BLM feedback.

[Krakatoa]

The thing about the changes is that they feel so ham fisted and not thought out at all. It's extremely obvious by now that the entire goal was 2 parts: Eliminate every single non-standard line including transpose -> F3P, and change how mana regen works to eliminate clunky mana regen situations and help SpS BLM.

Both of these goals are perfectly fine goals, but they chose to amputate the entire limb instead of attempting to heal the problem naturally.

If they wanted to eliminate non-standard lines, all they had to do was examine why they exist at all. If you were to increase the potencies of Blizzard III and Blizzard IV, and make doing that line the highest potency option, most all of non-standard evaporates naturally as it's no longer the best potency option. Creative players could still use non-standard lines to adjust for movement, but it would be at the cost of potency (in some situations).

To go a step further, if you want to ensure that players adhere to the standard line, make Ice phase interesting! Scrap Flare Star entirely, and instead make it so that F4s increase the potency of Blizzard III, and if you complete all F4s, B3 becomes Absolute Zero or something along those lines. Now I can get the reward for my F4s on the back end, Ice phase is more interesting, and I'm less punished for missing one or two F4s because B3 would still be higher than normal due to the scaling previously mentioned. You could even make it so that Absolute Zero buffs B4, further incentivizing planning ahead to ensure you can try and find a reasonable spot to cast those spells.

[Wiloh]

Yes, please just go back to Endwalker Black Mage. These changes feel like a slap in the face after playing it in Endwalker and finding out it was the most fun job in the game. I would rather Black Mage have gotten the treatment most other jobs got which was no changes except a followup ogcd action on something because SE didn't know how to add something without breaking the whole existing rotation. Just make flare star an upgrade of despair, make flare star stacks not disappear in UI (or remove the gauge), and give us a small amount of movement back with Ice Paradox. It's hilarious to look at PCT and see how much movement it has between GCDs (and support abilities and a 20s movement ability with a movement speed increase?!) and then wonder what happened to Black Mage. It honestly feels like it just wasn't play tested at all and all of the changes were a knee jerk reaction to kill nonstandard rotations (which, who really cares if there is a nonstandard rotation?) which just ended up hurting everyone. It's funny because I always assumed Black Mage would be in a good spot because it's always had one of the most interesting rotations with the most dedicated players. Now it feels like who ever designed it either hates Black Mage players or is just bad at designing jobs, which I know the second part isn't true because the new jobs are really well designed!

[PyurBlue]

To go a step further, if you want to ensure that players adhere to the standard line, make Ice phase interesting! Scrap Flare Star entirely, and instead make it so that F4s increase the potency of Blizzard III, and if you complete all F4s, B3 becomes Absolute Zero or something along those lines.

Adding a high damage ice spell has a lot of merit and would have been more of a change up than Flare Star. Such a spell could have also been the focus of the MP change, allow it to be an instant MP restore if SE felt like we really needed one while also keeping MP regen to allow for more dynamic play. I'd support this over what we have now.

[Galvuu]

I think this post has the best feedback post DT dropping.
Just gonna leave this here:


Least amount of clears in current extremes (by 25% less than the second-to-last job, Monk, and just a timid 4.1x less clears than Pictomancer). BLM has always been a niche job but it has never, since HW, been dead last. It's been bottom 3 a few times, but never dead last, and definitely not with this insane gap to the most played caster.
This job feels horrid to play. I've been playing a lot of pictomancer, and it's night and day. I just remember all those people who never touched BLM saying how accessible and "newbie friendly" it was going to become... yea, that's working out fantastic.
It's not just the potency either- this feels bad to play, like you're playing a job from HW but with modern encounter design.
DT being the death knell of this job wasn't in my bingo card, but I guess at least we have Pictomancer.
Genuinely sad about how this turned out. Enough 4am posting, I go lament the current state of job design in my sleep.

[Router]

I think this post has the best feedback post DT dropping.
Just gonna leave this here:


Least amount of clears in current extremes (by 25% less than the second-to-last job, Monk, and just a timid 4.1x less clears than Pictomancer). BLM has always been a niche job but it has never, since HW, been dead last. It's been bottom 3 a few times, but never dead last, and definitely not with this insane gap to the most played caster.
This job feels horrid to play. I've been playing a lot of pictomancer, and it's night and day. I just remember all those people who never touched BLM saying how accessible and "newbie friendly" it was going to become... yea, that's working out fantastic.
It's not just the potency either- this feels bad to play, like you're playing a job from HW but with modern encounter design.
DT being the death knell of this job wasn't in my bingo card, but I guess at least we have Pictomancer.
Genuinely sad about how this turned out. Enough 4am posting, I go lament the current state of job design in my sleep.

