Thread: Ideas to Improve The Black Mage (for 4.2 and beyond!)

Originally Posted by EllieShadeflare

You. Missed Astral Fire in your calculations, Kabooa. Not to mention, you're assuming a run that's not going to mess up your rotation.

Essentially, in that 30s, you lost a good chunk of potency and only gain Foul to make up a mere 650 per 30s. Wooo. Improooooovement.

Whups. I was thinking Ahk Morne. 650 is therefore exactly 20 pps

Applying astral fire is 468 vs 504, which is 514.8 vs 529.2 with Enochian applied. A loss of 5.14pps (Note this is applying 2.8 speed to both spells, instead of 2.8 to one and 3.0 to the other as we should)

Netgain: 14.86 PPS.

PS: This doesn't include the fact that Thunder gains more potency through improved Enochian than Raging Strikes. Or Ice spells that also do, but we don't really worry about those. I don't remember how to do probability math offhand though so I can't make accurate assessments, but it's +2 PPS just for the Thunder DoT ( 40 x 1.1 instead of 40 x 1.05)

Woohoo, it's one of the smallest netgains. No wonder it's so dissatisfying.

But fair enough, I can modify my first post.

...an improvement in terms of "sustained" damage, yes, but the reason that NIN/SCH/SMN work so well together is their two minute burst window synergy. This has been completely lost on BLM, because it has no real "burst" damage window anymore, save for convert which is laughable.

When I'm on SMN, just about every time I'm going to tri-disaster and deathflare, or going to enkindle bahamut and fester, trick attack is up. This is super significant; so significant that I don't think it can really be understated to either the devs or the "midcore"/casual players. Sustained damage alone is not as good as everyone's burst windows stacking together for dramatically powerful effect(s). It's the same concept with why you give the empowered balance to the strongest DPS and not the weakest, the gain is larger.

BLM deserves a "burst window" buff. They could give it back its own Raging Strikes, or they could adjust convert to fit it in, even a % damage increase on umbral hearts would be welcomed.




Also, the "standardization" of getting procs through guaranteed means as I suggested a few times would be extremely valuable for both movement and damage. Again, currently the Astral Fire MP table is 3x Fire IV > Fire I > 3x Fire IV, but if my proposed "Firestorm" trait (successful usage of 3 Umbral Hearts grants a Firestarter proc) was implemented, it would be 4x Fire IV > Firestarter > 3x Fire IV, for a reasonably significant damage increase (and no more need to cast Fire I to refresh Astral which feels weak at level 70). Also, an increased DoT timer on Thunder III would imply +160 total potency to Thundercloud, and if they went as far as to give "Thundersting" (previous remaining Thunder DoT timer is applied to initial damage of the next Thundercloud), there would be zero wasted ticks, EVEN IF you got back-to-back Thunderclouds (significantly increasing the value of Sharpcast Thunder more than it already has).


Honestly I really hope the devs read this and consider more than just flat potency increases.

Ellie, im curious what kind of numbers (rough avg) you getting for your current rotation on o3s?

im with leera here in term of his/her ideas of balancing blm. just want to add a qol change is to make transpose recast 10s or make af/ui 15s. i hate the current transpose recast is at 12s where af/ui is 13s. they only leave us 1s window to refresh af/ui during like long transition.

not sure how youll be losing enochian tho. o2s is the most turrety fight that 85% of the fight you will be standing on the middle or near it.

for me i basically do what blackcat posted, do my opener at the starting position and when in triplecast i use it to move to the middle of the map (safe spot). you'll stay there pretty much until you need to move to the safe probe spot.