BLM needs a rework because of new content difficulty

[Xephna]

2- I litterally sit on 3 xeno + 2x triple cast about 95% of the time

Congratulations on outing yourself as a bad BLM who's not qualified to discuss about it's issues.

[Tamaerl]

Dawntrail BLM is about as interesting as playing a healer that can't heal. I want Endwalker BLM back.
I also think PCT is probably in a good spot right now dps-wise and the other dps jobs need to be closer to where PCT is; one of the reason its dps is unusually high is because of thunder skip, which will be getting patched next week. PCT dps should drop slightly once thunder skip is patched out.

[Sylvain]

Congratulations on outing yourself as a bad BLM who's not qualified to discuss about it's issues.

The point being, people complain about mobility being an issue as if their only movement tool was ice paradox. We have plenty of movement tools.
It's obviously better to use some of those tools to enhance your dps but this is part of the whole optimisation game. You sacrifice mobility for a tiny bit of extra damage.
I just don't see the problem.

What I find odd is that people want flexibility and an optimal rotation at the same time. Basically, no matter what you do, the optimal dps rotation is also the one with the highest mobility.
If you want to have a perfect rotation easy rotation with no agency and trade off just play smn i don't know.

What I was trying to point is that, the current content can be done with minimal use of our current mobility tools, of course at a small cost. Most fight currently have very little required movement and can be done almost exclusively with Paradox and Thunder refresh.
Just looking at Eksu he's litterally using almost all his instant during burst. So saying BLM has no mobility is just wrong, unless you mean "no mobility at the cost of even 0.1% of our optimal dps", but then at this point why are you even playing this job? isn't the whole fun of optimising your movement to have as many of those tools during burst?

And this has nothing to do with our current DPS, even if we were grossly overpower and pulled 25k rDPS, the gameplay issue would still be the exact same.

Fine, people may dislike the more rigid rotation (the intended rotation basically) and want the old alternative rotation back, that's fair. People may dislike the new spell, I'm not especially fond of Astral Star, I feel it adds very little to your single target rotation (love it in AoE tho). I also dislike that Astral Flare has a recast of 2.5s has it pushes for it to be cast under swift/3cast, all this is valid and I get it. But ffs don't say "we have no mobility". Men just try AST on TOP and you'll see what it is to have 0 freaking mobility.

[Realfoxy]

The point being, people complain about mobility being an issue as if their only movement tool was ice paradox. We have plenty of movement tools.
It's obviously better to use some of those tools to enhance your dps but this is part of the whole optimisation game. You sacrifice mobility for a tiny bit of extra damage.
I just don't see the problem.

What I find odd is that people want flexibility and an optimal rotation at the same time. Basically, no matter what you do, the optimal dps rotation is also the one with the highest mobility.
If you want to have a perfect rotation easy rotation with no agency and trade off just play smn i don't know.

What I was trying to point is that, the current content can be done with minimal use of our current mobility tools, of course at a small cost. Most fight currently have very little required movement and can be done almost exclusively with Paradox and Thunder refresh.
Just looking at Eksu he's litterally using almost all his instant during burst. So saying BLM has no mobility is just wrong, unless you mean "no mobility at the cost of even 0.1% of our optimal dps", but then at this point why are you even playing this job? isn't the whole fun of optimising your movement to have as many of those tools during burst?

....

See this a perfectly good argument for BLM returning to a Shadowbringers type of design, where there's a severe tradeoff between using tools for DPS and for handling mobility. The problem is that trying to balance a job with ShB style mobility and a rigid rotation is going to create a huge balance problem when SE appears to be doubling down on Endwalker fight design.

Look at what's happening on the Extreme trial fights. EX2 BLM appears to be underpowered, but like you said that can be easily fixed. But then you look at BLM's performance on EX1 and it's completely awful.

The issue is that on heavy movement fights on EX1 it's extremely hard to maintain acceptable DPS while having enough resources to handle the movement. EW BLM didn't have this problem, because the rotation was flexible enough that you could have your triplecast/xeno/ice paradox/T3p do double duty as DPS tools and as movement tools (this was the basis of nonstandard play).

