Black Mage

[Kabooa]

You wouldn't need to rely on it though? You'll still depend on Fire and Tier III spells as your best refreshers. Actually, the current best stack refresher is a Firestarter which is a random proc so why would TC be unreliable? Specially when Sharping Thunder tends to be a bigger damage gain.

It locks Black Mage's damage ceiling behind procs then. A Thundercloud is an extra F4 in a phase if it also refreshes AF. Therefore any time you don't get a Thundercloud proc in AF you're losing damage, and that sucks. It puts more weight in Thundercloud, and while TCloud itself might be an RNG damage boost, it's ability to enable the Black Mage is limited enough where it feels like a bonus instead of feeling mandatory.

If you do everything right, and you still lose out, that's not a terribly rewarding system. It also removes some level of thought from Black Mage's play and that's the bigger sin of it in my opinion.

[OgruMogru]

If you do everything right, and you still lose out, that's not a terribly rewarding system. It also removes some level of thought from Black Mage's play and that's the bigger sin of it in my opinion.

This 100% ..

[Remedi]

Scathe refreshing would solve no problem, unless you go Astral Fire with full MP by getting the perfect MP tick you can't even Scathe without trading it for a Fire IV. By itself this would change nothing, if this happens and MP ticks issues are fixed or gone entirely it would be good. Actually, fixing MP ticks related problems would make Scathe already useful even without refreshing stacks.

I would in fact add a 0 MP cost to scathe too

Let's face it, scathe is a deadweight atm, what he was meant to do was lost to power creep

[Ferrinus]

It’d be cute if A) Foul had no cast time and B) Scathe changed to Foul when you achieved Polyglot.

[Ferrinus]

It'd be nice if thundercloud was enochian-neutral, like if a TC proc always added 3s to your existing timer on impact.

[BerserkerBard]

I think they could boost the performance of the BLM and make it both more powerful and mobile if they added on a trait:

Lingering Flame: When you cast a Fire spell, it leaves an X potency effect on the target for 20 seconds. Refreshable when the target is struck again by a Fire spell you cast.

This way the target is still taking damage, while the BLM have to run around and still prove to be high in DPS numbers and relatively little to no change to the current play style of the job.

I mean, when's SE going to realize that BLM was originally designed to be that "Glass Cannon" job. SAM's have a buff to reduce incoming damage and heal themselves afterward, it's not big, but it's better survivabilty, not to mention their mobility.

Or maybe they should make all Blizzard spells instant, with reduced potency so the BLM has mobility and will still have the incentive to go to Fire spells for bigger damage.

[Rakith]

Hi guys, is there a chance that SE reads and takes some of these good ideas into account ?
I really hope they do !

[Sfia]

A lot of suggestions here are great in terms of quality of life at lower play (fixing scathe usage etc.) but really it seems like most people are missing the mark on what I have said.

Even when played with absolute perfect execution Black Mage does not do enough of anything to justify it's slot in any end game situation.

The solutions are VERY simple. Provide much more personal damage or provide raidwide damage utility or provide unique and valuable defensive utility. A combination of these can also be used to create a strong class, however you then risk losing identity from an iconic job, and would (in my opinion) be much harder to achieve a healthy point with.

One or more of these options needs to happen for this job to be worth bringing into a raid/trial.

[TsuKoj]

It should be offensive utility or more personal damage. Defensive utility is too hard to balance. It ends up either too good and you have to bring it, or it's not vital and it might as well not be there. While defensive utility might be useful for midcore groups, most people won't admit they need the crutch and won't pick it up anyways. It's the problem with tenacity. Tenacity is useful for midcore groups that don't have the most amazing healers and tanks to progress, but since top groups have amazing healers and tanks and don't need tenacity, healers aren't going to admit they need the help, and tanks are going to just tell the healer to get good and keep their dps melds.

[Wyti]

A lot of suggestions here are great in terms of quality of life at lower play (fixing scathe usage etc.) but really it seems like most people are missing the mark on what I have said.

Even when played with absolute perfect execution Black Mage does not do enough of anything to justify it's slot in any end game situation.

BLM definitely need to have their ceiling raised, but focusing on quality of life at lower level is probably the single most important thing to make a BLM usefull to any group.
Just take a look at Rabanastre logs: https://www.fflogs.com/statistics/18#dataset=50 at the 50 percentile and below (that is half the BLM population doing rabanastre !) the class is literally the last in personnal dps.
Playing it correctly in mechanically intensive fights is quite difficult and currently far beyond the reach of most casual players.

The problem with BLM is more that at the top level the players understand that it isn't doing nearly enough to justify its place in a group compared to other classes, and at low level the gap become so wide that you begin to question taking a BLM because of the risk of getting a bad BLM that will underperform so badly you instead choose to take a more stable DPS that can at least press a button every 2 minute to boost everyone else.

Simply boosting the potency of fire IV / foul would only widen the already too large gap between top and bot BLM. I really do like the idea of increasing the duration of the Thunder, at least 30 sec would make it last until the next UI phase.
After that I would propose some buffs to fire I, sure It may cause problem with Blizzard IV not being used everytime by top players, but it would enable weaker player to at least do decent damage if they happen to drop enochian, which will happen a lot when not used to the class.

The change I would really like is to make fire I a bit more usable when on the move. Making it instant case would probably be OP and quite frankly not sounds too BLM to me, but I would love a base 1.5 cast time (still 2.5sec GCD) that way we could use a Fire I to weave OGCD during it with a minimal potency loss and gain 1 sec per cast of movement.