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

[LilimoLimomo]

...

I've re-read your post several times in an earnest attempt at understanding your perspective. There were times when I felt like maybe I was close to getting it, but then I'd realize I didn't. And after several reads, I think this is where we see things differently:

In the DT BLM you cannot do any of these things, because the moment you do not use a Fire IV (aka, use your builder) or don't cast Flare Star (aka, your spender) you permanently lose that one Flare Star.

I genuinely don't see how this is different than any other spell: if you don't cast it, you don't get the good results it provides. Whether that's damage or tokens or Umbral Ice or something else, not casting the spell means you don't get the thing. So I'm not seeing how Fire IV's tokens are different. It seems like you tried to guide me towards understanding how they were different with this...

you can say that if you overwrite a Xenoglossy right now you're doing the "same" (didn't spend the Xeno) or if you just skip your entire AF (like, go into Fire and immediately cast Despair) you're also wasting the "MP you built", but the fact that how you build and spend those resources, when you do that and in what order you do it is so free-form is why BLM doesn't fit that pattern at all (it fits it in the loosest sense possible).

...but I don't follow. How are Fire IV and Flare Star dictating when and in what order you do things in a way that other BLM spells aren't? And maybe it will help if I explain the way I'm thinking about it, which might be different than the way you do.

It seems to me like I'll be playing my Fire phase, and if I cast Fire IV then I'll get a token, and if I cast something like Xenoglossy then I won't. And unless there's something I'm missing, I can interweave casting those different spells in any permutation that I want, toss in a Fire whenever I want to sustain my Astral Fire, etc. Naturally, when I've built up 6 doodads, I probably want to unload with Flare Star, but I don't see how that's meaningfully different than unloading a Xenoglossy when my Polyglots are full. It still feels free form to me, in that the context of the actual fight plays a large role in determining what spell will seem best to cast at any given moment.

Is the issue that when you get that last token, you feel like you have to immediately cast Flare Star before you cast another Fire IV, and that's a meaningfully shorter window than the 30 seconds it takes to build a Polyglot? This is my best guess at trying to understand what you're trying to communicate, but I'm not sure if that's what you're trying to say or not.

While I don't understand, I'm genuinely interested in understanding. So I'm hoping this explanation of my thought process might help you to see where we're not seeing eye-to-eye so you can share it with me.

[Ramiee]

I don't follow. How are Fire IV and Flare Star dictating when and in what order you do things in a way that other BLM builds aren't? And maybe it will help if I explain the way I'm thinking about it, which might be different than the way you do.

The main difference then before is that the main spender (Xenoglossy/Foul) outside of just straight up using your Fire spells was connected to simply keeping Astral/Umbral up. It seems to be that Fire IV's tokens that give you Flare star forces you to linearly use as many Fire IVs to get it then use it and switching back to ice form drops this making you lose potency. This along with the MP regen changes has made it that switching to Ice phase and dropping Flare star fails your rotation ergo destroying non-standard rotation where you'd use tranpose to switch to Ice for certain reasons.

It makes it similar to how other Jobs in the game make you do a combo rotation that gives resources (Sen for example) to use on a spender (Midare Setsugekka) when previously BLM didn't have anything like this. Instead you were limited to using Despair or Flare at the end of your "combo" because your MP was running out. So you could technically switch to Ice to regain Mana and skip Despair or do Despair early even if you have enough mana to spend on extra Fire IVs.
But now because we have Flare Star we are forced to do as many Fire IVs as we can to get Flare Star as our finisher after Despair removing the decision making from it.

[Ferrinus]

The main difference then before is that the main spender (Xenoglossy/Foul) outside of just straight up using your Fire spells was connected to simply keeping Astral/Umbral up. It seems to be that Fire IV's tokens that give you Flare star forces you to linearly use as many Fire IVs to get it then use it and switching back to ice form drops this making you lose potency. This along with the MP regen changes has made it that switching to Ice phase and dropping Flare star fails your rotation ergo destroying non-standard rotation where you'd use tranpose to switch to Ice for certain reasons.

It makes it similar to how other Jobs in the game make you do a combo rotation that gives resources (Sen for example) to use on a spender (Midare Setsugekka) when previously BLM didn't have anything like this. Instead you were limited to using Despair or Flare at the end of your "combo" because your MP was running out. So you could technically switch to Ice to regain Mana and skip Despair or do Despair early even if you have enough mana to spend on extra Fire IVs.
But now because we have Flare Star we are forced to do as many Fire IVs as we can to get Flare Star as our finisher after Despair removing the decision making from it.

