Scared to try black mage

[CKNovel]

I had no idea how to play Black Mage and still don't have much, always leveled the job at 70 and sleep on it, not touched in 2 years and all I could remember was the Flare spam for aoe.
It's a very difficult job to learn at first but once you get the grip, it's very satisfying to play and feels natural. For sure it's not as easy or simple as the Red Mage.
You only need to grab the logic of "Fire" and "Ice" phases, once it's done, there's no difficulty anymore

Don't be afraid to try it, if you level it from the start to 80 I'm sure you'll grab the mechanics very fast!

[Katie_Kitty]

I'm not someone who believes Black Mage is some super hard class that only 1337 G4M3R$ can master, but with that said, going from a melee to BLM will require serious adjustments and practice. Ultimately that's what it comes down to, just getting used to the playstyle of different jobs and roles

[AikenDrum]

As someone who has picked blm few weeks ago, i'd say only first step was hard - you drop gcd on rdm you lose gcd, you drop gcd on blm you lose enochian; but after that it was on par (have to be focused not to unbalance mana/lose enochian, preposition on dualcast/instants or slidecast) or even easier than rdm (less rng, less distractions without having to monitor party list)

As for fun factor, i'm way too biased

[Amaterasu_]

I have my Black Mage around level 60 I believe.

What I can tell is in order to play Black Mage you have to learn a quite in depth and complicated skill rotation. (At least for me it is.)
Black Mage is considered the turret mage so it requires you to stand on one spot as much as possible.

Also Black Mage lacks mobility by a lot and is extremely squishy.
So a boss AoE attack will hurt extremely much if not avoided.

[Taranok]

I have my Black Mage around level 60 I believe.

What I can tell is in order to play Black Mage you have to learn a quite in depth and complicated skill rotation. (At least for me it is.)
Black Mage is considered the turret mage so it requires you to stand on one spot as much as possible.

Also Black Mage lacks mobility by a lot and is extremely squishy.
So a boss AoE attack will hurt extremely much if not avoided.

The rotation isn't complicated at all. It's actually the simplest, easiest rotation in the game to teach anyone short of teaching people a healer's AoE rotation.

BLM exemplifies the concept of "Easy to learn, hard to master," however, because it's very much a low skill floor high skill ceiling job, and has been since SB. All of its difficulty comes from adapting its very basic rotation into hostile situations. And let me tell you, the current raid tier is not friendly to Black Mages, at least E3S and E4S. It's not irredeemably difficult, but it's not easy and I still haven't been able to optimize the rotation on those fights to my liking, sometimes having to move like a peasant or drop Enochian because I'm not reacting to the situation correctly or RNG decides to screw me over.

Though to anyone that thinks the class is unapproachable, just approach it anyways. The class is insanely fun if you like it, and if you don't, well, you at least get to understand exactly why others might like it. You don't need to be 99th percentile to enjoy the class. Though I would caution anyone who wants to play it that it prefers people who have a good memory above all else, since you do need to custom tailor it to every single fight, so memorizing how to react to mechanics is very important.

[CKNovel]

I have my Black Mage around level 60 I believe.

What I can tell is in order to play Black Mage you have to learn a quite in depth and complicated skill rotation. (At least for me it is.)
Black Mage is considered the turret mage so it requires you to stand on one spot as much as possible.

Also Black Mage lacks mobility by a lot and is extremely squishy.
So a boss AoE attack will hurt extremely much if not avoided.

60... You just learned Enochian, Ice IV and Fire IV.
It's actually the least difficult rotation out of all BLM iterations, I still don't understand how ARR rotation was supposed to work (Spam fire for procs?).

The very basic rotation is:
Ice III -> Enochian (If not up) -> Ice IV -> Thunder III -> Fire III -> Fire IV * 3 -> Fire -> Five IV * 3 -> Repeat

The only tricky parts are the Thunder procs, the use of Sharpcast and that Fire IV doesn't reset Astral Fire duration.

