Black magic...kinda sucks

[Popotato]

Gonna keep this kinda short heopfully because I'm low on time. EDIT: It wasn't short at all lol

That is a fallacy, because the abilities that are not being used are not in the 'ideal rotation' does not mean that the BLM doesn't need a rework. with three useless abilities and two that are highly situational that puts it far ahead of other jobs who might have at worst one or two highly situational abilities. Especially when said abilities could be reworked to make the job both more interesting to play, and ease some off the need to 'memorize a fight' by having either more movement spells or utility in the BLM kit.

In the same vein, just because it has useless skills doesn't mean it needs a rework either.The second half is purely hypothetical. It could be better, but what more does BLM need right now? It would especially be hard to add those onto low level AoE skills. If you can propose something intuitive and interesting I'd be all for it.

Except they are NOT free movement. Again, thundercloud is a RNG proc and while you can push firestarter with a sharpcast you either need to have anticipated the need to have it beforehand or use both it and switft/triple cast to push it so you can move. BEFORE you can actually move. Free movement is just that, FREE. You are talking about moving during GCD and/or using instant casts to move, which in turn wouldn't be as much of an issue except that you both have to either rely on random chance and/or a combo of abilities to move without worrying about your DPS coming to a screeching halt.

It might be better to refer to Firestarter and Thundercloud collectively as "Sharpcast" then. Every 60s you get a guaranteed proc GCD of free movement, that can be held for 18s.

Except again you have to find, select, and THEN use AM. Which again could mean TWO people get damaged in a mechanic if you happen to pick the wrong person vs just yourself if you screw up something like the shadowstep. Again, it's a needlessly made complication to an otherwise simple blink spell.

Once again, this is pretty hypothetical. Looking at the spell, it COULD happen, but it rarely does. Good usage is effective. Bad usage is costly. This is just like any other blink. The alternative type of blink that still considers BLM's range would be a system like Shukuchi, which is very finicky especially on controller, or like Elusive Jump, which is once again finicky. There's of course dashing to the targeted enemy, but that compromises the range that BLM has, and it doesn't make much sense either considering the jobs with that kind of blink are typically melee DPS trying to keep uptime.

Except you and others keep telling me that the job works best when you know the fight. It's simple logic at that point, because if it works best when you know the fight it works at it's worst when you don't Which means in progressive situations the BLM then becomes more of a hindrance with no utility and no way to support the team outside of DPS; which again will take a hit since you won't know the optimal way to setup and use your abilities. You can't have it both ways if you continue to insist that the BLM is all about knowing the fight.

This is to get the most out of the job. If a BLM drops his timer, he can just recast Enochian and just pick up where he left of having taken a small hit to DPS. The challenge with BLM is not letting this happen to maximise damage.

You can claim that, but frankly I don't know any healer who doesn't still have to watch out for the refresh timers on hots or if shields are still up; let alone if the tank needs healing or support vs getting another damage spell in. Furthermore in every guide i've seen so far has cited keeping an eye on the timer. So if you have internalized the timer so much fine but apparently watching the timer is still very much a thing.

Those are necessary things to keep track of, but no healer has their eyes glued to a tank's health bar looking at their Regen slowly tick down. It's just a glance to check the duration. Same thing with BLM and any job really (besides WHM). The better you get at a job, the less you need to look at the timer. It's not like BLM requires an absurd amount of time looking at the gauge in relation to other jobs. I won't deny that the gauge itself is more integral to BLM than some other jobs like PLD and WHM though.

As a side note, if you need me to dig up every single recent or relevant post on the BLM to understand that a good number of people find issue with the job in various ways...well I would point out to you that a lot of my 'reference material' in this regard is front page of google searches. Plenty of people other then me have said the same things, and some of what I am saying now is coming from them. Yes the job is playable, yes it it top DPS, but no that doesn't mean that it doesn't need a fair bit of work when it has the most useless abilities and one of the simplistic rotations of any the jobs; when you have a dev saying that all the jobs need to have depth and interesting gameplay.

I'm just saying that those people should be decently experienced BLM player, that made threads recently. Not popularity polls conducted during ARR.