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

[Basteala]

I can not understand your problems with Blm.
You are all overreacting.

Its true, that there is room for quality of life changes (giving high fire and despair the option to stack the gauge, maybe, increase fire timer with 5 seconds more).

The blm is very smooth now. Its rarely a problem, to obtain the 6 stacks for flare Star. The main problem i see and understand is, that the timer is very short for that (reason, why i say, 5 seconds more could be nice).
But, whe have paradox and fire3 to refresh the timer. In addition can whe cast swiftcast more often and have tripple casting 2 times. At last for me was it rare, that i runned out of time.

Ok, its sucks, to not have enough mp left, if you are forced to use 1 additional fire1. But even than, have whe despair, who could substitute the finisher, like to the EW times (is only a small dmg lose for 1 round).
Or, whe could use flare, to refresh the timer and obtain the missing stack. The price would be only a small dmg lose. But, whe would be able to cast Flarestar for that.

With mp recovery had i even no real problems. Yeah, after a ress has whe zero. But with the dream skill is it recovered enough very fast, that whe can than cast the ice spells.

In overall is the Blm very smooth and has only small "problems". But that are parts, where whe have to adjust for the moment.
The only "pain in the ...." part are all this running stuff (shit ghost dungeon and bee's^^). But that was allways a problem for Black mages

There's literally no excuse for a pure DPS class doing less aDPS than Pictomancer, and having a barely higher performance overall than Red Mage and ranged DPS. Samurai doesn't have problems with performance, so what's the deal?

[Keichi]

There's literally no excuse for a pure DPS class doing less aDPS than Pictomancer, and having a barely higher performance overall than Red Mage and ranged DPS. Samurai doesn't have problems with performance, so what's the deal?

A) That is only a question of numbers. Nothing with the current playstil of the Blm. The flow of Action is mostly nice of Blm and it simply feels like, you all are overreacting.

B) Do the devs even messeaure in this "adps" thing and so on? I never heared of that terms aside of F14 and even forget allways, what the Letters even means. In addition, did they not even want, that players use dps checkers.
And a other question would even be, how much % difference that even is. Low differences are ok. And as much as i allways hear, are the differences allways very low (under 10 or even 5% difference, what is in most cases nothing).

A bit more potency for flare Star could be nice (its has 400 base, with a boost of 110% -30% echo something + 80% fire buff- makes it 840 in total, it would be nice, if it is around 1k, like some other dps classes have it). But its nothing, what influence the playstile of the class.

[Galvuu]

A) That is only a question of numbers. Nothing with the current playstil of the Blm. The flow of Action is mostly nice of Blm and it simply feels like, you all are overreacting.

I genuinely cannot take this statement seriously. Did you play floors 2 and 3 of the new NM raids and felt BLM flowed nicely?
The fuse mechanic into double lariat into the Emerald Weapon mechanic in floor 3, or the aoe and heart spam in floor 2 followed, literally in 25 to 30s, by a "dodge aoe line spam" didn't feel disruptive to you, as a BLM?
Because those two mechanics are awful for BLM.
Bonus point for the mechanic in floor 4 where the boss spams forward/backward lasers and the blasts come out so fast you literally can't slidecast at all there.

BLM feels awful to play in these encounters, and you're so tightly pigeonholed into this static rotation that there's very little you can do to work around these obstacles without tanking your already low dps further. In EW, you had like 5 fire lines you could use to resolve these problems. Now, you pray for luck aoe rng or run around losing uptime.

[Kabooa]

I genuinely cannot take this statement seriously. Did you play floors 2 and 3 of the new NM raids and felt BLM flowed nicely?
.

Having gotten over the initial system shock, yeah.

Honey Bee still kind of sucks ass, but like most things regarding Black Mage, learning timings and movement patterns make it much more manageable. Likewise with BB.

Can't speak to how Savage will push that, and frankly I stand by my initial thoughts for changes, which I will list in the spodler below for sake of readability. I am not in favor of full reversion, almost never am strictly on the principle of always moving forward. As someone who found Endwalker's changes bad for the class (But positive for the player), I'm fine with DT Mage. The numbers need adjusting, but the increased pressure is right up my alley. I'm personally looking forward to crafting my i710, pentamelding, and pushing the throttle.

