How is BLM?

[Airiden]

Trying to decide whether I should play Samurai or play a BLM. BLM looks pretty fun, from the gear to the big explosions but is it good right now? In PVP and PVE? Easy Rotation? Fun to play?

Thanks in advance!

[Kalaam]

BLM is extremely good.
The rotation isn't that complex, but it changes several times over the course of your levelling. And you have to pay attention to your timers to keep it steady.
Since your goal is to move as little as possible, it'll be better to know the safe spots of fights pretty well to put down your leylines and stay in place to blast away.

[MagiusNecros]

Easy to learn. Hard to master.

When you know the fight you know where to stand and just turret.

[Axzeriuth]

BLM is very fun to play, especially when you get Flare at lvl 50. BOOOOM!!
I find BLM easy to learn because it's all about casting as much fire spells to use your mana then swapping to ice to regain mana. The spell interaction with the two stances change as you level up so theres a learning curve there.

The hard part to master is learning to use your procs to instant cast spells so you can move around when rquired and not interupt your casting.

[NYCLouisGamer]

Good morning! Please explain what I am missing. Why is BLM considered easy to learn or even moderate in difficulty? It seems very hard to reach a base level of competency, considering the length of the opener alone!

https://www.akhmorning.com/jobs/blm/...eners/#openers

And the opener is something that can be memorized. I cannot imagine what happens when you have to then use a bunch of split-second decision-making for other stuff while using to tricks to squeeze out multiple Flares, unintuitive but brilliant ways to use low-level spells to take advantage of server ticks, etc.

Seems hard.

[Kalaam]

You are looking at it the wrong way.
You're looking at a raid optimized opener for a levelled up character, of course this'll look complicated because you don't know what the skills are. This is something you learn by playing.

[Risvertasashi]

Your best bet is to just try the jobs yourself and see how you like them. This game minimizes the investment for this, with how easy it is to switch between them.

Don't worry about "meta" unless you're trying to join a world first raid group (But even if you were doing that, you'd want several jobs ready to go, not just one).

[Frizze]

Good morning! Please explain what I am missing. Why is BLM considered easy to learn or even moderate in difficulty?

It really is easy to learn though. If played right you have infinite resources so you always want to be casting if you can(and since you usually cant cast while moving, that means standing still as much as you can). You use fire stance to do damage, ice stance to regen mana(your entire bar in 2 server ticks at higher levels) - switching back and forth throughout the fight. Theres one DoT you should maintain for additional damage. Different spells are used in different situations(fire 2 isnt an upgrade of fire 1 - its an aoe spell instead), so you need to learn what they do and when they should be used. And then at higher levels you get one buff to maintain(buffs damage and gives access to strongest spells), and a couple others to learn when to use(with a couple different effects). And thats the whole class. Mastery is harder, as there is a lot of optimizing that can be done in terms of when you use skills and learning fights to allow for the most uptime. But at its most basic you spam a fire spell to run out of mana, then use ice to get back to full before you repeat - thats pretty easy to pick up.

[Tint]

Good morning! Please explain what I am missing. Why is BLM considered easy to learn or even moderate in difficulty?

It's easy to learn because the rotation is really simple.

Blizzard 3 > Blizzard 4 > Thunder 3 > Xeno

Is the hardest part to remember. That's the ice phase. Fire phase is basically just counting to 3:

Fire 3 > Fire 4 > Fire 4 > Fire 4 >
Fire 1 > Fire 4 > Fire 4 > Fire 4 > Despair

And everything starts from the beginning.

And to make it easier for new BLMs: Everytime you move (more than 1 second) just cast Fire 1 afterwards and then start counting to 3 again with the Fire 4s. That's not optimal play, but makes it easier to maintain your buff. Optimizing comes later...

[NYCLouisGamer]

It's easy to learn because the rotation is really simple.

Blizzard 3 > Blizzard 4 > Thunder 3 > Xeno

Is the hardest part to remember. That's the ice phase. Fire phase is basically just counting to 3:

Fire 3 > Fire 4 > Fire 4 > Fire 4 >
Fire 1 > Fire 4 > Fire 4 > Fire 4 > Despair

And everything starts from the beginning.

And to make it easier for new BLMs: Everytime you move (more than 1 second) just cast Fire 1 afterwards and then start counting to 3 again with the Fire 4s. That's not optimal play, but makes it easier to maintain your buff. Optimizing comes later...

Thank you, Tint & Frizze! I will get over my fear and try out the BLM job this weekend. I have been secretly wanting to play it for some time!

The biggest part that confuses me is Fire 1. It's like, why do we stick that in when we have access to F3 & F4?