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

[Realfoxy]

...

I like BLM's sustain damage style, its what it's built around and I don't want them trying to rework it to be just like other burst DPS, but I feel like most of these changes to the job weren't made with enough consideration for what the new content is like. I did not need the thunder damage changes to give me a new thing to fret about and worry about dropping thunderhead or the DoT itself since you're discouraged from refreshing too early now, or a new slowcast spell that punishes me from missing even one fire iv because i tried to adjust for a mechanic. I don't think its impossible to add stuff to BLM that makes it more capable of dealing with these kinds of fights without undermining the core of the class too. I'm kind of bummed that the devs either didn't realize (or just didn't care) that nonstandard rotations existence was a symptom of Black mage's flexibility, and by haphazardly trying to neuter it they took part of BLM's ability to adjust for mechs with it.

I agree.

The fundamental problem with Dawntrail BLM is that the developers cared more about removing flexibility and absolutely murdering nonstandard than they cared about actually addressing any of the job's pain points.

Look at the Umbral Soul changes. People have been asking for such a thing for literally years to help make the BLM levelling experience less crap and we only got it just now when they accidentally broke the job in synced content.

[Sylvain]

I progged ex1 and had a rough time with it on BLM but I felt like it was doable, but ex2 .

For the love of me, can someone explain me, beside attempting to do 100% perf by doing everything that is possible to gain every little drop of dps from Xeno, Transpose, 3cast etc at the cost of movement, how is ex2 rough?
you litterally have 1 movement to do at 30s
Then you can litterally slide cast until the donuts arrive.
During the donuts, you can even get hit because as R1 or R2, your vulnerability won't be a problem at all during the share...
During the shared line you're litterally a turret

Like the only annoying part is the bumpy second part and that's really about it...

Where are people struggling on that fight (provided they're not chassing 100 perf and are just trying to do the fight with decent dps)

Unless I got confused and EX2 is actually the bird.

[meie]

For the love of me, can someone explain me, beside attempting to do 100% perf by doing everything that is possible to gain every little drop of dps from Xeno, Transpose, 3cast etc at the cost of movement, how is ex2 rough?
you litterally have 1 movement to do at 30s
Then you can litterally slide cast until the donuts arrive.
During the donuts, you can even get hit because as R1 or R2, your vulnerability won't be a problem at all during the share...
During the shared line you're litterally a turret

Like the only annoying part is the bumpy second part and that's really about it...

Where are people struggling on that fight (provided they're not chassing 100 perf and are just trying to do the fight with decent dps)

Unless I got confused and EX2 is actually the bird.

EX2 is mostly free for blm's once you get the mechanics down, think the person just might found some overly complex way to process the mechanics. EX1 is far more annoying, because some mechanics get you close to using all movement resources and then depending on how the mechanics play out, you have to run around the arena back and forth, or just stand in place.

[Keichi]

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

[Burningskull]

Why not just remove the timers on Astral Fire and Umbral Ice? Timer's on any ability aren't fun anyway.

[Azebra]

EX2 is mostly free for blm's once you get the mechanics down, think the person just might found some overly complex way to process the mechanics. EX1 is far more annoying, because some mechanics get you close to using all movement resources and then depending on how the mechanics play out, you have to run around the arena back and forth, or just stand in place.

This is what I was saying yes, Ex1 is more intense movement wise but I found the mechanics easier to understand so I could focus on how to use my resources, versus Ex2 whose mechanics I found more difficult to conceptualize mentally so I had a rough time focusing on my rotation. This was likely just a me thing though, and I agree apart from the one section of the fight that I mentioned prior that ex2 is pretty straightforward on BLM and theres enough gaps between movement sections for stuff like triplecast to come back up.

Why not just remove the timers on Astral Fire and Umbral Ice? Timer's on any ability aren't fun anyway.

To each their own, I find the timers a lot of fun even though they make me mald when I drop because it gives a sense of mastering the class when you learn to get it down and understand when you can cast in a fight and get greedy vs play it safe. To me half the fun is in learning to work around the timers, I just think in the current state of the class the balance has been tipped where it feels more pressing than before. I don't think its so cut and dry to say "well the timers feel bad right now, so get rid ofthem altogether" stuff like fire phase being more busy and you can't cast fire 1 as a panic refresh because then you lose flare star or ice phase lacking paradox to refresh its timer are part of the reason it feels worse than before.

[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?

[Ferrinus]

I've posted this elsewhere, but since I've broadly always played standard and never liked having to deal with mana ticks, I like the basic ideas behind the rework. Changes I really want to see are:

1. Button consolidation (F4/B4, Flare/Freeze, etc)
2. Remove Thunderstorm and just make Thunder spells castable whenever you're in astral or umbral state
3. Remove the Astral Gauge and display astral soul stacks on the main gauge instead (they can replace umbral hearts and first appear one by one then light up one by one)
4. Potency increases on HF2/HB2 so that they're worth casting in the AoE rotation even if you could hypothetically use transpose to skip past them

More elaborate mechanical changes I'd like:

5. Umbral paradox back
6. Flare Star becomes castable as soon as you drop to 0MP as long as you have at least 3 (4? idk) astral hearts and are still in fire mode. Its damage could scale slightly with your heart count but this would help to make sure you could finish even truncated fire phases with it.
7. Remove Scathe's MP cost and give it some new utility (health drain, timer refresh, something)

[Basteala]

Honestly I don't think it would kill them to make Flare Star instant. Or increase the potency by 200-400. Or both. It's objectively worse than Xenoglossy in every way but the AoE which...doesn't matter in most raid fights.

[Galvuu]

Black Mage is not a burst job.

Increasing the potency of Xenoglossy further, with three stacks of it, is going to force us to use them in the party buff window, restricting our movement options, and generally not feeling fun to play.

While I agree with almost everything you're saying, this point isn't completely true. It kinda hurts me to say this, as I started playing BLM in HW where being a steady damage dealer was its thing, every expansion moved BLM away from that and more into a burst job.
This is the damage profile of the BLM dps on 12Sp2 in EW, a dummy fight, overlayed with the overall raid dps:


You can see that, for the most part, the peaks follow that of the general trend. By EW, a lot of mastering BLM was tied to actually fitting your burst (3/4 Xenos, Paradox, Thundercloud and Despair) into the burst windows by manipulating your fire lines to get the required length and mobility.
DT might go back on this trend, but I feel the triple Polyglot stack and Flare Star somehow further pigeonhole BLM into this direction.

As an aside, and this is an idea I picked up from playing Picto, making Flare Star into a slower cast (like 5s) with very high potency (think something like 700 or 800 before the AF multiplier) might help with mobility. I can't begin to describe how comfortable it is to be able to use Holy in White/Comet in Black and Swiftcast a motif to get 8s of mobility. I feel doing something similar with Flare Star, assuming they're committed to that horrid spell, is a good idea mid/long term.