Black Mage changes aren't enough. (As far as we know.)

[J3WD4Z]

I've been a BLM main since I started playing. I still want to be one but this version of the job just feels bad and has so many small frustrations.

I agree so much with what the original poster said about thunderhead, it's just frustrating having to think about it. There are times when I'm about to cast it and the timer drops and it's just confusing. It feels like unnecessary jank that I now have to track.
I would rather they let Thunder be instant and always usable or at least increase the duration of the thunderhead buff. The buff is currently the same length as the DoT, so if you use the High Thunder to weave transpose into the AF1 Firestarter, the ideal reapplication becomes just as the buff is about to drop which is also at the end of a tight fire line under low spell speed.

Swapping to fire and using the Firestarter is ok but it just feels so tight to use it every time. Now that the optimisation is simple it feels mandatory to do it and you feel forced to try and make it work.
In 6.X, the optimisation was complex. I knew that I wouldn't be the best but there were always small bits I could learn for marginal gains if I wanted and I like that being there.
I didn't feel pressured to learn all of it because I knew it wasn't necessary. There were some basic improvements I did and after that it was diminishing returns.
Now there is only one optimisation with firestarter, I feel obligated to use it because I know that is how you do the most damage and it feels bad to not do it.

The manafont change sounded ok before I played it but it's just so much fire that I barely have time out of it to spend polyglots. I'm now also worried about drifting it.

6.X BLM felt so good, it was so free flowing and fluid and now it's so rigid, with no ways to correct it's rigidity. I'm playing PCT at the moment which is quite fun but I can't stop thinking about how I would rather be playing previous BLM.

I loved non-standard, it was so much fun and more accessible than outsiders realise. 90% of it was just swap to ice, use some instants and do a short fire line.
It took a bit of time to get used to actually using it but it felt so satisfying. Learning about it filled a lot of the time for me between patches whilst there wasn't much content and having these new options made me enjoy the new raid in P9-P12 so much more.
E.g. the double transpose opener, involved an early refresh of thunder which gave the thunder DoT a very different alignment for the rest of the fight.
The first time I used this to make it align better for movement for the rest of the fight felt awesome.

I hope SE bring back ice paradox or leave some more room for optimisation. Another suggestion I like is allowing Flare Star to work with fewer stacks for less damage. I really like everything content wise about Dawntrail so far but I just wish BLM didn't feel so bad :/

I really agree with most of this post. I disagree with the aspect that we should keep Flare Star. I feel that Flare Star's existence is fundamentally redundant with polyglot. They are both resources that build up to a nuke, and everything definitely feels too tight and restrictive. I agree with the thunder changes, they are just so far out there. It hits a point where there are too many mechanics at once and I think even if they loosened everything up, it wouldn't help much. I think a better solution would be an expantion of aetherial maniuplation to allow BLM to have More instant Cast mobility. Upon completing a rotation, Aetherial manipulation would reset the CD. I think mobility is the solution, not bigger boom. Mobility dictates the metagame of a game. I see no reason why a BLM that's peaking in the execution of their rotation shouldn't be able to easily phase in and out of the void and manipulate it to thier advantage. it solves the mechanical overwhelm BLM is feeling, it allow SE to continue to design high mobility fights without having to worry about BLM, and it leans into the existing lore previously establish by even the Thaumaturge quest lines in Ul'Dah. As a game designer myself, I really understand things in a lot of ways most people cannot.

[CoeliAlmr]

I really agree with most of this post. I disagree with the aspect that we should keep Flare Star. I feel that Flare Star's existence is fundamentally redundant with polyglot. They are both resources that build up to a nuke, and everything definitely feels too tight and restrictive. I agree with the thunder changes, they are just so far out there. It hits a point where there are too many mechanics at once and I think even if they loosened everything up, it wouldn't help much. I think a better solution would be an expantion of aetherial maniuplation to allow BLM to have More instant Cast mobility. Upon completing a rotation, Aetherial manipulation would reset the CD. I think mobility is the solution, not bigger boom. Mobility dictates the metagame of a game. I see no reason why a BLM that's peaking in the execution of their rotation shouldn't be able to easily phase in and out of the void and manipulate it to thier advantage. it solves the mechanical overwhelm BLM is feeling, it allow SE to continue to design high mobility fights without having to worry about BLM, and it leans into the existing lore previously establish by even the Thaumaturge quest lines in Ul'Dah. As a game designer myself, I really understand things in a lot of ways most people cannot.

