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

[Galvuu]

Their mindset is literally because players had a unique playstyle that did like 5% more damage than the standard rotation that the fact it existed means that they can't possibly ignore it because they would be "throwing" by not doing it, depsite the fact standard BLM had the highest damage of all ranged attackers and half the melee dps

No way it's 5%, it's like 2.5ish% tops if you do everything right and get a good kill time.
In theory, some lines do yield a 4% gain, but those are very expensive (need a lot of procs/Xenoglossy/Lucid Dreaming) and you eventually run out of resources to keep using them and need to fall back into weaker lines (that do less than the standard) and then back to standard until you can stockpile resources again.
This isn't aimed at you, more of a general sentiment, but you also definitely don't need the mana tick tracker- you need to be a bit less aggressive at the start, but you can mentally time your ticks fairly well after a while for slower gcds and 75% of the lines don't even need precise tick tracking anyway, esp if Lucid is off cd.

[Lyth]

...

From a job balance perspective, do you think that 'simple' and 'complex' jobs can co-exist in the same space?

At the end of the day, everyone wants to do more damage. That complexity label gets leveraged mid-expansion to argue for dps buffs, and Endwalker was no exception to this. You now have a massive sub-subrole Caster schism where BLM can't even be seen to associate with the others anymore. It's a fantastic feeling to play a job that is viewed as high-skill and you can invest your time into getting better over a few years, sure. It's deeply unsatisfying to try to do the same on a job whose aesthetics you prefer but the community dismisses as 'easy' (and in many cases, consensus doesn't automatically align with what's actually right).

The dev team knows this as well. When you argue for dps buffs on a 'complex job' mid-expansion, you'll get them, sure, in the short term. It's hard to change job design mid-expansion. But it creates a role imbalance. And what do you think subsequently happens when the dev team can actually change up job design during the expansion transition? You could have called this back in 2022. I did.

In an ideal world, job complexity is something that would exist internally within every job and reward you naturally as you became a better player. In an ideal world, nobody would try to argue for artificial dps advantages over other players, and differences in performance would unfold naturally from the layers upon layers of complexity built into every job. In practice, people are rarely satisfied with what they have and will look for ways to wrangle more of a competitive advantage against the others through terms like 'easy' and 'complex'. Which is why jobs go through cycles like this.

I'll also say that it looks like the dev team thankfully anticipated most of the 'that's so easy!' dismissals that get aimed at new jobs, this time around, probably because they wanted PCT to be a credible contender for BLM's spot.

[Basteala]

Maybe it's just me, but I always thought one of the draws of Black Mage *was* the difficulty. In a game where positionals are becoming braindead, some casters barely have castbars, and even mana being a borderline suggestion, black mage actually has shit you need to worry about, with the reward being big damage. That's a thing in other games, too. No one's ever accused Ivy as being easy to learn in Soul Calibur.

[Lyth]

I think that's a wonderful mindset if everyone gets on board with it. Give all DPS jobs the same average rdps, irrespective of their individual challenges. Build different levels of nuance and optimization into different jobs. Create an atmosphere of mutual respect for what everyone does. I personally would be perfectly fine with playing a difficult job purely for the challenge of it, without a thought of any further reward beyond that.

In practice, though, it would never last. Literally every expansion cycle we see the same wrangling over dps advantages based off of job 'complexity' and 'utility'. Rather than designing for an ideal that pretty much nobody lives up to, it's better to expect people to be people and set design expectations on how they actually behave, rather than how they ought to behave.

[Aco505]

Give all DPS jobs the same average rdps, irrespective of their individual challenges.

If "the same average rdps" here means DPS as a metric for the potential of a given job to provide DPS to the party (what is now known as cDPS), then I agree this should be the goal when balancing the damage output of jobs.*

On the other hand, if rDPS is used here as the specific metric of the same name provided by the FFlogs webpage, then no, jobs can never be balanced around rDPS only due to the selfish/buffer dichotomy.

A "selfish" job can never do the same rDPS as a buffing job, because for them rDPS is equal to nDPS, or their personal damage without taking external buffs into account. This means that if they did the same rDPS as a buffing job, they'd also enjoy extra benefit from others' buffs on top of that, even if this number wasn't reflected in the rDPS metric itself. That's why other metrics such as aDPS or cDPS exist.

Additionally, a buffing job would require way more effort to reach the similar rDPS number due to the way damage profiles of jobs work: some of them abuse buffs better than others due to how strong or weak their burst is. Therefore, there has to be a correlation between the different metrics: a job with higher rDPS has to have lower aDPS and/or personal damage and vice versa.

*Content mechanics must also be taken into account here. Clearly, the gigantic hitboxes of many duties in Savage have not challenged melee when it comes to keeping uptime.

However, Criterion dungeons have been a very illustrative piece of content when it comes to job balance. The strongest jobs there are the ones whose damage profile is more personal such as BLM, SAM, RPR, MCH or even SMN, while the contribution of buffing jobs is quite lower even with the hidden party buff, since it still benefits the "selfish" group more by virtue of affecting the entire party and not the buffing job itself.

Several of the melees are equal or just barely above some of the ranged DPS like SMN, even though said melees do have to work for their uptime, unlike many Savage fights in EW. And this situation also manifests in the other roles: AST is at a disadvantage compared to SGE, not only due to the damage situation I just described but also the lower amount of mitigation tools.

Of course, I personally think this shouldn't be taken as a call for homogenization but Criterion dungeons are a poignant example of how balance is not exclusively about numbers in full uptime fights that don't challenge melee.

[Ramiee]

No way it's 5%, it's like 2.5ish% tops.