If you take that away and get forced into standard, sure, it works on some fights. But it's not going to work on the types of encounters like DT EX1, Endsinger in Endwalker, TOP P6, etc. And if they buff standard BLM to do acceptable damage in those fights it becomes an overpowered monster in other fights - just look at what happened to BLM after the Xeno buffs when it was underperforming in TOP.

[Sylvain]

See this a perfectly good argument for BLM returning to a Shadowbringers type of design, where there's a severe tradeoff between using tools for DPS and for handling mobility. The problem is that trying to balance a job with ShB style mobility and a rigid rotation is going to create a huge balance problem when SE appears to be doubling down on Endwalker fight design.

Well I don't believe it's coming back so we might aswell find/hope they find a solution regarding that.

The issue is that on heavy movement fights on EX1 it's extremely hard to maintain acceptable DPS while having enough resources to handle the movement.

Personally I feel a good first step would be to equalize cast and recast on F/B4 and Astral Flare. If casting them under 3cast isn't a dps upgrade, then it solves a big part of the issue as using triple/Swift solely for movement wouldn't affect the dps.

Then there's the transpose gimmick and xeno.

Transpose F3 can easily be fixed by boosting the damage Astral Fire3.
I read somewhere that over 2 min or something, doing transpose A1F3 was barely 1.5% more damage than simply A3F3. A slight boost to A3 fire damage gain would be enough to make it even or at least a negligeable gain (like <0.5%).

Which leave Xenoglossy as either a movement tool or a burst window tool.
They could simply buff the rest of the kit and nerf it until the gain of spamming Xeno into the burst window would also be very small...

With all those 3 changes standard rotation would become the most optimal thing to do and done....

Except that no, people would complain that the job would become too easy as there's be almost nothing to optimise anymore.
And Xeno would feel underwhelming

[Ferrinus]

And this has nothing to do with our current DPS, even if we were grossly overpower and pulled 25k rDPS, the gameplay issue would still be the exact same.

This is the crux for me. I've always more or less played BLM like this; I remember the introduction of "cursed"/"hypermeme"/etc. rotations in Shadowbringers that involved weird transpose and lucid trickery but that would result in a hypothetical ~1 percent damage gain while actually becoming vastly more vulnerable to disruption from any required movement. I think I'm only realizing now that the EW equivalents not only preserved or improved your damage but made you more mobile rather than less.

If they want to crank the numbers up on BLM damage, great, but I appreciate the challenge of figuring out when to use my movement tools for damage vs. when to actually use them for movement (and it feels good when those two coincide). Umbral paradox specifically returning would be a nice way to fill out the ice phase a little, but it'd also be an ease-of-play buff, and there's such a thing as a job being too easy.

[Realfoxy]

This is the crux for me. I've always more or less played BLM like this; I remember the introduction of "cursed"/"hypermeme"/etc. rotations in Shadowbringers that involved weird transpose and lucid trickery but that would result in a hypothetical ~1 percent damage gain while actually becoming vastly more vulnerable to disruption from any required movement. I think I'm only realizing now that the EW equivalents not only preserved or improved your movement but made you more mobile rather than less.

If they want to crank the numbers up on BLM damage, great, but I appreciate the challenge of figuring out when to use my movement tools for damage vs. when to actually use them for movement (and it feels good when those two coincide). Umbral paradox specifically returning would be a nice way to fill out the ice phase a little, but it'd also be an ease-of-play buff, and there's such a thing as a job being too easy.

I don't have a problem with ShB style nonstandard coming back. The issue is that we don't even have that. We don't have any way to easily shift the alignment of the standard rotation loop versus the fight, beyond choosing AF3 F3p vs AF1 F3p or doing some stupidly cursed things with Lucid Dreaming. So you have LESS agency than in Endwalker when it comes to utilising those movement tools.

I also don't get why people think baseline BLM play needs to be harder. It already had the biggest skill gap of all the jobs in Endwalker. In a world where all jobs were in HW/Stormblood design and all of them had ways to mess things up, sure, maybe you could argue BLM could be more difficulty. But we're not in that world, we're in the one where melee uptime is nearly free, hitboxes are still huge, positionals are getting taken away, and mechanics still have you running back and forth across the entire arena. This isn't Eden's Promise any more.

