes at high level are probably for the best, but they didn't consider that an entire half of the game now has far less access to MP regen as BLM than they do now, with simply using Transpose while you run around or do mechanics.

[LilimoLimomo]

BLM main here. Overall I like the sound of the Dawntrail BLM changes, and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on them.

I don't think there's a problem with lots of players not wanting to play BLM; in fact, I genuinely think it's a good thing. BLM offers a very specific experience that no other job in the game comes close to offering; its timers and long cast times result in an engaging experience that I simply can't get with other classes. Which is to say, BLM serves the needs of a specific subset of FF14 players, and without BLM's unique design those players would not be served.

I honestly think more jobs should do that. Because overall, there's a lot of homogeneity in FF14's job design. If you like one job, you're probably going to like a lot of them. But if you dislike one job, there's a good chance your needs might not be served by any of them. And that's a bummer. I want more people to be able to find at least one job that really feels like "home" for them, because I want more people to play and enjoy the game. I don't want every job to be to my tastes. I greatly dislike playing Monk, but I'm super glad that it's in the game for the people who want the experience it provides. If it weren't in the game, those people would be having a worse time.

So in short, BLM changes seem good, and I would like to see more jobs get less homogeneous so that the FF14 community can grow and thrive.

[Ferrinus]

The biggest problem with the proposed DT changes, though, is they did not free BLM from the mana tick. Blizzard II requires a target these days. Umbral Soul is level 76. You need to use an Ice action, specifically, during Ice in order to restore your MP, and there is no free Ice action or even something you can swiftcast if the boss has gone untargetable for ten seconds and you're in ARR, HW, or Stormblood content.

I agree that some of the MP changes at high level are probably for the best, but they didn't consider that an entire half of the game now has far less access to MP regen as BLM than they do now, with simply using Transpose while you run around or do mechanics.

I think you're right that Umbral Soul or an equivalent should come earlier (a trait that gives you old-school super regen out of combat, say) but I don't think the current DT design is leaving us at the "mercy" per se. Like, if we're fighting a Stormblood boss that jumps away when we have 1600mp left, and we curse and transpose to umbral, and then just sit there until the boss comes back and we have 1800 mp thanks to natural regen... well, fine, we cast Blizz3 and Blizz4 and get back into it. It's less that we lose something to the randomness of mana ticks and more that we don't have any no-target resource builder yet.

[Kissune]

Nah. Standardization is better. Why would I play BLM in the content I care about when I am unwilling to play non-standard and will therefore be doing less than I should be doing relative to if I were to pick another job? It's a team game and that's called letting the team down for selfish reasons. It makes me feel things like "Black mage isn't really the job for me. I really want to play it, but mechanically I have gripes with the playstyle at the limit so I shouldn't play it. I am not a true black mage" and that's just poor design.

If you can't adapt to the changes, maybe you're the one who isn't a true black mage. The job is about maximum explosions, not esoteric math and addon abuse to track mp ticks.

Because you could clear any content you wanted with standard black mage? I've had black mages in basically every static I've been in, and only a couple of them used non-standard. Never had a problem with DPS checks, even on heavy movement fights.

My idea of fun isn't just acting out the square enix mandated rotation over and over that doesn't change in any fight. It's figuring out the best way to do damage with the tools I'm given, and adapting to each obstacle by breaking the rotation to optimize it. It's why I liked monk in DSR. All the downtime let me do some crazy stuff, and it was satisfying. Now? That might as well be gone.

I didn't really like non-standard, and I wasn't good at it, so I didn't do it. Did I think of myself as less of a player for it? Did I think I didn't deserve to clear? Of course not. I just... played the class the standard way. These changes don't really affect me, but I can emphasize a lot with losing an interesting playstyle for the sake of simplicity, and I don't want black mage to lose it. If anything they should just make any spell while in UI give mana, not just ice spells. It would play very similar but also not rely on mana ticks.

Instead, I think you are a very bitter person who was upset that something was too hard but slightly more optimal, and is now cheering on that it's gone. All because you weren't satisfied playing the game as it was intended and being able to clear anything you put your mind to. If you were failing dps checks bc you weren't doing non-standard, it was probably a skill issue related to yourself or your party. DPS checks were designed with standard in mind... So if you weren't failing them, why do you care?

...Another thing, you wanna call people out for third party abuse, and yet somehow you know how much dps you were doing on BLM compared to a non-standard player? Curious.

[Ramiee]

God when the mana regen change was annouced i meekishly said maybe it won't be that bad and we just need to see it in action. Then the media tour released and pretty much any tiny amount of defense I had for it on the forums got destroyed, I should of learnt my lesson. My fav classes went from SCH to SMN to PLD to BLM i really am cursed.

[Ramiee]

Nah. Standardization is better. Why would I play BLM in the content I care about when I am unwilling to play non-standard and will therefore be doing less than I should be doing relative to if I were to pick another job? It's a team game and that's called letting the team down for selfish reasons. It makes me feel things like "Black mage isn't really the job for me. I really want to play it, but mechanically I have gripes with the playstyle at the limit so I shouldn't play it. I am not a true black mage" and that's just poor design.

If you can't adapt to the changes, maybe you're the one who isn't a true black mage. The job is about maximum explosions, not esoteric math and addon abuse to track mp ticks.

Im sorry did non-standard existing force you into doing it?
We didn't point a gun to your head and say you have to play non-standard, there was no party finder conditions that said "BLM Non only" or anything like that. Only speedrunning or parsing raid groups would complain about you not doing the highest possible damage you can do and at that point its YOUR fault for surronding yourself with people who don't want you to play how you want to play. Im not a parser in fact I hate it and any record of my parses are recorded by other people and I infact played non-standard because I enjoyed having flexibity and adaptation in my rotation. So please explain to me why me losing my option to play the same Job as you in a different way effects you, when both ways are perfectly viable to do the most important thing clear the content.

[MagiusNecros]

It's a team game

Says the Samurai.

[Galvuu]

So in short, BLM changes seem good, and I would like to see more jobs get less homogeneous so that the FF14 community can grow and thrive.

The changes will literally turn BLM into a builder > spender job like any other dps (build Flare Star, spend Flare Star, repeat)... it will make it more homogeneous. It even lost all dot management since you just auto-apply it on stance swap (none of the casters have it now). How can you say, in the same breath, "BLM changes good" and "I want to see less homogenization"?...