Black Mage Casting Glitches

[Lendari]

I just wanted to compile glitches I've seen with BLM that greatly reduce the "fun" of the class.

1. When entering the astral fire/umbral ice stance with enochian up, the respective fire/ice 4 spells remain disabled for a brief period of time. This breaks the game's mechanism that allows the next skill to be queued up pre-emptively allowing for smooth, relaxed skill usage, even during moderate latency. Watch any video of a BLM on YouTube as the furiously mash on the disabled fire 4 button until it finally activates. It is very stressful and broken by comparison.

2. When casting fire 1, firestarter procs are delayed such that it is possible for 2 firestarter procs to merge into a single firestarter opportunity because the firestarter opportunity only becomes available once the next fire 1 cast is in progress.

3. When astral fire 3 runs out during the cast of fire 1, the BLM is returned to an unpredictable astral fire state. It would feel better if I was always put into the AF state in effect at the beginning of the cast.

4. It is possible for astral fire to run out during a transpose (an instant cast skill) leaving the BLM in what is usually a state where they have 0 mana.

5. If astral fire, umbral ice or enochian drops in the middle of the cast of a dependent skill, the cast is interrupted. Again it would feel smoother and be less susceptible to latency if it simply prevented the skill from being used again rather than interrupting the current cast.

Just some minor cleanup to the sub-second timings could make BLM a lot smoother to play and a lot more resilient against latency. I think this would result in it being much more fun than it currently is.

[Ashelia_Ferron]

No.

BLM is already a high DPS class, it should require good management from the player.

Some of these issues, like transpose not working due to loss of stacks or losing stacks while casting Fire IV/Bliz IV could be avoided by just being a better BLM.

We don't need BLM to get any buffs to make the skill ceiling even lower



Also as to the Firestarter thing: There is literally no way to change that without opening up possible abuse.

When would you want Firestarter to proc? Right as you cast? Because then people could find a way to just tap Fire 1, and if it procs Firestarter, cancel it and just use Firestarter instead.

It HAS to hit the enemy to proc or else it'd be broken. And since BLM Spells have decently long cast times, the stacking of two procs is inevitable.

[MagiusNecros]

There are times even with a decent connection that FS will have a slight delay even after the spell hits. Same thing with refreshing UI3/AF3 with F3/B3. So you have to wait a second before casting your next spell even though you always want to weave in spell after spell to be at optimal performance. It only serves to slow you down. Reason being the proc didn't reach the damn server yet.

If it was up to me I'd make FS proc on any Fire Spell except Fire 4. Since with TC they just said use any Thunder spell you want it'll eventually proc. With any one you use. And then people would cry about that.

Dunno why Ninja's got their latency fix if people are gonna have an issue with other classes getting the same deal.

[Tsilyi]

yes, let's let the skill floor/ceiling dictate whether we protect classes from latency issues. if we give firestarter the straight shot treatment then people's cats will raid on blm for them while they play other games and that is simply unacceptable.

[Ashelia_Ferron]

yes, let's let the skill floor/ceiling dictate whether we protect classes from latency issues. if we give firestarter the straight shot treatment then people's cats will raid on blm for them while they play other games and that is simply unacceptable.

Heavy shot has to hit before Straight shot procs.
Due to animation, before WM, Heavy shot would appear to instantly proc Straight Shot.
But in reality, the hit of heavy shot was already decided server side, and was proccing it.


Here, we're talking about a spell (Fire 1) that has a 2+second cast time (Vs Heavy Shot with 1.5 or less cast time on BRD with WM, or instant before WM). Or even compare it to Split Shot on MCH with GB. Those have lower cast times such that you can see the proc before your GCD is up.

They can't make it proc earlier unless they decided to check if your spell hits well in advance of the animation actually HITTING



Not to mention that every class has their own little latency things to deal with (See SMN and waiting for Bane after Bio) or other little annoyances caused by other issues (Animation delay for Benediction/Hallowed Ground).

Welcome to FFXIV, learn to adapt and make yourself a better player, don't wait for devs to make your job easy mode.

[Tsilyi]

Not to mention that every class has their own little latency things to deal with (See SMN and waiting for Bane after Bio) or other little annoyances caused by other issues (Animation delay for Benediction/Hallowed Ground).

Welcome to FFXIV, learn to adapt and make yourself a better player, don't wait for devs to make your job easy mode.

are you ok? let's not fix anything! certainly not latency issues. why can't we fix everything? i have no problem playing my jobs, as i play summoner and am familiar with the fester interaction, &c., but why are you not in favor of fixing things? This is how the game works now, and players adapt, but wouldn't it be better if we didn't have to adapt to things that are not player error? other games can do it, certainly ffxiv could at some point.

what i'm getting at is this: yes, i can and other players can and will work around the issues with latency involved in this game, but why not work slowly but surely toward a place where latency does not have as big of an effect?

[Shurrikhan]

They can't make it proc earlier unless they decided to check if your spell hits well in advance of the animation actually HITTING

Not to mention that every class has their own little latency things to deal with (See SMN and waiting for Bane after Bio) or other little annoyances caused by other issues (Animation delay for Benediction/Hallowed Ground).

