Black Mage Change thoughts

[Kabooa]

They changed it for the sake of Skill disparity which is a poor reason, it in my eyes has lowered the skill ceiling to what we know of of the tool kit right now, but whom is this actually aimed for, the skill disparity is not coming from enochain management.

This is poor showing that SE tried to cater to rubbish players and those skilled players basically got a shot in the foot for no reason.

No one worth their salt as a Black mage cares about this at all. Eno-chan management died in Stormblood.

[Mezzoforte]

They changed it for the sake of Skill disparity which is a poor reason, it in my eyes has lowered the skill ceiling to what we know of of the tool kit right now, but whom is this actually aimed for, the skill disparity is not coming from enochain management.

This is poor showing that SE tried to cater to rubbish players and those skilled players basically got a shot in the foot for no reason.

This game doesn't have a particularly high ceiling as it was before. This is a fairly simple mmo game with a fairly simple and easy to do set of rotations. Anything in an mmo that is based on a rotation is by definition simple. There isn't a lot of decision making. If you were working with multiple of built in rotations with priority lists and constantly shifting of the makeup of priority lists and building new ways to use skills on the fly. Then you may have a somewhat highly skilled mmo. The problem is that games like this rarely can work with such designs so we end up with these very simple 1 or 2 types of rotations that eventually you just repeat as a reflex. You are splitting hairs talking about removing managing enochian as lowering the ceiling since it was almost already at the floor as it is.

[Ferrinus]

Fire and Blizzard on the same button would be very cool but I strongly doubt we'll see it (and if they were doing that consolidation I'd first like to see F4 and B4 on the same button, since those are actually aspect-locked. Heck, do it for Despair and Umbral Soul, too).

Another technical possibility would be tweaking Scathe's MP/Potency and making whichever of F1 and B1 your aspect doesn't match become Scathe instead. I'd be shocked if they actually did this but it could be cool.

[Ferrinus]

Technically they've not only saved us a ~0.7s animation delay but also prevented us from ever again suffering the ultimate disaster, which is typoing a spell of the wrong element right after activating Enochian and then spending the next 27.5 seconds playing a level 50 character in a level 80 trial. But good riddance, I say.

[StriderShinryu]

I'm not at 80 on BLM yet so I can't really speak completely to the top level stuff but even to me the Enochian change seems fine. As a few others have said already, it feels to me like a button you press once and then it just sits there active as long as you're playing the job. I know YoshiP talked it up as being a skill gap change but I don't buy that. It really just feels QoL and button bloat control to me.

As for the fire/ice transition spell? I really like it. Currently switching between fire and ice just feels sort of anticlimactic to the point where I actually almost prefer low level BLM where you needed to use Transpose. That actually felt more active to me instead of it just being baked into certain skills so having a skill you enable by Doing Things and then using it to transition "properly" feels like a good change.

[raelgun]

I'm not at 80 on BLM yet so I can't really speak completely to the top level stuff but even to me the Enochian change seems fine. As a few others have said already, it feels to me like a button you press once and then it just sits there active as long as you're playing the job. I know YoshiP talked it up as being a skill gap change but I don't buy that. It really just feels QoL and button bloat control to me.

As for the fire/ice transition spell? I really like it. Currently switching between fire and ice just feels sort of anticlimactic to the point where I actually almost prefer low level BLM where you needed to use Transpose. That actually felt more active to me instead of it just being baked into certain skills so having a skill you enable by Doing Things and then using it to transition "properly" feels like a good change.

I dont think you get it, if this was a QOL change then they would first bring it up as that, the last thing you want to say is skill gap or skill disparity as a reason cos thats literally admitting your playerbase for the large part is crap - which is actually true to be fair but no developer ever wants to admit that publicly.

[dezzmont]

I am mixed on the dropping of it as a trait myself.

Managing eno didn't mean much in terms of 'always be casting' (though it did help remind newer mages to do this), but affected your rotation quite a bit and introduced some on the spot thinking to black mages if they were forced to move mid rotation. Most good BLMs who mastered fights don't care about this at all, but it did add some excitement to the job for people who were still caught by surprise at certain mechanics and failed to pre-dodge (which is 99% of the player base) and which helped encourage you to learn to do that.

I am not exactly filled with despair to see it go, but there was a certain charm to it as it was. If it was starting to get clunky with other stuff they wanted to do though, definitely axe it. It only adds to the experience of a specific segment of the job's playerbase, and it doesn't add so much as to be irreplaceable.

[waifugenerator]

The enochian change is inconsequential, in a perfect run we'd legit only need to press it once at the beginning of a fight. I DO think pruning skills in the name "player skill disparity" sets a bad precedent moving forward however. Thankfully this is yoshi-p's main though so I'm not that concerned about the jobs' identity or play style being changed in any significant way.

[Orbus]

I'm surprised there's people that care at all.
In the current game you have to be completely negligent to let eno fall off.
Even in the worst cases you can panic transpose to ice and hit the umbral soul button, and even then you'd only *need* to do something like that if thirty seconds hasn't yet passed since you activated enochian... and if you've played BLM to a high enough level to learn umbral soul, the latter scenario really shouldn't ever happen.

[Ferrinus]

The fact that it's so easy to maintain Enochian is exactly why button pruning for skill disparity is a good thing. All it's there for is to punish an inexperienced player with up to 30 seconds of Fire 1 spam. That kind of brutal lockout is not a fitting consequence for, say, being raised after death, scrambling to reactivate Enochian, and then accidentally swiftcasting an opposite-color spell just as you're trying to restart your rotation.

If they wanted to add more skill-testing elements they could introduce mechanics where you get bonuses for refreshing Astral/Umbral proportionate to how close to falling off it is or something like that. As it stands the actual Enochian button adds nothing good to the game.