Regarding the newest Blackmage changes

[LolaLou]

Blackmage is by far one of my favourite jobs to play, yet the new changes leave a sour taste in mouth tot he point of filling me with concerns about the general gameplay experience.

My main issue lies in the changes that have been done to umbral ice, basing the mp recovery on ice spells used rather than the server ticks spend within that state. The change was made in order to fix the issue of inconsistent timings in which your mp would reach the maximum, which has already been fixed by the introduction of paradox in my mind.

It's become easier than ever to allow for enough time to pass so your mp would refresh to full every time by the time you'd naturally want to transition to the fire phase regardless of server ticks. It also allowed for deep and interesting optimization strategies, which revolve around skipping casting ice spells alltogether with the aid of transpose and non ice filler spells including paradox. But this aspect of the job has now been made absolete due to being forced to cast ice spells in order to gain mp which is a big shame in my eyes and took away a lot of excitement I've had for the expansion.

Not to mention that now you're unable to recover mp while being idle in umbral ice between dungeon pulls, until you learn umbral soul at the late 70s.
The only use for transpose is to convert a fire 3 proc into skipping the need for casting a weak fire 3 to swap into astral fire but that's about it.

Blackmage will lose a large portion of skill expression and creativity, along with the risk reward factor that came from using your resources to squeeze out more damage, instead of using them for movement needs. But now there is no way to recover the required amount of mana without casting a set sequence of spells. There will also be no use of going into fire with non full mp depending on how the new job gauge works, doubling the amount of creativity that has been taken away from us.

Okay, rant over. How do you guys feel about the changes tho?

[Post]

Did they say it would 'wholly' be unable to gain MP back from umbral ice tics, or just that it would be 'assisted' by gaining additional MP from Blizzard spells under it?

If it's the former, in my mind that's a change on the levels of egregiousness in terms of how the job functions in lore up there with ACN losing its DoTs, SCH losing a fairie, SMN its Egis, AST not being able to manipulate time at all or WHM having all its spells stuck in light mode even though we're back from the first, gameplay-aside.

Hell, even BLM PvP moved away from generating MP from casts directly like it had in StB/ShB; that version of BLM is only relegated to NPC controlling duties... Until Dawntrail!

[Ramiee]

Unsure personally, this could lead to new non-standard rotations and strats for BLM, but also as you said loses the fun ice phase skips strats and unalligned leylines.
I think it will depend on how this whole mana regain feels to use which we won't know until we use it the make or break really depends on how much mana we get back. There could be new strats that come to surface like not recovering full mana and switching enough to get high enough damage for uptime before a non-damage period in a boss for example. I will say if I had to redesign mana regain with a gun to my head I wouldnt limit it to only ice spells and have it that all damaging effects you send out give you mana, but yeah i really dont know how to feel yet.

TLDR; Unsure, lean towards being uneasy about change but have to play before i know.
also lmao BLM was reworked way more than Dragoon was.

[jazzcatte]

I hope that they at least allow non-ice spells cast during umbral ice to regenerate mana. If you could also generate it with a Thunder 3 or a Xenoglossy, that would go a long way towards keeping the flexibility that the job currently enjoys.

[Aelin_Ashryver]

Fairly positive about the changes myself, keen to see more information about it in the coming days should more info appear.

[Keichi]

I think you forgett the natural mp regeneration of the charas, who is normaly blocked by the fire spheres of the blm.
Mean: If you are in your ice phase, should you have the naturaly mp regeneration (what will probably now be slower as before), the mp reg over time skill (for, when you are running around). And than, the fixed mp regeneration of the ice spells.
Im neutral to that.
It ruins the idea of beeing as good as possible be a pure fire mage. But, Ice feeled allways like the unwanted little brother, who you want to have away as fast as possible. Maybe, they extend the use of the ice phase somehow. It feels allways a little bad, that you dont need ice 1 ever, after you learn blizzard. Because, its the stronger ice spell with no drawbacks (except casting time).

My complaining about the blm is, that it looks like, as if whe are pressing fire4 even more now, as before. I would like to have some variation in his move set (like a firewall for a line aoe attack or so). A extended ice phase could give this maybe.
In addition did it not looked for me, as if the ice phase is truly longer now as before. It looked for me very fast over and was going back to the fire phase.

The other complain i have is more the Leylines.
Its a nice idea, to summon the lines back to you, if you are forced to go out of it.
But. i would miss the option, to jump to the leylines. Because, it could help with movement over the arena or to evade some aoe attacks (like the scorpion thing in the last dungein, where you could place the lines, and when the sand is coming, can you move instantly to the lines and are out of the danger zone).

[HikariKurosawa]

It also allowed for deep and interesting optimization strategies, which revolve around skipping casting ice spells alltogether with the aid of transpose and non ice filler spells including paradox. But this aspect of the job has now been made absolete due to being forced to cast ice spells in order to gain mp which is a big shame in my eyes and took away a lot of excitement I've had for the expansion.

Okay, rant over. How do you guys feel about the changes tho?

I don't get this logic. Being able to ignore core parts of your kit is deep optimization? It's no wonder they made this change. It's more like a glitchy interaction that broke the design of the job that people were getting away with rather than what I would call "deep optimization".

Personally this simplifies job expression of skill and makes it standard to use the full kit. We have these spells, you should want to use them the two times you have to use them. It's a loss that it was more optimal to not use the spells than it was to use the full kit.

To me this is a win.

The other changes I am a huge fan of too. More spamming explosions during fire phase, and a big fire nuke that looks modern for both single target and aoe fire.

[Post]

The thing is that they didn't 'fully ignore' parts of their kit, like it sounds at first, they are just able to at certain specific circumstances that the system allows for. And it's not easy to pull off effectively always, and that's what's fun about it. You really learn a fight more closely because the job itself tackles each encounter slightly differently when compared to most other jobs in the game.

From the Dev's perspective though, yeah, they mostly don't like 'unintended' rotations, it's why StB Tornado Kick MNK was gutted, Anatman was thrown on the GCD and likely why MNK is getting changed further in DT, so there's some history to it. But, spending less of your time in fire and more of it in ice has been how BLM was intended to work since over a decade ago at level 2, when THM unlocks fire 1. It's very intentional.

But tell me, when do you use Scathe, that's part of your full kit, right? And what would you consider 'deep optimization', seeing as just using every spell in the same prescribed order seems to be closer to it than what BLM has now?

[HikariKurosawa]

The thing is that they didn't 'fully ignore' parts of their kit, like it sounds at first, they are just able to at certain specific circumstances that the system allows for. And it's not easy to pull off effectively always, and that's what's fun about it. You really learn a fight more closely because the job itself tackles each encounter slightly differently when compared to most other jobs in the game.

From the Dev's perspective though, yeah, they mostly don't like 'unintended' rotations, it's why StB Tornado Kick MNK was gutted, Anatman was thrown on the GCD and likely why MNK is getting changed further in DT, so there's some history to it. But, spending less of your time in fire and more of it in ice has been how BLM was intended to work since over a decade ago at level 2, when THM unlocks fire 1. It's very intentional.

But tell me, when do you use Scathe, that's part of your full kit, right? And what would you consider 'deep optimization', seeing as just using every spell in the same prescribed order seems to be closer to it than what BLM has now?

When do you use cure 1 on white mage?

[Lemuel81]

I really think we need to know more about the changes in BLM before judging. There is already a thread claiming that the MP regen change will kill the BLM. I doubt BLM will be in a bad place and I am anxious to see what the full set of changes are.