Yep. For context, BLM used to be about as popular as BRD, with BRD sometimes even falling behind on the rankings. Now BRD has 50% more players despite very little changing with the job in DT. While it's possible that a bunch of people picked up BRD, the difference is more likely due to a huge amount of players dropping BLM.

[GartredZW]

I just don't get why they'd do this to Black Mage of all things. I can maybe see the idea that you should give a reason to play the shiny new caster job.
1, They didn't do that with the melees in lieu of Viper. I haven't tried any of them, but I've heard that the changes to Dragoon, Ninja, and Monk are pretty well received. I've also heard that Reaper and Samurai are mostly the same.
2, Why do it to Black mage in particular when it's already the least played caster with a reputation for high difficulty?
This makes me think that someone genuinely thought these were good changes to make. Probably without a lot of experience playing Black Mage in anything other than Stone Sky Sea.
Opinions on what's "the issue" are varied among these threads, so I can only hope that they take something from the multitudes of upset loyal practitioners of the Dark Arts, and fix this soon.
If you ask me, Revert the changes to Paradox and Thunder. Including the hard-cast Fire-Paradox.
Make the MP gain from Blizz4 5000, and give 5000 to Ice Paradox.
Change Flare Star to a different ability (we'll call it Astral Star) that can only be cast in Ice phase. Whenever you cast Fire 4 with no Umbral Hearts, you instead gain an Astral Heart (Same place in the guage, just red) then once you use Astral Star, it's damage scales based on how many Astral Hearts you had before going in to Ice. 300 for 1, 400 for 2, 550 for 3. (Yes, that does mean you'd get to use it normally in the normal opener, thanks for noticing.)
This leaves Manafont in a weird place, so how about it also grants a buff that allows Astral Star in fire attunement too. Or maybe just not have it be a pocket ice phase in the first place. Make Manafont into a 4000MP restore that also grants a buff to your next three spells, just enough for two Fire4s and a Despair. (I didn't come up with that. I can't remember who did though. sorry.)

Oddly enough, if you asked me what I'd do to improve Black Mage before the Dawntrail media tours and live letters, I wouldn't know what to tell you. I like the idea of Manafont not being on a 2 minute exact cooldown. Redrawing leylines is a pretty good concept. Aside from that, it was in a pretty good place. I already had a ton of fun just doing any normal or high end content. The one thing I did have a major gripe with is down-syncing. Not having Despair before level 72 makes dropping enochian almost inevitable. Losing Fire4 feels just terrible. And of course, the leveling experience wasn't helped a single bit in Dawntrail. It's been made much worse by the removal of MP ticks. Getting Umbral Soul at 35 doesn't even help that much. Without umbral hearts, I don't really have any reason to stay in Umbral Ice for longer than it takes to regen MP. Might as well just keep the MP regen, and add in an extra way to get it back just in case you're like me, and you love your spell speed too much that you couldn't get two MP ticks under leylines some of the time.

I might try Red Mage again. I heard they're doing pretty well these days.

[Sunako]

I think this post has the best feedback post DT dropping.
Just gonna leave this here:


Least amount of clears in current extremes (by 25% less than the second-to-last job, Monk, and just a timid 4.1x less clears than Pictomancer). BLM has always been a niche job but it has never, since HW, been dead last. It's been bottom 3 a few times, but never dead last, and definitely not with this insane gap to the most played caster.
This job feels horrid to play. I've been playing a lot of pictomancer, and it's night and day. I just remember all those people who never touched BLM saying how accessible and "newbie friendly" it was going to become... yea, that's working out fantastic.
It's not just the potency either- this feels bad to play, like you're playing a job from HW but with modern encounter design.
DT being the death knell of this job wasn't in my bingo card, but I guess at least we have Pictomancer.
Genuinely sad about how this turned out. Enough 4am posting, I go lament the current state of job design in my sleep.

I remember at the beginning of Stormblood MCH and SMN were least played jobs. Now both of these jobs are dumbed down and both are one of the most played old jobs in the game.

