The Black Mage simplification completely misses the point

[Valence]

On a side note, I'm also concerned about the melee buffs to supposedly compensate for more downtime.

Because I bet they entirely miss the point of melee uptime. It was supposed to be hard, you were supposed to take risks for your uptime and greed GCDs with last second dodges or unconventional strategies and good party coordination.
It was not supposed to be literally impossible.
Running around doing nothing for 30% or more of a fight is not fun gameplay.

Well, I don't think this is going to happen in a system where everything is too binary. In the modern DDR model, it's either you can, or you can't. There is very little in between, bosses reposition themselves all the time to make sure the DDR pattern doesn't deviate, every fight is scripted to the T, there is only generally one target opportunity on the battlefield, and eventually the only metric they can play onto is fast disconnects from the boss to mildly challenge the melees, or to create bigger disconnects that result in GCD losses.

I'm curious why people are arguing that Black mage doesn't work in "DDR" gameplay. The whole point of black mage is trying to learn the mechs so you know when to use your movement tools and when you can place leylines and not have the need to move. Almost like Black mage already had enough movement tools and the "DDR" gameplay is getting used as a excuse for why they should make black mage into a boring dull job like every other job in the game. Mages are just physical ranged, Tanks don't need to boss position or aggro manage, or even support the group much, Melees don't really care about positional nor are really challenged much with down time instances, healers barely heal and have one damage button.

What's even the point of having a class system if all we are meant to enjoy is the encounters, why do we need 2 new jobs every expansion??? The design and direction of this game makes zero sense and it's easy to see why numbers of people are getting disinterested when one of the core fundamentals to the game (the classes) have no meaning and have been getting less and less meaningful with each expansion.

Something seriously needs to change I rather have a imbalanced mess of a job system if it means they actually felt meaningful rather then this false balance of making everything the same and "focus only on encounter"

I'm also tired of "bro enjoy the encounter design" like you know what would make those encounters more enjoyable? If my job interacted differently in that said encounter compared to other jobs. Maybe we actually need both.

Personally I do think most decent BLM players or informed players know that BLM's kit works and can be used for it (cannot say for 7.2 yet but there is very little reason it wouldnt, unless their vaunted new encounter design is actually wild).
But Aelin above still does have a point. It makes it very difficulty and unapproachable for the average player. It's still one of the remaining jobs that is punishing enough that you can not only drop casts and full uptime, but also drop enochian, drop flarestar, etc. The mobility toolkit is extensive but also probably the hardest to use (no weave slots, a lot of technical tools), and the job actually lost mobility in 7.0 with the disappearance of sharpcast, until 7.1 made Despair and Fire Paradox instants. And also, the inability to swap to ice on demand with non standard like it used to, or not as easily. It's what makes the job interesting to a lot of veterans and mains of course.
I just think that the DDR system is unfortunately something that is preventing the jobs to be very expressive else you end up with a game ultimately catered to hardcore players only.
Now you're gonna tell me, we need easy and hard jobs, and frankly, perhaps, but I hate that idea. I'd rather have jobs with accessibility and high ceiling all across the board and in my eyes it's the DDR that's in the way.

Agreed either way..