Square Enix seems to really think BLM is just a joke class and that no one plays it

[Zzzlol94]

Honestly. Whoever is in charge of BLM needs to stop having that as their job. I have no idea what these recent changes are, but not a single one of them is particularly beneficial. And that 1% NERF? ARE YOU ACTUALLY FOR REAL? LMAO. Seriously, the designer must be on some of that good stuff thinking BLM needed a nerf when PCT already outclasses BLM on literally every point. (And PCT also got a huge buff to their already busted opener too which is hilarious)

Despair instant cast. Thanks, now I have to relearn all of my muscle memory again.

2 LL charges. So we get 1 additional burst outside of the burst window... Might be useful for movement, but it's literally only useful ONCE for the entire fight. That's how much we got from this, we got 1 more out of party burst window ley lines, woo.

Flare 3 second cast. This is actually so hilarious, it's almost like they don't even know what spells BLM has. Not only does this further reduce the point of High Fire 2 existing (And Fire 2 after you get Flare in the first place), but it even further buffs the double transpose rotation, making it now the de facto best AoE rotation. The BLM AoE rotation was already so stupid by using transpose to get from AF3 to UI1, but now an AF1 Flare + AF3 Flare is the most powerful rotation. Compared to Endwalker, Dawntrail BLM is potentially the dumbest iteration of this job since the pre-buff 4.0 Stormblood BLM where Foul cost MP and F4/B4 still had 3 second casts. Which is also funny that Flare now has the same cast time as F4/B4 had in Heavensward.

Then the 1% Enochian nerf. I don't think I have to explain myself at how absolutely moronic this decision is. Square Enix, surely reverting this idiotic change isn't too difficult before 7.11? (Not like I'm doing ultimates anymore, TOP killed most of the interest I had after I cleared it a single time. And then making the worst savage tiers in the game's history the next ultimate REALLY killed all interest in Ultimates).


So yeah, for another patch, the clownshow that is Square Enix """"balance""""" patches continue. (also just remove MP from healers cause it really has no impact on anything anymore)

[Atmaweapon510]

2nd Leylines is huge. There are several ill timed boss mechanics where it's completely unfeasible to use leylines, forcing you to use it elsewhere and completely desync it from 2 minute raid buffs for the rest of the encounter and 2nd leylines lets you avoid that. It also lets BLM sometimes make use of an extra pot window over other jobs and rewards proper pot planning in regards to expected kill times. Finally, it essentially gives BLM a huge chunk of "non-sustained" damage that makes it easier to balance alongside PCT which essentially starts each encounter with 9 seconds of free cast time.

[Turtledeluxe]

I like how the game makes it unnfeasible to use a base skill, so the solution is to double the skill and nerf the job. Lmfao.

"This will make it lag behind PCT less maybe" is also an interesting take.

@OP

At the time of writing, this JP forum users post has 40+ likes and shares many of your criticisms as well as some solutions. It's not perfect but it's the most popular post I've seen about improving BLM in a while. Try Google translate and give it a like.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post6623255

[Supersnow845]

How did PCT get buffed? You already drew everything before the fight started, now you just get it pre-drawn for you

[Carighan]

You do realize that the game's boss plays BLM? You might want to re-iterate on your blame approach on why BLM "gets ignored" (you know, other than getting always-on-burst ley-lines, which is a buff so big I had not even considered it hypothetically as it felt entirely unrealistic).

[Atmaweapon510]

Did some quick calculator math.

As a result of instant cast Despair (because Despair has a cast time longer than its recast) BLM rotation got about 1.4%ish faster. An extra charge of Leylines is also worth about 2 extra casts. I think the Despair change alone offsets the Enochian damage reduction (which was actually about .75% damage loss).

They were probably conservative with the buffs because they wanted to see the impact of the quality of life changes brought by instant despair and non drifting Leylines.

[GoatOfWar]

The goal wasn't to buff BLM dramatically. The goal was to make it easier.
It's almost as if the braindead jobs invalidate the harder jobs when they aren't penalised on their damage, making nobody want to play the harder jobs.
The only way to alleviate this problem is to either make braindead jobs do a little bit less damage, which this community is staunchly opposed to. Or, make everything braindead, so that it doesn't matter what you play. so thanks everyone insisting their braindead job should do the same damage.

[Taranok]

You do realize that the game's boss plays BLM? You might want to re-iterate on your blame approach on why BLM "gets ignored" (you know, other than getting always-on-burst ley-lines, which is a buff so big I had not even considered it hypothetically as it felt entirely unrealistic).

Yes, and for most of the game's lifetime the class has been in a stagnant state of not getting any attention it needs while getting a ton of things that has slowly broken it more and more over time, to the point where modern BLM mains hated the original class design being reasserted because flexibility was never an intended part of BLM's kit, but a consequence of bad design decisions.

It actually stands to reason that BLM is in this state now is because Yoshi-P has refused to actually let the class get updated with things literally every other class has gotten already. This is, incidentally, the same bizarre state Monk was in for the longest time.

[Taranok]

The goal wasn't to buff BLM dramatically. The goal was to make it easier.
It's almost as if the braindead jobs invalidate the harder jobs when they aren't penalised on their damage, making nobody want to play the harder jobs.
The only way to alleviate this problem is to either make braindead jobs do a little bit less damage, which this community is staunchly opposed to. Or, make everything braindead, so that it doesn't matter what you play. so thanks everyone insisting their braindead job should do the same damage.

The goal was also to find ways to turn BLM into more of an rphys because fights are too movement heavy in the game, and they wanted to do it in the simplest way that requires the least dev time. It usually preludes a bigger rework, but as my last post specifically mentions, BLM has been weirdly immune to getting any reworks despite being in a state of needing something for a long time.

Unrelated to that, hard fights demand easy jobs. A hard job with hard fights means people just don't play the job. Easy fights, like what we had in SB and early ShB, can allow for harder jobs. And while I've always been a proponent of updating BLM, my goal was mostly to drop the skill floor to make it more approachable. Dropping the skill ceiling is basically a: "Yeah, I saw this coming, because the devs forced themselves into a corner." I don't really mind the despair change directly, but they really are throwing the baby out with the bathwater all the same.

[Turtledeluxe]

It will be interesting to see what happens once we have more data. It's certainly true that instant Despair is intended to make things easier-- I'm ambivalent about it. Is it a bad thing if the average BLM brings more to the table in a wider context? And if the above average BLM is only doing marginally more DPS, they're still doing a whole lot for nothing really. An above average PCT (even average) is still going to meaningfully wreck them, most likely.

And yeah devs have put themselves into this corner. I'm not a huge fan of justifying current design by going backward i.e it was just too hard to keep balancing old BLM so anything goes now, Yoshi P should have acted sooner. In an ideal world that would have happened, there's still an active ongoing audience for this job, or any job. There's still a larger context the job has to fit into.

Whatever job or role you are talking about, the past is effectively meaningless. Devs have shown they are not going backward. It's full steam ahead and they must be held accountable for current day design.