The destruction of BLM

[Daralii]

i just don't get how anyone found the job fun, regardless of timer or not. spamming fire iv is not engaging to me. BLM and picto both feel clunky. with picto, you have to draw paintings in combat which does no damage, so it feels like you're wasting time somehow. in- between pulls you can do it instantly at least.

There's a few jobs that just aren't for everyone, and i think a lot of the forum people will never realize that. (except machinist and bard, please help them god)

So old BLM sucked and deserved to be buried so that it could be a job for everyone, but not all jobs have to be for everyone.

[Quuoooote]

bla bla bla

I get some people like complexity and to struggle, but it is what it is.. BLM shouldn't be the cool kid's club.

You may as well be honest and quit with the fallacious appeal to popularity if you're going to reveal your hand anyways. You don't care about popularity. You're just happy to see something getting torn down and brought to your level. To hell with the people who enjoyed having depth in their gameplay; they were excluding me and making a cool kid's club without me.

The sad part is that nothing was ever stopping you from joining the club. All it'd take is a little bit of time and effort on your part. The overwhelming majority of jobs are already tailored to be as accessible and painless as possible, so why do we have to turn that number up to 100%? What's actually wrong with a single job providing a niche for people that want more engagement? Can you answer that question without appealing to popularity as if it has anything to do with objective quality? I'd really rather not go down the food analogy route, so please give this some genuine consideration.

[ElysiumDragon]

I'm gonna be really honest, this overexagerrating of the rework from some Black Mage players kinda seems like a weird form of "I suffered, so you should too, we should never improve things", and I just don't vibe with that sort of mentality.

[PyurBlue]

I'm gonna be really honest, this overexagerrating of the rework from some Black Mage players kinda seems like a weird form of "I suffered, so you should too, we should never improve things", and I just don't vibe with that sort of mentality.

People are upset because there were no improvements.

[Quuoooote]

I'm gonna be really honest, this overexagerrating of the rework from some Black Mage players kinda seems like a weird form of "I suffered, so you should too, we should never improve things", and I just don't vibe with that sort of mentality.

The flaw in this line of thinking is the assumption that Black Mage players are secretly some cabal of evil gatekeeping masochists, who only wanted to play it in order to lord some non-existent difficulty medal over everyone else's heads. In reality it's simply a matter of people choosing a job that spoke to them and engaged them properly. "Improving things" is entirely subjective; for some people Black Mage was never suffering at all, and the current devolution into WHM-lite gameplay is an affront to their preferred playstyle. If they wanted to play WHM-lite, they would've been playing White Mage. Black Mage players were never suffering, they played Black Mage because they wanted to. Framing it as if they were is intellectually dishonest.

To put it another way, I like doing Sudoku puzzles in my spare time. I typically go on Sudoku.com to do them. The website has six difficulties to choose from: Easy, Medium, Hard, Expert, Master, and Extreme. I typically pick Expert, because it's a good balance of challenging vs. winnable for me. I wouldn't expect someone who's not interested in learning Expert difficulty to "suffer" like I did learning more advanced strategies (which, I didn't suffer at all by the way, I chose to learn because I enjoy the game), but on the other side of the same coin it would be wildly inappropriate to rework Expert difficulty into "Easy Mode 4" because the people that only play Easy want a new flavor of Easy to choose from. I play Expert because I enjoy it and it's suited for the level of challenge that I prefer. If you don't like Expert, there are other options available to tailor your experience how you like. If I were stuck playing on Easy mode forever because it's all they offered, I would either find a different site to play on or stop playing entirely. And before anyone jumps at the opportunity to tell me, "Well Quote, looks like this game just isn't for you! Go unsub and play something else!" ...

By the same logic, what's the problem with finding a different job because Black Mage isn't for you? There were 20 other jobs/difficulties to choose from if Black Mage imposed too much "suffering" upon you! For what purpose do we pressingly NEED to flatten it out? It's not like it was rocket science either, so I have no idea where this idea that it was awful, miserable suffering came from. And if it was really so awful that you consider it suffering, then what's the problem with finding a different job that accommodates your desired level of difficulty? Why does every job need to be flattened out to the floor to leave more advanced players out in the cold? We're constantly reducing jobs, and the game is explicitly becoming narrower in scope to exclude players that enjoy being challenged by the gameplay. There's no way to look at it other than the game objectively becoming smaller. I consider that to be the opposite of an improvement.

[Kohashi]

And PCT/SMN’s play rate went down. So…….absolutely nothing was actually achieved

Especially when they buff PCT in 7.3 and all the meta chasers go back to PCT

Did you become a fortune teller meanwhile? Is this your part-time job aside from full-time forum whiner?

