PVP and BLM. The nerf and difficulty of our role.

[Maddonious]

I play blm in pvp. I played back before the AoE sleep nerf happened. I knew my role and what this classes' purpose was in pvp, it was CC and protecting teammates retreating.

With the revitalization of pvp I have now started to pvp again now after the AoE sleep debuff and I gotta say its heartbreaking. I feel the nerf they got has no warrant and it was more to cater to players who didn't know how to counter it with the ridiculously short CD of purify and sharing their unused purify with the teams healers.
This ruins the class dynamic as was intended. Blms are NOT dps in PVP, they are CC classes. That is where they shined and it was never their easily LoS/interrupted Dps that was the main focus on this class. We were ment to lock people down rather then nuke them down.

As a blm we are constantly harassed with no way of stopping multiple people on us with stuns/silences/spell breaking except ice 2/freeze and that ruins our astral stacks hard by giving us 1 umbral that is very very hard to recover from while trying to kill someone.

We can no longer save our team's healers with our sleep while they are being harassed unless we used our very long cd nightwing which is wasted with their purify usage. While trying to dps it is hard to maintain our stacks while dodging/CCing/interrupts so we barely get out any fire 4s or even fire 1s.

I used to sleep players rushing to a node or trying to break ice to stop their dps in frontlines. This is no longer the case and im reduced to a weak dps that has his los broken constantly by people running away. What is my purpose when most of my attacks are reduced down to ice to heavy someone then barely get time to cast a spell on them at all when they run away? Much of our same issues are present here as in feast with LoS/stun/silence harassment with players being able to simply step outside of range.

Why has SE not relooked at this class to figure out how to better balance it now that we are no longer a CC class or even a good dps class unless someone rushes the team alone. We are the only class that cant dps while moving in pvp unless we get a thunder proc as scathe is a joke and I find it unfair that we have our ability nerfed while other classes out there can one shot someone with the right set of CD usage.

Our pvp skills need updated and require special treatment. We shouldnt have to share abitlies with other casters and get our own that allow us to work better in these unfair enviornments.

Our pvp skills equanimity needs updated to protect against stuns/silences to make it more useful as a skill with such a long cd and short payoff with only 2-3 spells benefiting from it. Change it already to allow casting while on the go which would help fill in the negative aspect of the class.

Same goes for the instant mana, while good in some situations, doesnt benefit our class nearly as much as a smn/healer. Change it into another swiftcast so that we may also be more mobile and deal with situations more often then once a min for our regular swiftcast. We could then better dps and CC players as needed on a moments notice rather then feeling helpless as we wait for our 3 secs cast bar.

SE Please fix blms, make them CC again but also allow us to have better flexibility in pvp to match the dps of other classes since you nerfed our CC hardcore. If not soon then in 4.0 cause as a pvp class it fails in so many categories when it was somewhat balanced before and did its intended job. You gave into the whiners now I ask you to fix us to make it right.

TLDR: This class needs a major rehaul or give us back our AoE sleep. You cater to every other job by allowing them to kill others in 4 cds while the blms has to struggle and stand in the open while players LoS their dps and mock them and their now current lack of CC abilities. Allow us to dps while moving with changes to pvp skills and reduce the strict nature of managing buffs and astral/umbral fire to allow us to better be able to Dps if you dont intended to restore our CC role.

[PotatoTree]

They also need to bring back full damage with swiftcast imo. BLM was never the same after they removed it, as it was a key part of the burst rotation.

That and BLM and SMN get penalised in feast if the healer runs out of MP. Mana regen is just too good if the teams are evenly matched.

[Chiramu]

There is already too much CC in PVP. Last thing we need is aoe sleep to combo with the aoe bind, and then 5 cometeors on top...

[TiaHariberux3]

I knew my role and what this classes' purpose was in pvp, it was CC and protecting teammates retreating.

Blms are NOT dps in PVP, they are CC classes. We were ment to lock people down rather then nuke them down.

That is completely wrong while blm in feast is not very good its completely the opposite in frontlines. You are meant to DPS and kill people if you CC then only if the situation needs CC on certain targets. Also mana draw is helping you to keep dpsing so its not really useless xd. If you think blm is a weak dps class then may improve?

[SuperZay]

If you think BLM is bad then what about BRD? Outside of Barrage every 2 mins it's almost useless. Plus terrible distance penalty, something mages don't have. And yet nobody complains about it.