Well, Fire IV has always been BLM's single hardest-hitting and spammable spell, so the goal (on single target, anyway) has always been to maximize the density of Fire IV (and Despair) of casts in the total list of spell casts populated over the course of a fight. Even if Flare Star didn't exist, you'd still be trying your hardest to execute an astral cycle consisting of six F4s, one Paradox, and one Despair every time you can, with an awareness of an imminent boss jump/death just leading you to cut your astral cycle short by casting your Despair early.

Various transpose/lucid/paradox tricks ultimately amounted to purging as many weaker-than-F4 spells from the rotation as possible, but if by some miracle you could still cast six F4s per astral cycle while also skipping B3, B4, F3, whatever, that's what you'd do, because it would further increase your F4 density. So it's just generally true that you always want more F4s, and lose out on damage if you can't do all your F4s. DT knows what the maximum number of F4s is and rewards you for hitting it, which is a bit of a win more mechanic, but doesn't really change your basic goals in so doing.

[Galvuu]

Well, Fire IV has always been BLM's single hardest-hitting and spammable spell, so the goal (on single target, anyway) has always been to maximize the density of Fire IV (and Despair) of casts in the total list of spell casts populated over the course of a fight. Even if Flare Star didn't exist, you'd still be trying your hardest to execute an astral cycle consisting of six F4s, one Paradox, and one Despair every time you can, with an awareness of an imminent boss jump/death just leading you to cut your astral cycle short by casting your Despair early.

Various transpose/lucid/paradox tricks ultimately amounted to purging as many weaker-than-F4 spells from the rotation as possible, but if by some miracle you could still cast six F4s per astral cycle while also skipping B3, B4, F3, whatever, that's what you'd do, because it would further increase your F4 density. So it's just generally true that you always want more F4s, and lose out on damage if you can't do all your F4s. DT knows what the maximum number of F4s is and rewards you for hitting it, which is a bit of a win more mechanic, but doesn't really change your basic goals in so doing.

This is a simplified view of the overall problem, in fairness. The goal, in reality, at least for EW, is the following: "how can I maximize the average potency of my gcd?". This includes many aspects- maximizing your powerful spells like Despair, Paradox and Fire IV is one. But so is keeping Thunder rolling without overwriting it and using your instant casting ogcds (Swiftcast and Triple) on Despair as much as possible (since it's a slower cast and doing so grants you more potency per second).
In addition to these, another aspect of this is "how can I minimize the number of weak spells in my gcds?" and "how can I keep perfect uptime at all times?". And it's these last two that make DT BLM problematic. For the former, they're attempting to force you to use them. For the latter is where the "rigidity" aspect comes into play. It's just like the hypothetical I gave you exemplifies- if movement, or a mechanic, or downtime, or just an honest mistake forces you to lose one of your "builder gcds" (your Fire IV), then you lose a very powerful gcd (Flare Star) for the whole fight, with no way of recovering it. It's like losing a Xenoglossy for not casting 6xFire IV. This is the "builder>spender" pattern. People have given good examples and thoughts on this in other posts.
It's really thinking about the problem a bit differently (and more completely) than just "I wanna cast as many Fire IV/Despair as possible".

(Oh my God, I replied to the wrong post... I'm sorry. I'll leave it up because I think the info is still useful...)

[Ferrinus]

It's just like the hypothetical I gave you exemplifies- if movement, or a mechanic, or downtime, or just an honest forces you to lose one of your "builder gcds" (your Fire IV), then you lose a very powerful gcd (Flare Star) for the whole fight, with no way of recovering it. It's like losing a Xenoglossy for not casting 6xFire IV. This is the "builder>spender" pattern. People have given good examples and thoughts on this in other posts.
It's really thinking about the problem a bit differently (and more completely) than just "I wanna cast as many Fire IV/Despair as possible".

I get what you're saying, but if a movement, mechanic, or downtime forced you to lose a Fire IV cast (or, more generally, a high-potency rather than low-potency GCD), then you have also lost that cast forever, and are never getting that potency difference back. In DT, that mistake denies you a Despair Flare Star (oops!), so it feels proportionately worse to make. On the other hand, in DT, that mistake is less likely to happen, because your astral cycle is more flexible; every spell that isn't F4/Despair/Flare Star is an instant cast, and now two of those instant casts rather than one can refresh your Astral Fire. Personally I wouldn't mind if you could cast a lower-damage Flare Star with less than the maximum number of astral hearts or whatever they're called (like maybe Flare Star is only castable at 0 mp, and its damage scales with astral hearts accrued as long as you've got a minimum of 3, or something) but even the maximally-harsh Flare Star design in the media tour doesn't change our basic decision-making. Flare Star is a reward more so than an organizing principle because you'd still be playing the same way at level 89.

