Black Mage

[Altera]

The lack of any sort of feedback is a bit depressing. I keep seeing less and less players around who plays BLMs, so I kinda hope when the Devs looks at the class activity, that they notice and will do something.
They did post on fanfest the split between Classes and Races played, so I would love to see the % of classes played atm.

Atm the synergy between melee and ranged physical just seems too desireable, and either should be weakened/removed, or Magical Synergy should become a thing.

Would be great to see some of these happen:

Flare gets its original version back where it hits every mob equally
Fire4/Blizzard4 pot increase to 280-300
Umbral Hearts - Next 3 spells cast has a 5-10% potency and crit chance increase
Make Freeze not a ground targetted spell, and make target being affected by Fragile, taking increased damage from all sources for X amount of time
Sleep changed into Blood Rite, which increases damage of allies.

I am just loosing my interest in the class lately seeing how people look down on BLMs lately. And I have talked to players who has done O4S, and gotten quite far on Ultimate, and they have told me that there is absolutly zero benefits or point of bringing a BLM to that content as other classes can do equal personal damage as well as bring more to the table for the raid teams

If patch 4.2 rolls out, and no changes to BLMs, I am considering cancelling my subscription for the first time since 1.0, and return to other MMOs and see if my favorite classes there are fun to play and useful in all content

[Dyvid]

Honestly I have no idea how to fix BLM other than potency changes to increase it's DPS, maybe increase thunder dot duration to 30s? I personally feel BLM should be nothing but pure direct damage, followed by RDM then SMN since those jobs can provide indirect damage modifiers.

[Remedi]

A permanent magic vulnerability wouldn't be much different from the permanent physical type dmg that the physical classes have atm and that is the idea behind it

Also personally I don't think it would make casters that OP compared to other comps

[Lina_Slayer]

A permanent magic vulnerability wouldn't be much different from the permanent physical type dmg that the physical classes have atm and that is the idea behind it

Also personally I don't think it would make casters that OP compared to other comps

I think a better solution is to put a 10% non-stackable magic vuln up with 100% uptime in the 3 casters (in BLM it can be on BlizzIV), nerf SMN potency so they deal the same dmg they are doing now, while BLM and RDM will be doing ~10% more damage closing the gap between the casters, giving the role something powerful that only they can bring (like only physical ranged can bring Refresh for example) and it also somewhat preserves our utility as the selfish class because while magic vuln up is party utility it'll be something that is more attached to the role rather than the job.

Rework idea for Convert:
Convert - For 20 seconds spells will cost HP instead of MP, ends if casted again. Recast: 120 seconds.
It gives us some kind of a 2 minute burst phase that lines with Hypercharge, Trick Attack, Chain Stratagem, etc. and it makes the spell riskier but much more powerful (it'll give like 8 extra fire IV rather than 2 but the HP cost will be massive), the only problem is Foul timing but it can be fixed by making Foul oGCD during Convert or something like that.

[Llugen]

At this point almost nothing they would feasibly do would be "too much" of a buff to the job, not even kidding.


Even if they flat increased its entire damage output by 20%, that still would change nothing about its difficulty with dealing with mechanics (and by extension its inherent damage loss). Even with a buff like that I still would see SMN being more valuable overall than BLM in unending coil.


Consider even just the first phase and the movement involved. Between hatches, liquid hells, and fireballs, not to mention twisters, BLM absolutely does not have enough tools to fully maintain maximum damage uptime and MUST resort to scathe or pray for procs while still being pretty heavily worked around/babysat. All of those mechanics REQUIRE movement if selected/when applicable, so even such a massive damage buff would STILL put it at a disadvantage (and all that is to say nothing of the movement required for the final phase and the nael phase).


This is ultimately (ha get it? Ultimate-ly? Ok sorry) why I strongly feel like the "face" of the class being "turret pure DPS" has to change. Triplecast is great... once every minute. It NEEDS more mobility options for raiding.

[Dyvid]

Just a thought about freeze. Rather than be a lame AoE attack that bind, why not revamp as a damage mitigation tool for BLM so they could have a set time of just standing in place and nuking?

[Llugen]

Call me a broken record, but I really think Freeze with my aforementioned proposal could single-handedly fix BLM's current aoe dilemma. Plus it's an AOE skill, so that makes sense.

[zuzu-bq]

BLM doesn't really have an AoE dilemma though. If BLM has any dilemmas is mostly on the nature of their rng procs and how they interact with the gcd by gcd rotation and stack refresh. And also MP ticks issue that haunts BLM since ARR.

Also, BLM's area damage is good. What sucks is their single target.

[Llugen]

I used to think BLM aoe was good until I ran as BLM with a SMN in the party. Without making allusions to our favorite website, let's just say I was thoroughly shocked by the damage discrepancy.

tl;dr on the matter is that aoe phases in general favor burst damage because the whole point is for things to die really fast, so when painflare can do 200 potency per target (with no falloff!) as a literal off-GCD and can be "dumped" back to back to back, the "infinite" aoe damage that BLM brings is weak in comparison, not to mention deathflare and bahamut and the pet aoes. One solution for this issue might be let Flare consume only one Umbral Heart at a time so you can do four per fire phase. This would need coincide with the Freeze suggestion, as a significant portion of BLM aoe phases involve slowcasting Fire III and potentially slowcasting Blizzard IV, both of which are significant aoe potency losses.

[zuzu-bq]

SMN AoE is better in general, this is much true. But do remember that people's favorites you know what are really bad with Bane. BLM still excels in AoE over many jobs, even over SMN depending on the conditions. Even then, making BLM AoE better won't fix any of the issues listed on this thread's OP. But I do see where your claims come from.