The (Possible) Shape of Black Mage to Come

[Taranok]

Point 1: This will happen because the second they make DSR for DT, the over-time nature of BLM is going to collapse in on itself, again. This combined with its ridiculously low play rate still is going to necessitate a pretty big rework, and the burst meta is here to stay, at least given EW and DT's track record.

It also took them two years for BLM's damage to be fixed, required making the class literally overpowered, and it still was one of the least played jobs in the game outright. Encounter design drives class design, and class design drives encounter design. If we want over-time classes to come back, we need to demand the devs stop making fights that punish over-time classes. Fights like DSR or P8S. And instead make fights like early ShB or especially Stormblood.



Point 2: This will be necessitated because they'll see how popular PCT is, and the issues BLM is running into. As part of a rework, giving better slidecast opportunity will need to happen. And then some new intern will turn a class that famously doesn't get damage from oGCDs and give it 50 billion oGCDs, making the class extremely clunky, and destroying the class.

If you don't want point 2 to come across, every single caster needs to be screaming from the rooftops to reinstate turret caster gameplay. Which means a complete 180 on the boss design started in EW back towards mechanics that target specific roles instead of 8 man dances like pinax that horrifically punish casters that don't have enough movement or the right movement. That is the only way to prevent this. Encounter design is the problem.

Every summoner needs to ask for summoner to have cast bars again, every RDM needs to ask for RDM in its current form to be the most mobile caster without changing it (meaning make every other caster less mobile, )and every caster needs to scream bloody murder about fight design like EX1, because that is what's ultimately going to push BLM towards this so-called healer GCD. It is the natural consequence of EW's hyper-movement dance design.

If we want BLM to avoid this fate, we need to ask for fight design like Stormblood. Especially Neo Exdeath and God Kefka. Where mechanics would target some roles more than others and caster movement was extremely limited, with attacks such as delta attack targeting casters but not really rphys, tanks, or melee, while things like boss jumps across the arena targeted melee and tanks, but not casters. Nevermind things like BJ/CCs jump into apoc ray, that target rphys specifically in TEA. We need fight design with this style to come back if we want to bring turret casters to be viable, but EW/DT fight design is a giant middle finger to turret caster playstyle, which is painfully obvious in BLM's hideously low play rate in both EW and DT. The devs won't care about designing caster-friendly mechanics again if casters aren't casters. Healer GCD and Summoner basically are forcing casters to handle like rphys, which is the problem in entirety.



As for point 3. Oh boy do I disagree with you. Every single class designed in ARR or HW has had critical design flaws. What you're asking for is Summoner snapshotting with superdots to come back, greased lightning and its many drops with things like tornado kick to drop GL to come back. Or Dragoon with random positionals and BotD timers that fell apart at specific skill speeds. Eno-chan is ARR-era class design even though it's distinctly from HW. AF/UI is hideously flawed in execution, and is the source of BLM's hyper-punishing gameplay design. That doesn't mean the class shouldn't have the fire phase going into an ice phase, but that BLM mains need to rethink how that is accomplished, because the timers are actively and aggressively holding the class back.

Removing the timers would allow the devs to prune a ton of redundant abilities that exist primarily to service AF/UI itself, expand the UI rotation into a main component of the class instead of something the playerbase wants to skip or avoid, and all of a sudden the extreme punishment from dropping timers just disappears so the class becomes more accessible while maintaining its core HW/SB design that DT reinforced. When I say to remove AF/UI timers, and even the concept of AF/UI as a stance, I mean to get rid of buffs with (what used to be) hidden strengths, the pointless meme rotations that complicate the job without making it meaningfully better like hypermeme or transpose->firestarter, and free up space to turn BLM into more than just a fire mage by another name. Monk is in a better spot without GL, DRG is in a better spot without BotD timers. BLM will be in a vastly better spot without AF/UI timers. Especially if the devs murder the thunder dot and add in thunder as its own distinct mini rotation it can launch whenever. Hell, removing AF/UI timers would literally be as liberating to the class as removing enochian timers was back in stormblood, despite keeping the stupid 1m oGCD you had to press to get into enochian.

[ElevatedCosmonaut]

Fights like DSR or P8S.

There are many points wrong with your post. BLM was perfectly capable in ShB and EW without these so called "pointless meme rotations", (Except in P1 TOP), and just because a mechanic persists from ARR doesn't mean it's inherently flawed! I'd argue the only persistent flawed thing about BLM that stuck, was server mana ticks! AF/UI is no different in practice from the buff upkeep you did on classes like Monk or VPR, and it's an aspect of the class that's a necessary learning process, which intuitively teaches you the ebb and flow of it.

Though I must ask. What specifically about P8S on BLM was difficult? Looking at your logs, you haven't done the fight on BLM once! Though I do not want to gatekeep opinions based on personal experience of the problem, what was the issue there?

[Realfoxy]

It also took them two years for BLM's damage to be fixed, required making the class literally overpowered, and it still was one of the least played jobs in the game outright. Encounter design drives class design, and class design drives encounter design. If we want over-time classes to come back, we need to demand the devs stop making fights that punish over-time classes. Fights like DSR or P8S. And instead make fights like early ShB or especially Stormblood.

DSR and P8S were fine on BLM, even if you just stuck to the standard rotation. DSR has movement, yes, but it comes in short bursts, with plenty of time between those bursts to get resources back. P8S was completely fine for caster movement as well.

It's only TOP that was actively hostile to BLM and that was due to P6 only, which I think we can all agree, while a fun challenge, was not a very well designed phase.

Anyway, here's my hot take: Endwalker nonstandard was not only good gameplay, but should have been officially supported by the developers. This would allow them to balance it properly and account for it in fight design. Because it allowed for BLM to play into buffs and adapt to downtime, it allowed for the job to compensate for its weaknesses at a high level of play where those weaknesses actually mattered. Other developers of other games have incorporated similar mechanics into their own gameplay balance, why can't SE do it?

Now that they've removed it, we're in a world where it's competing with a job that dumps insane potency into buffs and destroys fights with downtime, leaving SE with a balance problem of their own creation going into FRU.