Do you think the devs intended multi-flare blm?

[Mishayangg]

I think you are overestimating BLM's DPS. They may be best at AoE damage, but the entire speed of the run depends on both trash+boss kills. Any DRG/BRD should have no trouble pulling higher DPS than BLM over the entire run. In fact, my fastest runs have always been with DRG + BRD.

After several hundreds of pugs in 2.2, my experience is very different. BLM + BLM absolutely melts everything. Other classes simply don't even come close. A raging strikes flare crit on 6 mobs is way way beyond anything any other class can dish. SMN can get close but only with great luck on the bane spreads.

[Mirili]

You can do an endless chain of flares if you can time it correctly. Using Flare around 2 seconds after you get a mana tic from Umbral Ice (Transpose) makes it so you receive a tic of MP after the flare goes off. That might be what he's referring to. Quelling Strikes would probably help in this situation, but you obviously can't have it up every time you need to AoE. Or even most times.

And BLMs want buffs to their "viability" anywhere there's high-movement fights, or need heavy single target damage. So, basically anything that isn't clearing Brayflox trash.

[whoopeeragon]

You can do an endless chain of flares if you can time it correctly. Using Flare around 2 seconds after you get a mana tic from Umbral Ice (Transpose) makes it so you receive a tic of MP after the flare goes off. That might be what he's referring to. Quelling Strikes would probably help in this situation, but you obviously can't have it up every time you need to AoE. Or even most times.

And BLMs want buffs to their "viability" anywhere there's high-movement fights, or need heavy single target damage. So, basically anything that isn't clearing Brayflox trash.

If you're using Flare from Umbral Ice, you really shouldn't be pulling hate from ANY tank considering how low damage it is.

[Radacci]

You can do an endless chain of flares if you can time it correctly. Using Flare around 2 seconds after you get a mana tic from Umbral Ice (Transpose) makes it so you receive a tic of MP after the flare goes off. That might be what he's referring to. Quelling Strikes would probably help in this situation, but you obviously can't have it up every time you need to AoE. Or even most times.

And BLMs want buffs to their "viability" anywhere there's high-movement fights, or need heavy single target damage. So, basically anything that isn't clearing Brayflox trash.

yes, i did bray SR. we were 2 BLM. the other BLM was 5ilv higher, and did 2x more flares than me, and did only 10% more damage in total. and i wasnt even using raging strike, convert, mp pot, food...he did.
so those ice flares....rubbish.

[Recaldy]

They were expecting fights using melee DPS but look what happened? >_>

[Moirear]

BLM dps is highly overrated. Parsing has skewed some people's perception of it further.

BLM AoE dps is arguably very high in the triple Flare rotation. But it's only really worth it as a multi-target technique. It's made way better as a BLM+BRD combination with the BRD putting up Foe Requiem first, letting the BLM triple Flare, then hitting all sorts of damage buffs, dropping FoeReq and then finishing them off. At least, this is how it is in most of the best speedruns I've been in.

BLM+BLM for instance is not nearly as effective. Towards the end of enemy health the rotation is not very good, Fire II spam works but is not as fast and effective as it were, and the Flare rotation takes too much time to warrant the overkill it produces.

Also, something I noticed is that some BLM seemingly don't understand the importance of Quelling Strikes. It seems like it was made cross-class-able for them simply for this reason. Normally a tank of equal ilvl has no problem holding hate against BLMs unless they proc and crit a lot, but it's really the multi-Flare rotation where the BLM generates ridiculous amounts of enmity on hordes, where Quelling Strikes suddenly makes a huge impact. BLMs in the endgame who don't obtain it and actually use it when needed are somewhere between "liability" and "irresponsible." Either way, it's in the toolset of BLMs, SMNs and BRDs for a reason, they create ridiculous enmity and this helps tanks manage it more easily while doing other things than just spamming Flash or Overpower just to desperately hold hate.

Finally, IMHO, there are huge drawbacks to BLM as a DPS job. First off, it's one of the worst single-target DPS jobs. BLM isn't as good as some people think in any situation where you have to kill a single, super-tough target. The other DPS are way better at this. Secondly, as soon as a fight is move-intensive (which is literally everything from T5 onward in Coil over Extreme Primal duties, i.e. all the difficult content) their dps drops significantly—BLM is a heavy turret type DPS.