[Taranok]

This job feels horrid to play. I've been playing a lot of pictomancer, and it's night and day. I just remember all those people who never touched BLM saying how accessible and "newbie friendly" it was going to become... yea, that's working out fantastic.
It's not just the potency either- this feels bad to play, like you're playing a job from HW but with modern encounter design.

Welcome to Black Mage. Not the fake black mage that nonstandard worshippers built up as somehow being the real class that was so flexible and freeform because of abusing bad design. The real, core Black Mage. It is a very sloppily designed class that has design decisions made before ARR even launched still present in it because the devs never bothered to actually fix the damned class. In part because of people constantly saying how much they loved the class because the class was so perfect, even though it relied on effectively turning the class into something it wasn't to achieve this. Look at the class without all the nonstandard exploits. This is Black Mage.

To give you an idea of how bad this class is, I saw the problems it has that people are complaining about right now back in 2021. Here's the thread I made where BLM mains who abused nonstandard claimed the class was perfect and I was crazy.

Personally, I don't like pictomancer. It feels like 5 core ideas roughly thrown together and called a class. It feels rough around the edges and half-baked. BLM is in a bad spot, but at least its idea is coherent, even if BLM's core is literally incompatible with DT, BLM itself is still a coherent rotation that has persisted since HW, and not just: "Random crap, go!" the class.

But I'm also going to say this, the only reason I'm happy with the state of BLM right now is that, now that the nonstandard wool has been removed from all BLM main's eyes, they can finally see just how rotten the class actually is.

I just hope that when this is all said and done, the devs revitalize the turret caster gameplay within their encounter meta. The death of turret caster gameplay will be the single largest example of homogenization the game has ever had if it finally and truly dies.

[Ririta]

Welcome to Black Mage. Not the fake black mage that nonstandard worshippers built up as somehow being the real class that was so flexible and freeform because of abusing bad design. The real, core Black Mage. It is a very sloppily designed class that has design decisions made before ARR even launched still present in it because the devs never bothered to actually fix the damned class. In part because of people constantly saying how much they loved the class because the class was so perfect, even though it relied on effectively turning the class into something it wasn't to achieve this. Look at the class without all the nonstandard exploits. This is Black Mage.

To give you an idea of how bad this class is, I saw the problems it has that people are complaining about right now back in 2021. Here's the thread I made where BLM mains who abused nonstandard claimed the class was perfect and I was crazy.

Personally, I don't like pictomancer. It feels like 5 core ideas roughly thrown together and called a class. It feels rough around the edges and half-baked. BLM is in a bad spot, but at least its idea is coherent, even if BLM's core is literally incompatible with DT, BLM itself is still a coherent rotation that has persisted since HW, and not just: "Random crap, go!" the class.

But I'm also going to say this, the only reason I'm happy with the state of BLM right now is that, now that the nonstandard wool has been removed from all BLM main's eyes, they can finally see just how rotten the class actually is.

I just hope that when this is all said and done, the devs revitalize the turret caster gameplay within their encounter meta. The death of turret caster gameplay will be the single largest example of homogenization the game has ever had if it finally and truly dies.

What is the "abuse of non standard" to you? You keep saying that but don't actually give examples of how it somehow sweetened the "poorly designed real black mage".

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

What is the "abuse of non standard" to you? You keep saying that but don't actually give examples of how it somehow sweetened the "poorly designed real black mage".

Apparently shortening Fire lines is "unintended gameplay" and "abusing bad game design", when the basic idea of "use as much Fire IV in a short time as possible" has been upheld the entire time. I find it unbelievable to call the use of one of your oldest skills, Transpose, in clever ways and skipping certain spells sometimes for fight or cooldown alignment "abuse".

What is actually sad though is how much the job had to be gutted (Umbral Paradox, Sharpcast management, MP recovery rework, Thunder rework) for them to return and put their tinfoil hat on and go "see, I told you the job is bad if you remove all the QoL that is intended to help you deal with new fight mechanics and be creative in your gameplay, it's a fundamentally badly designed job" like wow, no shit.

The irony in their and other people's negative stance to "nonstandard" and how they are happy bordering on delusion that it got destroyed is that the steps that were taken to kill nonstandard (which wasnt even that crazy of a gain anyways) actually hurt Standard BLM equally and only made the job HARDER for beginners, NOT easier.