A few bits of feedback on the changes between media tour BLM and release BLM

[Gewahren]

I think the Endwalker media tour BLM looked very promising and fun, iterating well on how it played in Shadowbringers. However, a couple changes between then and now feel rather last minute and undermine what I feel makes the job satisfying and engaging to play.

The first is the thundercloud duration. An increase in the duration of thunder and an increase in the duration of thundercloud is fine - welcome, even. Though I prefer the old system where thundercloud is a shorter duration than thunder, the new system is fine too. My issue with it is just how long it is. 40 seconds allows far too much leeway and feels rather unfun to play around with, even if it's demonstrably stronger. I'd much prefer it if thundercloud was brought closer in line to the duration of thunder, else I'm afraid one of the parts of BLM optimization that I enjoyed quite a bit will be gone.

The second is the change to paradox. In the media tour, the only requirement to be able to use paradox was to get 3 stacks of astral fire or umbral ice and swap to the opposite element. This meant that the Shadowbringers optimization of occasionally skipping blizzard IV when movement allowed for it would stick around - and even feel more like an intentional game mechanic rather than the admittedly janky implementation it had before. Standard rotation would still be ideal for when movement was required in the next AF cycle and for when you were unfamiliar with a fight, and B4 skips would remain a small damage boost for when you were able to execute them correctly. That makes for (in my opinion) a rather fun gameplay dynamic of looking for times when a B4 skip could be done and feeling rewarded by a slightly higher potency per second.

In the version that shipped to the endwalker release, however, paradox now requires the player to accumulate 3 umbral hearts in addition to 3 stacks of umbral ice in order to gain paradox for the next astral fire cycle. This effectively makes B4 skips nearly always worse than a standard line, and pushes them even further into feeling like unintended side behavior (something that, to my knowledge, yoshi-p said on stream was not the intention of endwalker BLM changes).

It feels like, regardless of the intention of these changes, they weren't fully thought out. I'd love to see paradox changed before the savage tier as I feel that's the biggest thing holding EW BLM back from being genuinely more fun than ShB BLM. These changes, on the surface, appear to have the goal of making the job more accessible. In practice, however, I feel that even if B4 skips are a thing the job is just as accessible as it would normally be. Removing them only limits creativity for higher-end players while making virtually no difference for the lower-end, and that feels like a step backwards.

[Ferrinus]

I'm pretty sure only getting Paradox if you went from umbral 3 to astral having stockpiled three hearts was how it worked in the media tour. Certainly that's what the tooltips published on various games journalism websites said.

Two things stick out to me about release 6.0 BLM:

-In the media tour, you'd get a stack of Enhanced Flare by casting High Fire II, and then Flare would consume a stack. Now, you just get a lasting Enhanced Flare buff that only dissipates once you leave Astral mode. This is generally better because it means all three of your Flares are enhanced if you're using Manafont, but it does make me wonder if it's ever worthwhile to skip your third High Fire II in the AoE rotation (I'm hoping not, honestly).

-A few tooltips are misleading. For instance, (non-High) Fire II and Blizzard II, after level 35, claim to grant full stacks of their aspect or remove the opposite aspect. Meanwhile, their High versions (as well as Fire III and Blizzard II) say they grant full stacks of their aspect and remove the opposite. The implication here is that you can't use F2 and B2 to switch aspects; thankfully, this is wrong, and they work just like their single-target equivalents at level 35 and after, but the language should probably be standardized.

[Taranok]

There's a reason I've constantly repeated it: The devs don't want hypermeme and rotations like it and are actively going out of their way to try to enforce this design. This is why Fire 1 (paradox) is now straight up more damage than Fire 4 per second but you only get 1 use. They also straight up shortened Blizzard 4's cast time to 2.5 seconds from 3s (no, really, from 3) specifically to make it always worth casting. And with Paradox instant cast in UI phase, there is even more reason for UI phase to not be awful. It is straight up your second highest damage ability that's not a polyglot spender or 30s duration thundercloud proc.

In other areas of weirdness, the increase of thunder 3's duration actually bumped Thunder 3 from a 57% proc chance over 24 seconds to a 65% chance (approx) over 30. Which oddly devalues using sharpcast on thunder 3 despite it being 800 potency on proc. They're objectively trying to enforce a specific rotation for the class with a specific design of abilities while trying to keep the archaic structure established nearly a decade ago that has long since been outdated (AF/UI timers and random proc chance that never fully fit.) And, because that's not good enough, because of Paradox being instant cast, as long as you're at full MP, doing a paradox->transpose->fire 3 with proc is objectively a massive DPS gain, so we're introducing odd and silly mechanics back into the class anyways.

So the devs want to fix the classes flawes without going to the heart of the problem, instead leaning on the decades-old design and trying to force players to play specifically while making it confusing about how it's supposed to be played.

Also, in the media tour, it was always UI3 + UH3. That came out in the gamerescape articles and has been known for a while. Doesn't make it better though.