[Gormogon]

Parsing has skewed some people's perception of it further.

First off, it's one of the worst single-target DPS jobs.

You were doing good into you went into that part of the subject.

What other job does a constant 1000-1200 damage then gets 2 procs than can crit for 1500-1800 without relying on buffs? What other job can pull off a single target AoE ability 3 times within 10 seconds that can hit its target and everything around it for 2500-3000 each time with just 1 buff?

That's the whole point of a burst design.

Black Mages aren't as bad as people make them out to be yet they do suffer the most when it comes to constant downtime since downtime is part of their rotation.

[Moirear]

What other job does a constant 1000-1200 damage then gets 2 procs than can crit for 1500-1800 without relying on buffs? What other job can pull off a single target AoE ability 3 times within 10 seconds that can hit its target and everything around it for 2500-3000 each time with just 1 buff?

That's the whole point of a burst design.

The amount of spell speed you sacrifice to get a higher crit rate (of not even 25%) on BLM lowers your dps slightly because of long casting times. It evens out to almost the same, either way you go. Throwing around numbers without context or timeframes to measure them by, then saying that if these attacks proc, and if they crit, they might just outburst other DPS jobs?

I don't understand your point. Are you trying to argue that BLM is the best DPS job? Because that would be a laughable sentiment.

[Akujin]

The amount of spell speed you sacrifice to get a higher crit rate (of not even 25%) on BLM lowers your dps slightly because of long casting times. Throwing around numbers without context or timeframes to measure them by, then saying that if these attacks proc, and if they crit, they might just outburst other DPS jobs?

I don't understand your point. Are you trying to argue that BLM is the best DPS job? Because that would be a laughable sentiment.

Please don't do that.

If you're going to mock one person's argument because they don't have a spreadsheet of parsed numbers between XX DPS versus XX BLM, don't assume his own argument is simply invalid, as neither of you are providing anything beyond opinion at this point.

While I'll lean with Gormogon to a point, it's all about the situation. BLMs do excel in Burst damage, as we're meant to. But if a situation is movement intensive, such as bomb lanes in Brayflox, yes it screws us up unless we just eat things and let the healer deal with it, or ignore us, whichever. A melee DPS should always stay upwards to the highest numbers in a single target fight, but there have been many instances when that's not the case with me either, in movement based fights as well. It does depend on crit and proc chance, but it's simply a chance.

It's also why that player requested a boost for all BLMs during the Tokyo event, because movement is out greatest issue currently.

Also, just to toss it in, depending on the type of content, such as Brayflox, I'll take a second BLM over any other DPS any day of the week. It was one of the things I specifically looked for during my own speedruns for my animus grind. Because whereas another DPS will require a third, or possibly even fourth flare to clear groups of mobs, a second blm 99% of the time ensured that we had everything dead by my second flare, theirs as well. So again, it's all about the situation.

[Gormogon]

Do you think the devs intended multi-flare blm?

Not sure if Triple through Quint Flaring was intended. Yet double Flare should have been taken into consideration because that's kinda what Convert would ended up being used for over keeping a constant F1> B3 > F3 > F1 rotation since transpose exists.

I'm glad to have Triple Flare and Super Double Flare yet not a lot of BLM's can and will Flare properly anyway. It's not really changing the game just that a lot of Black Mages are become aware of their kits full potential. Sadly getting DRG's to realize their full potential is gonna be way harder than anything else.

You can do an endless chain of flares if you can time it correctly.

Reliably you can't. Since Flare gets it's damage from Astral Fire 3 in which you gib yourself from 1 Flare doing the Transpose method, especially when you can screw up and miss the timing. Also Transpose is on a 10 second cooldown and usually your Flare is on a 3-4 second cooldown timer which leaves with too much downtime.

Now unless you're suggesting the Bards + Scholar mini/baby Ancient Flare spam. Yeah now that's totally worth doing but you need both a Scholar and a Bard for it to work.

Yet Quint Flaring is more like Quad Flaring + Fire 2. Since that Umbral Ice 1 Flare is not doing as much damage as the rest.

As for buffing BLM's I can think of a dozen ways to make it work but none that are gonna please the overall BLM community. Overall it ain't needed only reason they aren't topping DPS parsers is because they neglect the downtime caused by Blizzard 3. If it wasn't for that downtime BLM's would probably be topping the charts or be on equal footing with rest on single target damage.