I agree with you about Flare Star, it creates a lot of problems. If I had complete freedom to change the class, I would remove it. Unfortunately, I think it is very unlikely that SE will. They would need to create a new ability for Lvl 100 which is a much bigger commitment (obviously it would involve making assets, code logic, testing etc). As far as I'm aware, they've never removed a current max level ability (as in Level 80/90/100 etc) and I don't think they want to set the precedent.
Sadly, I just don't see SE even considering removing it, it's a lot of work and it's bad optics for them.

So the question becomes how do you fix Flare Star? I've seen 3 common ideas.
a) Allow it to be used with fewer stacks
b) Make it instant (This is better than current but this alone doesn't fix the rigidity. Maybe this & option a) )
c) Allow the fire stacks to carry through ice (Please no, flare star will appear all over the place in your rotation)

I'm personally fine with AM as it is. I like the 10s CD and adding anything to it means they need make the CD longer as you've kind of said. 10s CD is nice for using it several times quickly (e.g. P12S Superchain 1, putting LL center and using manip to people then use BtL to get back was quite common).
I like the idea of instant casts after AM ONLY IF it does not become a DPS gain to spam it and it is done in a way that doesn't prevent using it several times quickly (E.g. a stack system with 2 or 3 uses).
Yeah, I'm mainly thinking about adjusting the length of fire phases for the sake of mobility. Ice phases used to be the more mobile ones with ice paradox (RIP). I'm less fussed about the DPS gains, the flexibility is more important.

[kuje]

Adding my voice to this, as someone who's dabbled in Black Mage since around 5.4, graduating into maining it in savage Pandaemonium throughout 6.x.
TL;DR: Bring nonstandard back, and allow for flexibility and meaningful decision-making again.

The 7.0 changes are severely disappointing, even as someone who generally favored standard gameplay, only using basic optimizations like shorter fire phases to pump out more damage before boss disengagement or death, and salvaging movement-heavy situations. This kind of situational assessment and the ability to respond accordingly are what made Black Mage fun for me. As a direct result of the new changes, the latter half of the equation appears completely absent.

The current form of Flare Star and the necessity of casting Blizzard 4 to restore mana (and thus to do a fire phase at all) are the biggest issues I have with this iteration. Especially combined together, these make the gameplay experience extremely rigid and fairly miserable.

I'm not much of a theory crafter and even less of a game designer, but I would still like to share my thoughts on how these two elements could be adjusted for a smoother experience.

Flare Star:
As per CoeliAlmr's message above, Flare Star would work best if it could be used with fewer stacks, increasing in potency as it reaches full charge. It would still work as a reward for a full Fire phase, but not punish the player unduly for the often necessary shorter phases; this might actually be fun to juggle. That said, I definitely would not miss it if it were removed entirely. It's not worth the trade-off of flexible fire phases.

Umbral Ice:
Having a more reliable mana restoration tool does help with server tick and lag issues, but I would like to see this element added on top of the boosted mana regen instead of replacing it completely. (I realize this is a bit superfluous.)
If keeping mana regen tied to spells is what the development team really wants to do in the future, then I'd like to see Ice Paradox make a comeback as an alternative mana restoration cast to Blizzard 4; it could have higher potency, but grant no Umbral Hearts/less mana. This would really only have value with the Flare Star change, though. In any case, being forced to prepare a full fire phase when it's clear the boss will die or disengage before you can finish it feels just bad.

I think something along these lines would be preferable to how the class currently plays.

...Or just revert the class back to how it was in 6.x and allow nonstandard play to exist. I would genuinely be more excited about a rollback than I am about any of the new toys Black Mage got in 7.0. It might be an unrealistic request, but the current iteration just feels inferior to 6.x, and potency buffs alone won't help with that.

To any of the development team who this might reach, thank you for reading. I hope our thoughts are earnestly taken into account for a future revision of the class, ideally before 8.0.