Yes, PCT went down as it got re-balanced and put more in line with the rest. It will still remain popular because the class design is actually really good especially for ultimates.

Each role has a least one played class. This is true in every single MMO and FF14 is no exception. Equal distribution among all classes does not exist.

Look at statistics regarding the new tier. War is least played 10%, WHM sitting at 7%, reaper, 3.2%, smn 1.8%, MCH 4%. Where are my Reaper mains to complain? Or Ninja sitting at 3.1% from m6s? LOL.


Anyway...........

[Supersnow845]

Did you become a fortune teller meanwhile? Is this your part-time job aside from full-time forum whiner?

Yes, PCT went down as it got re-balanced and put more in line with the rest. It will still remain popular because the class design is actually really good especially for ultimates.

Each role has a least one played class. This is true in every single MMO and FF14 is no exception. Equal distribution among all classes does not exist.

Look at statistics regarding the new tier. War is least played 10%, WHM sitting at 7%, reaper, 3.2%, smn 1.8%, MCH 4%. Where are my Reaper mains to complain? Or Ninja sitting at 3.1% from m6s? LOL.


Anyway...........

So if every role has a least played class then what was the problem of casters being BLM considering you said that it suddenly shooting up because it was buffed and made easier is a good thing

Like you can’t argue out of both sides of your mouth here that BLM changes are good because it moved BLM’s play rate but also that you’ll never change that there is a least popular class

(Oh and side note they managed to ruin PCT’s class design so I wouldn’t be too hopeful on that front unfortunately)

[Kohashi]

You may as well be honest and quit with the fallacious appeal to popularity if you're going to reveal your hand anyways. You don't care about popularity. You're just happy to see something getting torn down and brought to your level. To hell with the people who enjoyed having depth in their gameplay; they were excluding me and making a cool kid's club without me.

The sad part is that nothing was ever stopping you from joining the club. All it'd take is a little bit of time and effort on your part. The overwhelming majority of jobs are already tailored to be as accessible and painless as possible, so why do we have to turn that number up to 100%? What's actually wrong with a single job providing a niche for people that want more engagement? Can you answer that question without appealing to popularity as if it has anything to do with objective quality? I'd really rather not go down the food analogy route, so please give this some genuine consideration.

well what can I say? You will get over it, eventually and hopefully..

As for me, I don't get attached to any role. So in short, I don't give a F. I know games always change classes for the better or for the worse, and they always do this in a cycle. I am aware of that, and what I can do is play them, or not. There is not much to it. And if it reaches a point where the game itself becomes miserable for me and not much incentive to play, I switch. easy peasy.

[CidHeiral]

By the same logic, what's the problem with finding a different job because Black Mage isn't for you? There were 20 other jobs/difficulties to choose from if Black Mage imposed too much "suffering" upon you! For what purpose do we pressingly NEED to flatten it out? It's not like it was rocket science either, so I have no idea where this idea that it was awful, miserable suffering came from. And if it was really so awful that you consider it suffering, then what's the problem with finding a different job that accommodates your desired level of difficulty? Why does every job need to be flattened out to the floor to leave more advanced players out in the cold? We're constantly reducing jobs, and the game is explicitly becoming narrower in scope to exclude players that enjoy being challenged by the gameplay. There's no way to look at it other than the game objectively becoming smaller. I consider that to be the opposite of an improvement.

[ddwarbird]

I can totally understand why BLM are feeling like their identity has been gutted. Summoners were treated very much the same way. I can empathise because the same is true of every healer in the game. Pretty much every healer feels the same at the moment with the exception of Astrologian which has a considerable edge because of their ability to buff damage.

Unfortunately like many other games, DPS are the problem. The developers become obsessed with DPS at the detriment of every other role in the game. The problem is, if they started rebalancing the classes, people would complain and they might lose subs so they are scared to readdress the trinity. As far as I'm aware, no other MMO makes a Healer work as a "back-up DPS" because nobody is taking damage they cannot self-heal away.

But now they have created a game where healers are not required, even for top tier content, tanks are there and DPS is the only thing that matters as well as dodging.

In a way, FFXIV has the same problem that Dark Souls has post Dark Souls 2, where dodging became so dominant, other defensive strategies were neglected and ignored. Which makes the game lack choices and basically boils the game down to two buttons, dodge and attack.

P.S. This is not an attack on DPS players at all but a criticism of Square Enix's handling of a lack of variety when it comes to DPS classes and how other roles have been pushed out.