[Ferrinus]

I don't have a problem with ShB style nonstandard coming back. The issue is that we don't even have that. We don't have any way to easily shift the alignment of the standard rotation loop versus the fight, beyond choosing AF3 F3p vs AF1 F3p or doing some stupidly cursed things with Lucid Dreaming. So you have LESS agency than in Endwalker when it comes to utilising those movement tools.

I also don't get why people think baseline BLM play needs to be harder. It already had the biggest skill gap of all the jobs in Endwalker. In a world where all jobs were in HW/Stormblood design and all of them had ways to mess things up, sure, maybe you could argue BLM could be more difficulty. But we're not in that world, we're in the one where melee uptime is nearly free, hitboxes are still huge, positionals are getting taken away, and mechanics still have you running back and forth across the entire arena. This isn't Eden's Promise any more.

I don't think BLM needed to be harder, but, I don't mind it getting harder. Like, if it remained as hard (even, with an aggressive enough boss, impossible) to use all your cooldowns for optimal damage as it is now, but hypothetical white-room BLM damage was increased such that doing the best job you could (even though you were objectively, measurably losing damage compared to what you could deal a training dummy) still gave you top-tier DPS, I'd be perfectly happy. It's what I play a job with long cast times for.

I agree that a little more control over astral/umbral cycle length would be good. If, for instance, completing a cast of Despair always filled your astral gauge no matter how many F4s you'd already cast (even if that resulted in a slightly weaker than average Flare Star) then we'd be in a situation in which the standard rotation is also the optimal rotation but the various second-best and third-best compromises black mages often have to make feel a little better to settle for.

[Realfoxy]

I don't think BLM needed to be harder, but, I don't mind it getting harder. Like, if it remained as hard (even, with an aggressive enough boss, impossible) to use all your cooldowns for optimal damage as it is now, but hypothetical white-room BLM damage was increased such that doing the best job you could (even though you were objectively, measurably losing damage compared to what you could deal a training dummy) still gave you top-tier DPS, I'd be perfectly happy. It's what I play a job with long cast times for.

I agree that a little more control over astral/umbral cycle length would be good. If, for instance, completing a cast of Despair always filled your astral gauge no matter how many F4s you'd already cast (even if that resulted in a slightly weaker than average Flare Star) then we'd be in a situation in which the standard rotation is also the optimal rotation but the various second-best and third-best compromises black mages often have to make feel a little better to settle for.

The reason I keep going on about BLM getting harder is that in EW we had the perfect solution - the job got easier at a base level with the addition of Paradox, while simultaneously harder to get maximum damage on. Lower skill floor, higher skill ceiling.

In Dawntrail they've done the opposite, raising the skill required to get an acceptable level of damage out of BLM, while simultaneously destroying the skill ceiling of the job.

And having the basic level of BLM play get harder to execute, with the less flexible Thunderhead system and rigid Flare Star, just makes it the job a walking balance problem. We can see it in the Ex1 damage numbers. If you buff BLM so that the average player does acceptable damage, the top end players will be doing imbalanced levels of damage.

[Ferrinus]

The reason I keep going on about BLM getting harder is that in EW we had the perfect solution - the job got easier at a base level with the addition of Paradox, while simultaneously harder to get maximum damage on. Lower skill floor, higher skill ceiling.

In Dawntrail they've done the opposite, raising the skill required to get an acceptable level of damage out of BLM, while simultaneously destroying the skill ceiling of the job.

And having the basic level of BLM play get harder to execute, with the less flexible Thunderhead system and rigid Flare Star, just makes it the job a walking balance problem. We can see it in the Ex1 damage numbers. If you buff BLM so that the average player does acceptable damage, the top end players will be doing imbalanced levels of damage.

I don't think this is true. I've said it before: if you're not trying to optimize your instant cast resources so that they shave down the maximum possible number of seconds off your GCDs, I think BLM is actually easier than before. A higher proportion of your spell casts are naturally instantaneous, you get 50% more uses of swiftcast, thunder needs to be hardcast under any circumstances and requires no weaving to make this happen, etc.

On the other hand, it's much harder to maximize the job's damage output. In fact, that's what this thread is about!