It sounds like those who favored EW Black Mage have a new home in Picto. I'm happy for those people. I am sorry that your favored version of the Black Mage is gone. I really am. I am, however, happy to have a version of it closer to the one I enjoyed more.

Rotational Changes

Astral Soul carries over.

Flarestar refreshes AF

Blizzard 3 / Transpose from AF3 restores 2k MP.

Blizzard 4 restores all MP

Ice Paradox returns, usable when entering UI from AF3.

All other GCDs in UI restore 3k MP.

I believe these changes allow a return of some of the flexibility previous Black Mage incarnations have, while also making Flarestar more lenient, allowing up to 6 excess Fire 4s before "Losing" the use of a Flarestar. Combined with appropriate potency shifts (Hell if I know what those should be), this provides both ease of use of the Developer Intended Rotation as well as reinstating the player puzzle of removing as many non-F4s/Despairs/Flarestars from used GCDs as prior.

The MP changes in particular provide UI with multiple purposes, be it hard turret (Immediate B4 into AF), extended repositioning (return of Ice Paradox for extended UI phase as well as using stocked instant casts / polyglots), and shorter lines (2 GCDs chosen from THead, Ice Paradox, or Polyglots) for 8k MP.

[Galvuu]

It sounds like those who favored EW Black Mage have a new home in Picto. I'm happy for those people. I am sorry that your favored version of the Black Mage is gone. I really am. I am, however, happy to have a version of it closer to the one I enjoyed more.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, but short fire lines (sometimes using Lucid Dreaming)- which became a massive loss in DT- were very common in ShB and even SB (although to a lesser extent). DT BLM is very different from ShB. Not gonna bother comparing to HW because that one is dramatically different just by virtue of how Enochian used to work (and the fact BLM had actual damage steroids back then).

[Kabooa]

I'm not sure what you mean by this, but short fire lines (sometimes using Lucid Dreaming)- which became a massive loss in DT- were very common in ShB and even SB (although to a lesser extent). DT BLM is very different from ShB. Not gonna bother comparing to HW because that one is dramatically different just by virtue of how Enochian used to work (and the fact BLM had actual damage steroids back then).

Yes, I am aware.

What I enjoy most about Black Mage is the pressure it puts upon itself, both from the encounter and its mechanic. This is something Endwalker largely alleviated, outside of certain phases in certain encounters. The extension of TCloud, charges and CD reduction of Sharpcast, combined with further polyglot stacking was the straw that broke the camel's back.

We'll start with Thunder. You always aim for 100% uptime with thunder, but the shift in potency in DT makes uptime more important and clipping more punishing. It adds pressure. The change to TCloud makes your ideal points to refresh thunder less flexible. It adds pressure.

Flarestar, while far too rigid at the moment, demands you to perform a specific condition that is currently all too easily lost - but it adds pressure. The addition of another strong AF GCD does the same so it doubles up.

I do not care about the standard, nonstandard, short line debate. Everyone plays black mage non-standard, even those who claim not to, because dummy fighting almost never happens and adjustments need to be made. What matters to me is whether or not the job applies suitable pressure, to which, DT is closer to StB and ShB than Endwalker is in that regard. That is what I enjoy.

[Galvuu]

snip.

No encounter in the history of this game was as rough to BLM as Golden Bahamut in UCoB during patches 4.X and especially p6 TOP.
Not sure how you feel anything has more pressure than that- it was extremely challenging to keep uptime and not drop AF in p6 TOP.

Regardless, all this talk of "pressure" that you're describing is subjective. The point of my reply was divining which "version of BLM" DT is like, according to you, because it's not HW and it's certainly not ShB either. Stormblood is probably the closest, but you had Sharpcast for movement and short lines (of 4x Fire IV after skipping Blizzard IV) were also used in some places, so that's also quite different from DT.
While EW was BLM at its most fluid, this absurd rigidity of DT never existed in the history of this job.
A lot of what you're saying can be construed for EW anyway- I can say it was much harder to weave ogcds in EW and that there were more of them, so it was more "pressure", whatever that means.