[Taranok]

60... You just learned Enochian, Ice IV and Fire IV.
It's actually the least difficult rotation out of all BLM iterations, I still don't understand how ARR rotation was supposed to work (Spam fire for procs?).

The very basic rotation is:
Ice III -> Enochian (If not up) -> Ice IV -> Thunder III -> Fire III -> Fire IV * 3 -> Fire -> Five IV * 3 -> Repeat

The only tricky parts are the Thunder procs, the use of Sharpcast and that Fire IV doesn't reset Astral Fire duration.

ARR's rotation was basically a proc-based rotation. It worked like this.

Fire 3->Thunder 1 (opener)->Fire 1 'til low on mana (about 600 at level 50, pre-MP changes) bliz 3->thunder 1->bliz 1 (if you need to delay for MP)->fire 3.

The ways procs worked are: If you get thundercloud, use Thunder 3 AFTER fire 1, if you get fire 3, DO NOT INTERRUPT FIRE 1 to cast it, even if you lose a proc you still fire 1'd and then fire 3'd. Thunder 3 can also be used during ice which lets you push your MP even lower (like 215ish required to T1, but otherwise you can just instant thunder 3). Thunder 2 was not used at all in the BLM rotation once T3 was acquired.

The rotation was actually made possible to do as of ShB, whereas in SB it was broken due to MP and T1-3 merging changes (couldn't get as many fire 1s without losing out during UI phase). But if you want a good impression of what it was like, RDM is basically how it was intended, but not how it actually was. They screwed up firestarter as a proc because by the time you noticed it procced, it was too late (they since sped it up, but still too fast for most people to notice in time and get) and, well, most of the worst aspects of Black Mage's class design is caused by legacy ARR mechanics before it was turned into the HW+ rotation. It's really hard to work in procs when your rotation is so set in stone and time-limited. Plus at this point, I just wish Sharpcast was a trait that worked on every fire 1, because I basically just use it on UI->AF transition at all times now. But I digress.

That's basically how it worked. Procs broke up what was basically fire 1 spam.

[Tint]

The main problem of BLM is that you get punished for messing up a lot.

When you move you can't cast, so no damage.

While moving your Astral Fire timer just keeps running, so you now have to replace a Fire 4 with a Fire 1 to refresh the timer, wich means you further lose damage.

If you was moving out if your Ley-Lines you also will lose damage. With a bad timing on the Ley-Lines you can waste them completely.

When Enochian drops you are really screwed and basically have to restart your rotation with a weak 3.5 seconds cast. Bonus points if it happens right after you have used Enochian, like in the opener, you are now stuck in the 2.0 rotation!
And of course you lost the timer for your Polyglot.


While the job is actually not that hard to play, one mistake can lead to a cascade of damage loss >.>

[Samsta]

I have my Black Mage around level 60 I believe.

What I can tell is in order to play Black Mage you have to learn a quite in depth and complicated skill rotation. (At least for me it is.)
Black Mage is considered the turret mage so it requires you to stand on one spot as much as possible.

Also Black Mage lacks mobility by a lot and is extremely squishy.
So a boss AoE attack will hurt extremely much if not avoided.

Those things aren't really true though... The rotation is really simple really and while blm does benefit from minimal movement, it has a shit ton of tools nowadays for movement, swiftcast, triplecast, xenoglossy and procs. Also blm is not anymore "squishy" than any other caster (or pretty much any other non-tank for that matter, although technically the defense stats are a little different)

[Souijinn]

Black Mage isn't at all hard. The rotation is simple throughout its entirety as others have said. Though I've heard here and there that the AoE rotation still a foreign concept to some level 80's out there.

Movement becomes less and less of an issue once you learn to look at Swiftcast and later Triplecast as not only burst/frontloading options, but as movement options. Our HP pool is the same as all other DPS Casters and is dependent on gear.

Also, if you REALLY don't want to move for a moment, and you know a certain AoE isn't going to do something wacky like debuff or outright kill you... Pull a "Healers Adjust" move and use Manaward. Out of all the DPS Casters, as far as I remember, we're the only ones with a self-shield to mitigate damage.