Now, obviously, the reason you'd be playing the same way is that F3 and B3 have been significantly buffed (since they now do x1.0 rather than x0.7 listed damage under normal use conditions) and B4 has been rendered absolutely crucial to single target. It's simply no longer a defensible choice to enter Astral Fire at less than intensity III with less than 10,000 MP and fewer than 3 Umbral Hearts. But that's the actual dagger in the heart of nonstandard; Flare Star is just something the death of nonstandard enables the devs to add.

[Galvuu]

I get what you're saying, but if a movement, mechanic, or downtime forced you to lose a Fire IV cast (or, more generally, a high-potency rather than low-potency GCD), then you have also lost that cast forever, and are never getting that potency difference back. In DT, that mistake denies you a Despair, so it feels proportionately worse to make.

(Emphasis mine, but I think you meant "Flare Star" there)
The heart of what you're saying is technically true, but in EW you can easily recoup from a "lost" Fire IV (that's the whole reason why you might want to cut your AF short on purpose). Usually, when you do a line like 4xF4>Despair many times, the proportion of Paradox and Despair casts overall increases (well, it depends on the phase/fight duration, but in general this is true). In fact, people sometimes do that to maximize Despairs on short phases. My point here is that the Fire IV you "lost forever" usually means an extra Paradox or Despair when you tally your gcds at the end of that phase. That might be a small potency loss (since Fire IV is more potency than Paradox, and usually you lose 2 Fire IVs for one Despair+Paradox), but it's usually not a big deal.
In DT, since you also lose the Flare Star, it is a pretty big deal. At the end of the day, you can only fit N gcds in a phase, and in EW, if you know what you're doing, the lost Fire IVs will correspond to some combination of procs, Paradoxes and Despairs.
In DT, if this happens, you just lose a Flare Star, period.

I agree with your other general sentiment that this kinda thing should be infrequent in DT... but if they ported TOP p6 as is to a random DT fight, this would definitely become a serious problem. Even if, by burning your ever resource, you managed to keep perfect uptime, there's no way you'd have the luxury of stockpiling Xenos for your 2min burst and force Triple to be used on Despairs/Flare Stars for maximum pps gain. This was already a big issue in some reopeners for EW fights...

[Ferrinus]

(Emphasis mine, but I think you meant "Flare Star" there)
The heart of what you're saying is technically true, but in EW you can easily recoup from a "lost" Fire IV (that's the whole reason why you might want to cut your AF short on purpose). Usually, when you do a line like 4xF4>Despair many times, the proportion of Paradox and Despair casts overall increases (well, it depends on the phase/fight duration, but in general this is true). In fact, people sometimes do that to maximize Despairs on short phases. My point here is that the Fire IV you "lost forever" usually means an extra Paradox or Despair when you tally your gcds at the end of that phase. That might be a small potency loss (since Fire IV is more potency than Paradox, and usually you lose 2 Fire IVs for one Despair+Paradox), but it's usually not a big deal.
In DT, since you also lose the Flare Star, it is a pretty big deal. At the end of the day, you can only fit N gcds in a phase, and in EW, if you know what you're doing, the lost Fire IVs will correspond to some combination of procs, Paradoxes and Despairs.
In DT, if this happens, you just lose a Flare Star, period.

Whoops! Yeah, I meant Flare Star.

I guess what I'd point out here is that there's a "lost" Fire IV and a lost Fire IV. If you want to skip Fire IVs profitably, you need to know what you're doing and plan it out to an extent, often paying for it ahead of time by skipping a Blizz IV or B3 or both ahead of time. But it's entirely possible to do all the clever nonstandard stuff, screw something up, and end up only casting three Fire IVs before your Despair, or only two, or to cast your four Fire IVs but fail to get your Despair off because you got greedy. More prosaically, you might have to cut your cycle short by casting only four Fire IVs... but, tragically, you were ready to cast six because you'd cast B3->B4 before this astral cycle, so now you're just owned because you forgot about an incoming boss AoE or something.

So, like, mistakes are mistakes. You can sometimes recoup some, but often not all, of the loss, especially not if you manage to overcap Polyglot stacks or fat-finger Convert with full MP or something.

[Ramiee]

To explain to black mage players who don't know this side of the job but are curious why some of us are unhappy.

Basically our play style where we tried to do as much of our highest damage dealing spells seems to be impossible now due to the changes in MP. The new ability Flare Star seemingly also conflicts with this play style.

Idk if there's a simpler way to explain this because I can imagine if you're a BLM who only knows the standard play style these walls of texts might be hard to follow.