They nerfed because BLMs had 'unnaturally high win rate' on jp servers. Fire IV in AF3 is 504 potency, 630 with Enochain and Raging Strikes damage bonuses, 2-3 in a row can kill anyone. If their spells are spammed without interruption, that will make BLM in a constant burst mode, something other jobs can do only once in 90-120 seconds. With AOE crowd control options it makes them overpowerful.

Some BLMs successfully adapted with Thunder/Sharpcast procs gameplay, which is not as bursty but much more SMN-style mobile, maybe you should try it out.

[Maddonious]

Some BLMs successfully adapted with Thunder/Sharpcast procs gameplay, which is not as bursty but much more SMN-style mobile, maybe you should try it out.

You are assuming I am bad. No, I am rusty atm due to my hiatus, but of course I use the thunder proc method as its the one one with mobile burst. Fire 4 is strong yes but think of the opprotunity you hve to have to be clear to cast it without harassment. My complain in pvp is that we have to little options when players focus us or run away and we lost what made us more useful to the team. Its either they are right next to us attacking someone else or right on the edge constantly moving behind objects/out of range.

I simply think we have to little option when it comes to adapting to a situation while maintaining our dps as we have to maintain our buffs along with mp management and cant move in order to do even halfway decent damage. I simply want blms to have changes to help balance out our shortcomings just a tad so we dont feel like such a burden on our feast team. Frontlines we can do better but I still miss being able to "hold the line".

[Maddonious]

There is already too much CC in PVP. Last thing we need is aoe sleep to combo with the aoe bind, and then 5 cometeors on top...

Purify is on a short cd, CC is not a huge issue to players used to it. For multiple LBs I can feel your pain but thats once every how long? And as long as your not grouped up no more then 1-2 should die from that.

This isn't about adding more CC to pvp, its about giving BLM their role back as a CC class instead of a subpar dps class. We have the least mobility in pvp with the hardest time keeping up our dps capability so back before the nerf our role was to harass players/protect our healers while the other players finished them off. Now its incredibly hard to feel useful cause the second we start running around we lose all our dps unlike every other dps class that can attack while moving. The fact that its all or nothing for our dps doesn't help BLMs and when we did CC with aoe sleep we could actually contribute. What do we do now? Get LoS or interrupted and spend more time moving to get a view on someone only for others to start beating on us. All that time moving is dps the team has lost due to the blm. Sleep the healer and they use their short CD purify, sleep again diminish returns destroy any usefulness left.

[Bartleby]

Alright so I don't think I even got past the 2nd sentence before I had to stop reading.

An AoE sleep that lasts for 15 seconds was INCREDIBLY over powered. The game literally revolved around BLM and their sleeps. The JP meta pretty much only allowed for a BLM and even in NA, if they could coordinate it (like in Light Party) it was just incredibly unfun to play against because you'd spend half of the game either bound or slept. And no, a 90 second purify is not even close to a counter considering that even if you purify the first sleep the BLM can still sleep you twice more for another ~20 seconds and bind you for 25+. AND if they sleep on DR reset (e.g. 60 seconds later when your resists reset) you wouldn't even have purify up and you'd be taking a nice 25+ second snooze.

BLM can still do this, although to a lesser degree. You can bait out Purifies with Binds and then give them a nice ~16 (8+4+2) second nap and/or bind them for another 6 seconds. And an enemy without purify is now opened up to a lot of other stuff like PLD stun locks, Full Swing, etc. It is still the king of CC which is a huge part of PvP in FFXIV.

[Rilasha]

I play Fire IV turret style in Frontlines. This style is to harass and kill opposing enemy players with this method by planting yourself in a safe spot and nuking the enemies while they hit ice. You can easily kill someone in two GCDs with two Fire IVs if they crit or someone's using Blood for Blood. We're already helpless when melee DPS use Fetter Ward, making normal Sleep AoE again wouldn't solve the issue of us having a higher skill floor to play. We still have lots of CC at our disposal such as Lethargy's slow and Blizzard's heavy.

Our weaknesses were only exacerbated by the changes to ice being more resistant to magic damage.

[MisterAdri]

I agree that removing the aoe effect from sleep was quite a big nerf, and sometimes I wish I'd have aoe sleep again, but it is overpowered if we're being real for a sec. But I completely disagree with you that blm is a cc job and not a dps job. Good blm's will do good on-point cc, and o really good damage. Up to you to do both effectively. Blm has really good dps and I really love playing blm in frontlines when I have a good healer, I love the power of Fire 4. Even you may not notice while playing blm yourself, but fire 4 spam puts quite some stress on healers.