Black Mage Sanctuary - A Guide to DPS

[Benolan]

I only have BLM to level 50 but i really feel so powwerful compared to my ninja and leveling it i always "felt" i was doing alot of damage in group. This job is so freaking fun

Enochian will make it a more interesting and challenging job to play once you get there... And make you more bitter about tornados

[Aikaal]

Started up this progression as SMN, ended up as BLM. Dang, I think we're still looking at a very well dressed up, hidden ARR situation where BLM still smokes SMN by 10% minimum (on ST, of course) and where there's a will to mitigate movement, there's a way, and BLM is just more damage. Then again, SMN's got a lot of advantages to it, AoE, consistency, and different, sometimes more handy utility, but golly BLM is so good. It'll be hard to decide where I fall next progression, but then again I think we'll be using shared tome gear from now on and it's gonna be a situation where we pick and choose all day per the fight without downsides.

Don't forget to mention only BLM can do the Strafdoll cheese in A4S lol. SMN get rekted again by mechanics.

[Waliel]

You might not be able to cast F1 right at the end of F3 cast, but you can queue it up to cast right at the end of the GCD. F4 requires the animation to complete before it lets you think about starting a cast.

There's actually a very small window during AF3 and UI3 transitions with F3 and B3 where you can't queue any skill when the cast finishes because the GCD isn't far enough (that you will propably never even notice, unless you aim to specifically hit your button there), but for whatever reason you can't queue F4 at all until you have AF up.

I did some quick testing because bored, and both F3 and B3 apply their respective stacks at the end of their cast animation when you see the damage on your screen, but for god knows what reason F3 has double the animation length of B3. Wouldn't surprise me if it had something to do with the double Flare fix.

Fix pls.

[Kenji1134]

So many little things concerning the fluidity of the BLM rotation were shattered with the "Flare Fix", which have only been worsened by the inclusion of Enochian.

[arrie-prime]

After fire 3 weave a ogcd skill like manawall, will force fire 3 to hit sooner and leave you able to cast fire iv instantly after manawall or whatever animation goes

[HaroldSaxon]

After fire 3 weave a ogcd skill like manawall, will force fire 3 to hit sooner and leave you able to cast fire iv instantly after manawall or whatever animation goes

No. You weave an OGCD skill because you have GCD animation lock to prevent the infinite flare bug and its better to weave an OGCD than to sit there fiddling with yourself. Not to make the F3 hit sooner.

[Aikaal]

So many little things concerning the fluidity of the BLM rotation were shattered with the "Flare Fix", which have only been worsened by the inclusion of Enochian.

I had never got any Flare Transpose bug in 2.x but I've been getting those a lot in 3.x. Because there is a delay on stacks when you cast a spell, when I Fire IV x2 + Flare, I need to way before Transposing and I transpose nothing. This is very frustrating.

[Dagda]

What exactly affects WD? I don't see it as it's own stat really.

[Waliel]

So many little things concerning the fluidity of the BLM rotation were shattered with the "Flare Fix", which have only been worsened by the inclusion of Enochian.

All that was needed was to make Flare require AF to cast, but they had to go and make the whole job very awkward at times with how timings can work. If Squenix was also so concerned with the occasional fast F1 after F3, just make the damn spells apply your stacks immediately after cast is finished instead of some arbitary time after.

Now that I think about it, it doesn't make any sense for not to get your stacks if your spells miss or you hit an immune unit. Does your fiery soul cool down or something when you can't hit your target? Or are we just so egoistic that if the spell didn't land, we think we didn't actually do anything and nothing happened, erasing the "failure" from our memories because we're perfect.

[MyraOriales]

{Hello!} {black mage} {Chum}s. I'm working on bringing up my black mage up to speed after getting my summoner up to a decent item level, as I want to use both jobs in Alex Savage. My group's currently working on A3S, but we still have a way to go (furthest we've seen is the first Gaol), so I'm planning around what I can get with Esoterics and A1S/A2S tokens. I was wondering how this set based on what I can get over the next three weeks looks:
http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/RLCD
(Hopefully this shows up okay, with starred items being what I currently have, and highlighted items being what I'm wearing/what I'm planning to get)

Currently sitting on two page 1s, one page 2 and 915 Esoterics, so in terms of resets:
- Week 1 (tomorrow): Esoterics weapon
- Week 2: Esoterics body, Gordian wrist via A1S tokens (Weekly Esoterics balance goes to 0)
- Week 3: Esoterics ring, Gobcoat for ring via A2S tokens
- Week 4: rain of fending/healing accessories from a1s continues; maybe get the Esoterics earrings and beg for a gobcoat

I was aiming to cut out the serious excess of accuracy I have and increase spell speed primarily, while also balancing it so that I'd get accessories that would work for my summoner too (Gordian wrist, i210 Eso ring). I am wondering if the 636 spell speed I end up with could be better, but at the moment my spell speed on BLM is really low (459) and anything would be an improvement really. (I see a lot of "- Enochian + Enochian" after Blizzard 4, even on long Enochian timers...)