BLM Post-Patch, and where to go from here.

[Illyrian94]

Just throwing my voice in with the hopes that more people commenting is enough to draw attention to things. I'm probably what most people would consider a fairly "casual" Black Mage. Started playing FF14 partway through Endwalker with BLM as my main and have yet to do any "harder" content. I largely played the standard rotation, but had been starting to explore a tiny bit of non-standard since I was wanting to dip my toes into harder content in Dawntrail. I still could do harder content in Dawntrail with BLM, obviously. It's not like the job is actually factually unplayable.

It just doesn't feel good right now. I could care less about damage, really. That can be fixed easily enough with potency tweaks. The job feeling bad, though? That can't be fixed with potency tweaks. Flare Star is incredibly clunky. Did we really need another big, slow, hard cast ender? Especially one that punishes us for needing to have a short fire phase or if the boss leaves the arena? Thunderhead/thunder is just bad. Ice Paradox being gone limits our mobility and makes the UI phase feel weirdly short, etc. All things that have been said plenty of times that I don't really need to repeat.

What really blows my mind is the MP regen problem. The fact that this wasn't caught in testing makes all of the BLM changes feel as if they were untested and rushed. I work pretty closely with QA folks on a daily basis, and I love them to death. It feels like these changes weren't given a proper QA pass at all. Obviously, we don't know if that's the case--but it sure feels that way.

Thanks for the consistently well thought out posts you've been writing up.