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

[Ramiee]

Project harder little guy

Don't need to I lived through that coping through the first half of Shadowbringers as a Scholar.

[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...

[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.

[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.

[LilimoLimomo]

First off, my genuine thanks to Galvuu, Ramiee, and Ferrinus for the friendly discussion. Not only is it very interesting to read, but pleasant as well, at that warms my Umbral Heart.

Part of what I love about reading this is that I have not devoted even half as much of my brain to topping out BLM's damage as y'all have! What I've generally loved about BLM is that instead of doing a static rotation, I instead "push the button that most wants to be pressed at that time." Generally that's the one that does the biggest damage, but sometimes it's the button I need to press to keep Astral Fire up, sometimes it's the button I need to press to do damage while moving, and sometimes it's both! And I love that.

So when I read through these posts and we're talking about how much of a damage loss there is from doing something like missing a cast or doing a Transpose instead of Despair, I haven't really ever gone down that exact road. Naturally I know there is a damage loss and I try to avoid it, but I haven't ever really bothered to try to quantify it. I'm just always trying to do my best while avoiding my perfectionist tendencies. So it makes me wonder...

(The crux of it is that you cannot keep the same number of high potency gcds in DT if you "miss" one of your builders- you permanently lose Flare Star. In EW, you can. Swapping one Fire IV for a Paradox on your overall gcds for that 2 min window has no penalty)

Hmmm...so from reading your entire post, I think I might understand you, but I'll say it in the way that my brain thinks about it. Would I be correct in interpreting that the issue here isn't inherently about the mechanics of building up resources, but rather comes down to the loss of damage and how great that loss is? It sounds like you're saying that some losses feel tolerable because the difference in damage between 2 sequence options isn't that much, but there's an estimated guess that whatever the final potency is for Flare Star, it will be significant enough that choosing the sequence that has fewer Flare Stars will result in a more meaningful difference in damage to a degree that feels significant? I hope I'm understanding that right! Let me know!

This along with the MP regen changes has made it that switching to Ice phase and dropping Flare star fails your rotation

I'm split on whether I'm interpreting this right, but are you saying that switching to Ice phase removes your Flare Star charges? If so I had not caught that aspect and I can see how that would put an serious amount of pressure on players to either have a "perfect" Fire phase or be at a loss. I had thought that the charges would remain until spent.

Anyway, I'm enjoying hearing y'all's thoughts on this and trying to follow along. I like learning about your perspectives, and I'm guessing that I probably won't understand every last bit of the detail y'all are putting out there (at least not right away), but I appreciate your putting yourselves out there to try to help me understand the basic gist of it!

[Ramiee]

I'm split on whether I'm interpreting this right, but are you saying that switching to Ice phase removes your Flare Star charges? If so I had not caught that aspect and I can see how that would put an serious amount of pressure on players to either have a "perfect" Fire phase or be at a loss. I had thought that the charges would remain until spent.

Yeah this is basically it, it's not like this is something that couldn't of worked in non-standard but it does heavily imply that doing non-standard is now "wrong."
This is a smaller problem next to the MP regen and removal of ice paradox. Though I think it existing is directly telling us that we have to play in a linear way now.

[Voidmage]

What I don‘t get the most is why they got rid of UI Paradox.
It was a good movement tool, the removal doesn‘t even help with button bloat and the entire fantasy of that action was to be usable in ice and fire.

Also regarding non standard.
Most people weren‘t even aware of its existence so no, that wasn‘t what kept them from playing blm.
The playernumbers were already low before that.
What kept players away was the casting times, fight design and just alternatives to the job, at least that’s what I think.

[Valence]

If Flare Star charges get removed by swapping to Ice, how the hell are you supposed to play around downtimes? You swap to Ice and eat the loss? Or you just stay in fire and let the timer drop? What nonsensical design is this even?

[Galvuu]

So when I read through these posts and we're talking about how much of a damage loss there is from doing something like missing a cast or doing a Transpose instead of Despair, I haven't really ever gone down that exact road. Naturally I know there is a damage loss and I try to avoid it, but I haven't ever really bothered to try to quantify it. I'm just always trying to do my best while avoiding my perfectionist tendencies. So it makes me wonder...
(...)
Hmmm...so from reading your entire post, I think I might understand you, but I'll say it in the way that my brain thinks about it. Would I be correct in interpreting that the issue here isn't inherently about the mechanics of building up resources, but rather comes down to the loss of damage and how great that loss is? It sounds like you're saying that some losses feel tolerable because the difference in damage between 2 sequence options isn't that much, but there's an estimated guess that whatever the final potency is for Flare Star, it will be significant enough that choosing the sequence that has fewer Flare Stars will result in a more meaningful difference in damage to a degree that feels significant? I hope I'm understanding that right! Let me know!

I'm split on whether I'm interpreting this right, but are you saying that switching to Ice phase removes your Flare Star charges? If so I had not caught that aspect and I can see how that would put an serious amount of pressure on players to either have a "perfect" Fire phase or be at a loss. I had thought that the charges would remain until spent.

Again, emphasis mine. But that last detail you didn't notice is a big part of the problem- since going into ice with an unused Flare Star, or unused Flare Star charges/"stickers" erases them, whenever that happens, you permanently lose a cast of Flare Star. This detail, and the deletion of ice paradox are, honestly, the real problem, much worse than any "loss of non-standard". The changes to Thunder are also, imho, very bad (because it might force you into overwriting it and, since there's no frontloaded Thundercloud potency like before, you lose a much larger proportion of the overall Thunder damage when you're forced to overwrite it).
If going into UI didn't erase the Flare Star "stickers" and Flare Star itself, and if we had kept UI Paradox, I'd be much less pessimistic about this whole affair.

As an aside (not directed at you, really, just something I've realized while typing this), these changes make crit BLM a bit worse (because that build leveraged the fact that, in EW, you can remove the previously mentioned "weak gcds")... but also might make SpS BLM worse (if you're very fast, you might be forced to overwrite your Thunder, which becomes worse in DT, as I explained). So there's a real chance both builds will become worse.

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.
(...)
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.

Yes, you're completely correct. I just feel that, in DT, there's a chance your mistake costs you a usage of your nuke button with no possible silver lining down the road. That's very punishing.
These changes remind me of the very rigid, very hard-to-execute 4.0 BLM gameplay, where losing a Fire IV after getting your Umbral Hearts was so punishing to your potency that most people ignored Blizzard IV and played the 4xFire IV rotation, since it was much more lenient and resulted in only a very small loss of potency overall if you had to move/made a mistake. Years pass, and XIV's job team never learns...