Welcome to FFXIV, learn to adapt and make yourself a better player, don't wait for devs to make your job easy mode.

Fair enough, but a good deal of those are due only to purposeful design.

Have you seen how fast Greased Lightning procs from a Rock Breaker that may have missed? Before the animation finishes. It's not like the server has to actual wait for the projectile animation to cross over to the mob to calculate whether it will hit.

That said, BLM becoming unable to waste Firestarters would be a pretty huge and unnecessary buff prior to level 60, and would frankly make the job less interesting to me, given that I liked using oGCD weaves to deal with it, etc (the mere fact that oGCDs would allow you to proc Firestarter early should be a queue that the time before you have access to Firestarter has been purposely prolonged by design...).

That said, the other changes (more responsive Transpose, F4, B4) mentioned here largely lie within latency-safety / QoL. Would like it if B4 would end casting instantly if Enochian drops rather than completing the cast before fizzling.

[Kabooa]

1. I'm going to furiously mash the buttons regardless. Ain't no gamer out there that pushes limits that's zen as all !@#^.

2. Firestarter already procs on cast. It just doesn't register onto your character until the animation finishes, or you use an instant abilty or spell like Scathe or Thundercloud to 'force' it to show.

Hell, if it actually procced on the animation instead, that would have made it so you could chain firestarters.

3. It's not unpredictable. If fire finishes casting before your stacks wear off, you get the bonus damage and reset at stack 3. If it finishes after, you don't. It's that simple.

4. The easy fix is avoid situations where a transpose that fails due to latency leaves you without at least enough MP for blizzard 1.

5. As it should be.

[Waliel]

1. When entering the astral fire/umbral ice stance with enochian up, the respective fire/ice 4 spells remain disabled for a brief period of time. This breaks the game's mechanism that allows the next skill to be queued up pre-emptively allowing for smooth, relaxed skill usage, even during moderate latency. Watch any video of a BLM on YouTube as the furiously mash on the disabled fire 4 button until it finally activates. It is very stressful and broken by comparison.

From the top of my head, you have to wait for the F3 animation before you get AF3 and that causes F4 to get delayed very slightly every time, but almost always you'd be in the middle of GCD anyway when this happens, so it's not a huge deal. I'd like the ability to queue that F4, though.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is a side-effect from the double Flare fix and sometimes-getting-fast-F1-after-F3-fix from back in the day.

2. When casting fire 1, firestarter procs are delayed such that it is possible for 2 firestarter procs to merge into a single firestarter opportunity because the firestarter opportunity only becomes available once the next fire 1 cast is in progress.

Intented -- you have to wait for the spell to land. Personally I would find it very annoying, if you had to check for FS proc after every F1 for optimal DPS. Slight annoyance at worst and practically never seen now with F4.

3. When astral fire 3 runs out during the cast of fire 1, the BLM is returned to an unpredictable astral fire state. It would feel better if I was always put into the AF state in effect at the beginning of the cast.

That depends on entirely when your AF runs out during your F1 cast and nothing else. Nothing unpredictable about it. I haven't given the second point any thought to form an opinion.

4. It is possible for astral fire to run out during a transpose (an instant cast skill) leaving the BLM in what is usually a state where they have 0 mana.

This is a problem problem with every instant cast, where you have to wait for all the hand waves and prayers to finish before anything happens. Has the potential to cause deaths and wipes in the case of healers and tanks. Fix please.

Another problem that can happen is when the Transpose effect happens before you get your AF3 stacks from Flare, and you're left stranded for a long time. Happens every time when you run out of AF during your Flare cast. Might be a server hiccup otherwise, and I can't remember the last time it happened without AF running out.

5. If astral fire, umbral ice or enochian drops in the middle of the cast of a dependent skill, the cast is interrupted. Again it would feel smoother and be less susceptible to latency if it simply prevented the skill from being used again rather than interrupting the current cast.

I'm pretty sure this is intented, but it's quite annoying when it happens nonetheless. A change would most likely end up being a DPS increase, as you could basically fit an extra spell into every rotation.

I guess the snarky response would be "L2P issues".

My two cents.

[DeliriumTrigger]

BLM player here since 2.0. I just want to respond to the glitches that you pointed out.

1. Played on constant 80ms and constant 400ms and I have never encountered this issue (also I play on a Japanese server from Europe and SEA). The only time I noticed the delay is when you cast Enochian when you already are in astral/umbral, or you're having ping time outs.

2. Known issue since 2.0.

3. You'll have to look at the remaining time on your astral fire. The only time that this happens is when you cast Fire 1 when you have 2 seconds left (depending on your SS) on Astral.

4. This happens when you have high latency (>200ms for me). Transpose is mostly used after Flare anyway so just wait a few milliseconds before using transpose.

5. Not a glitch. You need to check how much time you have left on your buffs factoring the cast time of your spells. Don't be afraid cancel spells just to keep your buffs up.