BLM needs a rework because of new content difficulty

[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!

[Realfoxy]

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!

I'm not just talking about maximising your instant cast uses, I'm talking about all the other ways in which they've made the job harder:

- High Thunder can't be hardcast, so a long manafont fire phase can cause it to fall off

- High Thunder has such low upfront potency you lose a lot more damage refreshing it early, compared to throwing out an early T3P in Endwalker

- Flare Star makes the consequences for missing an F4 much greater

- Flare Star is an additional 3 second long hardcast

- If you mess up the end of your fire phase e.g. with an interrupted Despair cast, you can't transpose Para B1 B4 and then resume. You have to slowcast a B3 before you can get back to your normal rotation.

The only thing you could argue that makes DT BLM is easier is the free F3p, which I agree is an addition that makes the job easier. However you could get that in EW just by sharping fire every time (fun fact - you lose more damage by doing AF3 F3p instead of transpose AF1 F3p now, just to make it harder to do optimal damage).

All of the above contributes to the execution of the job being much less flexible than in Endwalker. Again, you can see this in the two Extreme trials we have. EX2 is a fight without much movement, it's very easy to budget your instant casts and the high movement mechanics are very spread out. The job functions fine.
However then you get into EX1. You have to fight adds which will force you to re-DOT and change targets. The movement is more continuous. Now you see the issues with DT BLM's kit.

RE: Maximising damage output: Sure, you could argue they've made it harder to do so. But they haven't done it in a very fun way. Here's another fun fact, Manafont is such a huge damage gain now that you absolutely do not want to lose a use due to drifting, but you don't have any short fire lines to adjust its alignment any more.

That's the issue with DT BLM. It's A LOT more clunky, and that makes it harder for newer players and veterans alike.

[Ferrinus]

I'm not just talking about maximising your instant cast uses, I'm talking about all the other ways in which they've made the job harder:

- High Thunder can't be hardcast, so a long manafont fire phase can cause it to fall off

- High Thunder has such low upfront potency you lose a lot more damage refreshing it early, compared to throwing out an early T3P in Endwalker

These two complaints are in tension with each other. Is Thunder in danger of falling off, or is Thunder in danger of getting clipped? In the first place, Thunderhead rationing means that you're never going to have a proc burning a hole in your pocket and demanding to be used early by sheer dint of its own timer; you'll only feel the need to burn early Thunderheads for movement (I often find myself doing this early in Ex2, clipping like ~5 seconds of the dot) if you're completely out of other movement tools. On the other end, Manafont gives you the Thunderhead buff, so you'd have to Manafont when your Thunder's already run out, then Thunder, then spend a full 30 seconds in Manafont's extra fire phase, which on paper and with 0 Spellspeed should contain 27.8 seconds' worth of fire spells, and that's assuming you used your F3P instead of saving it. If you also had to dump a couple Polyglots, well... then your enemy's going to not have a DoT on them for like two GCDs tops.

These aren't catastrophic or even significant failures on the level of dropping Enochian, missing a Flare Star, or overwriting a Polyglot. They're just damage shortfalls that can be fixed by better planning and optimization. They don't make the job harder to learn or play at a competent level, they make it harder to optimize.

I should add that I think Thunderhead is a pointless mechanic and that it'd be better if Thunder spells could just be cast at will whenever you had astral/umbral status (to protect newbies from losing the Enochian damage bonus) but while Thunderhead does exist it doesn't increase the job's difficulty so much as constrain (but not entirely remove) your ability to make mistakes.

- Flare Star makes the consequences for missing an F4 much greater

- Flare Star is an additional 3 second long hardcast

This is true (Flare Star definitely makes the job harder to play), but is counterbalanced by instant paradox and guaranteed F3P. If you're just working on making sure you get a Flare Star every astral cycle, you will, thanks to those particular QoL improvements. When I miss a Flare Star it's usually because of a combination of being flustered by boss mechanics and having greedily spent all my triple and swiftcasts last astral cycle to try to save a few extra seconds of cast time. The job is hard for me precisely because my spellspeed is much lower than usual and because I'm aware of, and constantly trying to perform, optimizations that increase my outgoing damage at the cost of risking that my whole rotation collapses.

- If you mess up the end of your fire phase e.g. with an interrupted Despair cast, you can't transpose Para B1 B4 and then resume. You have to slowcast a B3 before you can get back to your normal rotation.

Para -> B1 is two GCDs' worth of spellcasting, while hardcast B3 is 1.4 GCDs' worth, and so gets you back in gear faster. It's less damaging than the now-impossible alternative, sure... but so what? There's no more damaging option. It's not somehow easier doing the first thing than the second thing (in fact I would argue it is harder as it requires more button presses and more game knowledge).

All this is to reiterate that it being harder to maintain hypothetical maximum damage isn't the same as it being harder to just maintain uptime or execute the job's basic mechanics consistently. The difficulty that veterans are feeling is not something new players are feeling, and being able to relax and compromise on things that you wouldn't have to do in Stone, Sky, Sea (e.g. using F3P on mobility and AF maintenance rather than saving it for damage every single time you get it) makes the job feel a lot more able to adapt to movement-heavy bosses.

[Realfoxy]

These aren't catastrophic or even significant failures on the level of dropping Enochian, missing a Flare Star, or overwriting a Polyglot. They're just damage shortfalls that can be fixed by better planning and optimization. They don't make the job harder to learn or play at a competent level, they make it harder to optimize.

I should add that I think Thunderhead is a pointless mechanic and that it'd be better if Thunder spells could just be cast at will whenever you had astral/umbral status (to protect newbies from losing the Enochian damage bonus) but while Thunderhead does exist it doesn't increase the job's difficulty so much as constrain (but not entirely remove) your ability to make mistakes.

I think I see where we're disagreeing. Personally, I don't consider "just casting something, anything, to maintain the AF timer" to be the skill floor of BLM, I consider the skill floor to be "how hard is it to execute the developer intended rotation." It is true that the free F3p does help players avoid catastrophic failure more easily than in Endwalker, I just don't think that these "damage shortfalls" you mentioned are in the realm of optimisation tricks. They're what I consider the basics of the job - refresh your DOT on time, don't clip your GCD, etc.

Still, I consider the Thunderhead system to be not only clunky, but an actual trap for less experienced players - I have had to advise more than one person that you should in fact not hit the shiny thunder button as soon as it lights up, since it's equivalent upfront potency to Scathe.

...

All this is to reiterate that it being harder to maintain hypothetical maximum damage isn't the same as it being harder to just maintain uptime or execute the job's basic mechanics consistently. The difficulty that veterans are feeling is not something new players are feeling, and being able to relax and compromise on things that you wouldn't have to do in Stone, Sky, Sea (e.g. using F3P on mobility and AF maintenance rather than saving it for damage every single time you get it) makes the job feel a lot more able to adapt to movement-heavy bosses.

Sure, it is true that if you close your eyes and ignore all the "damage shortfalls" then yes, you could consider DT BLM to be easier. But I don't like this jobs' difficulty to now come from managing an awful DOT system and manafont drift. I don't think that anyone who misses one F4 should be punished so harshly.

(On that note, I consider it poor design that casting Flare Star as soon it becomes available is a mistake since it doesn't refresh your AF timer. Yet another thing the developers appear to have forgotten).