Black Mage 7.2 feedback

[HikariKurosawa]

Are we taking bets for ending up with another Foundation to Build Upon that never gets Built Upon

They can easily expand on paradox and umbral hearts, they can easily add an UI finisher, they can make fire phase last longer by doubling how effective umbral hearts are by making paradox put them in a state of "deep freeze" or something, with that also being the condition for a UI finisher.

This is the logical evolution of the job, and it's likely what will happen.

[Supersnow845]

Genuine question why would you ever want to make the fire phase longer? Like new manafont being “now I fire phase again” already feels terrible because it just reduces fire 4 to glare status.

Like WAR has a similar problem where old WAR was about organising your rotation around trying to get like 3 fell cleaves in a row, now it feels like half the WAR mains would be happy if ever button was just fell cleave

Do people not feel like these big important buttons are getting ruined of importance by the fact that now you do them so often. I can’t imagine how boring an 18 fire 4 fire phase would be (24 if manafont reset the deep freeze on the umbral hearts), like that’s almost a minute of continuous fire phase once you include paradox, despair and flare star

[Carighan]

I agree, I kinda wish ice and fire were more balanced and ice felt more meaningful. Would be a pretty big shift in class design though I bet?

[Hellebore_Ghrian]

When I'm playing the current BLM I'm feeling like this :

https://youtu.be/Wx2GHvx6d8k?t=9

[Rithy255]

When I'm playing the current BLM I'm feeling like this :

https://youtu.be/Wx2GHvx6d8k?t=9

Pretty much the same cast times and everything

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

I agree, I kinda wish ice and fire were more balanced and ice felt more meaningful. Would be a pretty big shift in class design though I bet?

Making Ice phase more interesting would sound nice ngl... maybe that way we could also gain Frost Star from PvP in PVE.

[Supersnow845]

At risk of my usual “everything used to be better” I do miss when ice phase actually felt like a preparation phase that was designed to augment the fire phase. It made the fire phase feel more impactful as well

Now the ice phase is so unimportant in the context of the wider rotation that it both feels completely irrelevant and the fire phase do don’t feel powerful anymore because you barely feel like the ice phase is prepping it anymore

[nuuhku]

I don't understand why black mage can't have a different difficulty level and playstyle to it. I think that the fundamental differences should be the reason to have a class system that's more than just aesthetics. Particularly for black mage, it was a rewarding and engaging system that I enjoyed and I don't think I was the only one. It wasn't even the hardest system in the game, other jobs still have something interesting other than the basic combo in them like ninjutsu, sen, black and white mana etc. Enochian was actually easier to keep up since you didn't have a two-minute burst to think about. Without enochian timer, the only thing left for black mage is just casting spells, which also is now trivial since the cast times are so short.

This time the changes were said to be because of "difficulty casting spells in the new battle design", but at least for me that wasn't the case after trying out the new fights. It just feels like these changes to make it easier were made for no reason. If they actually wanted to make enochian during mechanics less punishing for new players, I think there could've been other options than just removing it outright, like instead of it dropping to zero it could still be one astral stack with reduced damage or just adding a few seconds in the timer.

I understand reworking old jobs is a thing that happens in this game, but I thought they would've waited for the 8.0 job reworks that have been mentioned in many occasions, and not suddenly change black mage now. I definitely don't want the next iterations of jobs be even more simple and with condensed buttons, but that seems to be the direction when looking at pictomancer and viper... I think pre-7.2 black mage was a great job that didn't need to go yet. As it currently is, it doesn't feel like a blank slate to which build upon, just the old job with all systems completely removed.

[Carighan]

I don't understand why black mage can't have a different difficulty level and playstyle to it.

Ignoring the specifics, there is a general argument to be made that in a class-based RPG, classes of a similar role should not be overly different in complexity, depth and efficacy. Multiplayer-games of course, in singleplayer this is almost opposite.

The reason is in the way you want to do balance. If say, Black Mage, is 25% more difficult to play, how do you balance it?
Does it to the same damage as an easier class when played perfectly? As in, there's no actual pay-off for playing that good?
Or does it do the same damage if played "the same", and at perfect play deals ~25% more damage to offset the 25% increase in player difficulty?

If you opt for the former, do you balance for the increased wipe-chance when bringing Black Mages in tough fights, since they struggle just as much with any DPS check but are more complex, hence it's easier to screw up? Or do you ignore it?
If the latter is what you do, do you balance DPS checks for "Oops, all Black Mages"? Or for no-Black-Mages? If it's the former, the fights are now factually undoable without Black Mages, and hence the 25% extra difficulty of BLM is in fact a requirement to being able to clear some fights. If not, the fight is far too easy bringing Black Mages, and you would need to also offset this with a complexity that begets a far greater wipe-chance, no?

None of these are unsolvable, they're just design decisions. But you need to decide on one, and it influences the entire rest of the game design as this would need to be a baseline decision to make, independent of any specific class. And that's why most multiplayer-games just won't do this. It restricts future design, in particular towards adding classes, fights, encounters or contexts.

[Azurarok]

Ignoring the specifics, there is a general argument to be made that in a class-based RPG, classes of a similar role should not be overly different in complexity, depth and efficacy.

Wasn't each job's difficulty and output closer within their own roles back in ShB (except maybe PhysRanged)? They were still more different from eachother than they are now though.

Perhaps their shift to having easy/hard jobs within roles was due to role quests requiring players to pick up at least one job from each.