Frustrations with BLM immobility

[Nizzi]

Black Mage needs a rework. Not a summoner-level rework, but a monk-level rework. And for the first time in the history of the game, the class is played to such a low degree the devs might finally give it the attention it deserves to not only breath life into its playstyle, but to also bring it up to the same standards all other classes are built with right now.

People still aren't playing Monk even after its numerous amounts of reworks. If your argument hinges on "nobody is playing it, that's proof it needs a rework!" then you're going to get the Summoner-tier rework and you're going to enjoy it. In which case, have fun I guess when they do that?

[Taranok]

Do you honestly believe SE is capable of that?

By the by, old and bad are not synonyms in the same way new does not mean good.

Yes, I do believe it, because they've done it in the past. I also believe that if they made a new caster in BLM's general playstyle, BLM's population would completely plummet into the dirt.

The only actually bad reworks in the ShB+ era were Summoner being turned into a ranged phys instead of a caster, with fight design that is extremely hostile to everyone with a cast bar, oddly including samurai, reaper, and to an extent Summoner. Where SMN's advantage over everyone else is that it can choose exactly where to place its cast bars within a relatively large amount of wiggle room, and can swiftcast out of 1 of them every minute anyways.

While I don't play every job for progression, I do regularly dust off and bring out every job to try, see what they're like, find out their pain points and etc, and there's only a handful I flat out refuse to play. Most of the reasons are due to button bloat issues and clunky design. BLM is the only one where the game feels like it wants BLM mains to quit.

People still aren't playing Monk even after its numerous amounts of reworks. If your argument hinges on "nobody is playing it, that's proof it needs a rework!" then you're going to get the Summoner-tier rework and you're going to enjoy it. In which case, have fun I guess when they do that?

Monk is hard to pin down exactly why, since its rework is actually good and legitimately brought up its numbers from where they were, but I'd suspect it's directly related to a bad opening rotation and incredibly stale animations on a somewhat 'meh' aesthetic moreso than anything else. Monk just isn't a popular aesthetic. It also has an overcapping problem for chakra that the devs didn't bother addressing for some reason, and has direct competition with Samurai and Reaper, which are extremely popular aesthetics with similar rotation design and without dragoon syndrome on the opener.