Wouldnt suprise me, I never really kept track of the logs because parsing doesn't interest me. Still its funny because the difference between standard and non-standard being only 2% adds more to the absurdity of the excuse of feeling like you're sandbagging. Lol do gunbreakers feel like they're sandbagging when double down doesn't crit and they lose 1% of their damage?

[wildvenonat]

That's the thing though, they made it so BLM does work optimally for everyone who cares enough to learn the job now and not just the people willing to research all the non-standard lines. At the end of the day, it was bad design and abuse of game mechanics. It's pointless to argue about it since it's gone. If you can't see why it was removed and isn't coming back, it's fine to keep throwing a fit on the forums. I'm not going to try to help you understand why your perspective is bad or wrong anymore.

I wish you a very merry leveling roulette. May you queue in the Aery as BLM with these changes.

Black Mage op in dungeons with long hallways and many cutscenes, please nerf.

[Ferrinus]

This isn't aimed at you, more of a general sentiment, but you also definitely don't need the mana tick tracker- you need to be a bit less aggressive at the start, but you can mentally time your ticks fairly well after a while for slower gcds and 75% of the lines don't even need precise tick tracking anyway, esp if Lucid is off cd.

I don't think this scans. If you don't need precision 75% of the time, then you do need precision 25% of the time, and doing something "fairly well" is worse than doing it "automatically". I barely used nonstandard lines (I'd skip B4 and just cast solid F4s->Despair if I knew that Hephaeustus was about to do his mixology mechanic or something) but a high enough Spellspeed actually made it important for me to worry about mana ticks anyway, especially if I wanted to do the Transpose->Firestarter trick consistently. Sometimes I'd shift into ice mode with an enemy those Thunder DoT still had a lot of time on it and no polyglots, which meant that maybe I could, or maybe I couldn't, gain ~0.15 of a Fire III by transposing between Paradox and my next spell. Should I do it? Sometimes I guessed right and sometimes I guessed wrong and sometimes I chickened out of taking the risk and sometimes I actually hung for a second, watching my MP, to see if I could get away with it, which I'm sure cost me DPS on its own. If I'd just installed a simple third-party utility, I could have gotten these questions right every time.

The analogy I would make is to a hypothetical BLM that does not actually show you how many seconds you have left on your Astral or Umbral timer. Could you play without that information? Yes, you'd still develop a pretty good feel for how many things you need to cast relatively quickly. But you'd really be feeling around in the dark if you wanted to do the most basic tricks and optimizations, like using Swift or Triple to cheat out a Despair when you had like 1 second left on the clock.

[Galvuu]

I don't think this scans. If you don't need precision 75% of the time, then you do need precision 25% of the time, and doing something "fairly well" is worse than doing it "automatically". I barely used nonstandard lines (I'd skip B4 and just cast solid F4s->Despair if I knew that Hephaeustus was about to do his mixology mechanic or something) but a high enough Spellspeed actually made it important for me to worry about mana ticks anyway, especially if I wanted to do the Transpose->Firestarter trick consistently. Sometimes I'd shift into ice mode with an enemy those Thunder DoT still had a lot of time on it and no polyglots, which meant that maybe I could, or maybe I couldn't, gain ~0.15 of a Fire III by transposing between Paradox and my next spell. Should I do it? Sometimes I guessed right and sometimes I guessed wrong and sometimes I chickened out of taking the risk and sometimes I actually hung for a second, watching my MP, to see if I could get away with it, which I'm sure cost me DPS on its own. If I'd just installed a simple third-party utility, I could have gotten these questions right every time.

If you map the fight, you can make it so you only use non-standard when you have three instant casts (Xeno/procs) or Lucid up- that's the 75% you're guaranteed to pull off correctly even without looking at the MP bar or trying to keep track of the ticks at all. The remaining lines are standard if you wanna play it safe, or "gamble" on those last 25% by following your "feel" for it. That's what I meant. In practice, this means that, usually, out of like... 8 AF cycles, you do one less non-standard than someone with the MP tracker. It also means your overall planning for a phase/fight will look slightly different from that of someone with the MP tracker, but that one non-standard you lose is literally negligible (we're talking 0.5% or less dps here).
At that point, your opener/reopener crit rate is a much more impactful factor.

The issue with your analogy is that you cannot avoid the AF clock at any time. Like, you can't "ignore" AF (I guess you can... spam Fire). Here, when your tools to guarantee non-standard safety are down, you just do standard at a negligible cost. Since 3/4 of "powerful" non-standard use those tools, you really only miss out on a very small amount of non-standard usage with nearly insignificant gain. A more apt analogy is that you can always see the AF clock unless, for a period of 15s out of a 2 min interval, you decide to "gamble" on knowing the clock by heart to gain 0.5% dps. Also, fwiw, the mana tick precision is much higher than just counting how many AF gcds you do (I don't look at the clock at all, for example).

[LilimoLimomo]

That's the thing though, they made it so BLM does work optimally for everyone who cares enough to learn the job now and not just the people willing to research all the non-standard lines. If you can't see why it was removed and isn't coming back, it's fine to keep throwing a fit on the forums. I'm not going to try to help you understand why your perspective is bad or wrong anymore.

With respect, you won't be able to convince anyone of anything if you don't actually listen to their perspectives. And your reply to me suggests that you're not actually listening to what I said, because you put a whole bunch of words in my mouth:

• I've played BLM since 2.0 and never even heard of the phrase "non-standard" until a few days ago, and I most certainly never researched them. I just play the game, and I enjoy what BLM has to offer.
  
  
• I haven't been throwing a fit on the forums; quite the opposite - I've been saying that overall the changes look interesting and that I'm eager to try them out.

If you want to genuinely engage with me, I'd appreciate it if you take this into account, take a few deep breaths, and give my previous post a re-read with a fresh head and a good faith attitude. Then we could probably have a productive discussion. I'll leave the ball in your court.