Please reconsider 7.0 BLM changes

[NamiOh]

Simply going to add my voice in agreement with the poster. I'm a BLM main since ARR and endwalker was the most fun I ever had playing the job. What made the job so fun was the adaptability of the rotation giving you a puzzle in a sense during each new encounter, having to figure out the best rotation to fit the timeline and movement of the fight. +1

[Moqi]

I don't understand some players' aversion to a skill ceiling. Standard gives you 97% of the job's power in a very straightforward, simple way to understand. How does nipping the last 3% help them?
You can literally do top 3% damage just doing standard stuff. The new standard is just a downgraded version of the current standard, so how does this alienate them?

Because the game rewards you for doing nothing and when you have a job that requires a couple of working braincells suddenly it's too hard and they whine that they're not easily top damage like they are when they play SMN. The funny thing is, if you manage to cast 4 Fire IV in an Astral Fire cycle you're already better than most BLM's in Roulettes (these people are not gonna step out of that) so worrying about non standard is about as legitimate as having anxiety over healing in a videogame.

But as usual SE caters to players who DON'T play the job rather than the ones who do.

[Minmay-Xiaobailong]

Honestly I'm a subjob BLM player and not the kind of player who tries to dig the job to the deepest, and I never systematically learned the theories about non-standard versus standard. From such a non-top player's view, I have no idea how deleting ice paradox and forcing players to do the standard make this job more popular. （Contents below are some of my own opinions, might be wrong.）

I can understand that Yoshi'P the Producer wants BLM to be accepted by more players, yet from what I know so far, the reason people refuse to play BLM in raids is not those theoretical differences among rotation structures, but the fundamental-skill requirements/the over-high penalty of Gcd losses/frustrating Enochian suspension.

If the producer expects more players are trying to play BLM in DawnTrail, a good direction could be working more on mistake-solving! Every rookie BLM makes huge amounts of mistakes when practising. Simply limiting the rotation to standard will not benefit them, but on the contrary lower down the flexibility（the best part of BLM）.The new FireIV gauge in Dawntrail seems to trigger the player to finish the standard perfectly, if failed, the frustration grows even stronger compared to Endwalker.

One typical BLM mistake is that the player incorrectly starts to cast a spell (Fire IV，Despair， Flare， or whatever) when the fire phase duration isn't enough. In such cases when the player needs to interupt, a Endwalker BLM can use either a firestarter(if available) or a Transpose-Ice Para as a good way to avert the potential loss. Ice Transpose can both hold up enochian and provide extra instant cast skill to do mechanics, even though it might not be good enough and might change the whole rotation, but those feedbacks of adjusting successfully are truely positive. For a Dawntrail BLM, player can only use the firestarter provided by paradox, if not available, any other solution(either casting low pot Blizzard Ⅲ for mp recovery or transpose back to fire with unfull MP) brings strong penalty and frustration.

[HikariKurosawa]

It's easy to understand when you really think about it, people who master non-standard have optimized the punish out of the job. When you know how to adjust your rotation for every situation you will no longer feel any urgency ever. This defeats the entire purpose of the job design, which is for fire to feel really desperate and urgent to get all your potency out in the limited window of time you have. This is why astral soul was added and made necessary on top of getting deleted if you leave astral fire. You now have forced urgency. This is by design and a good thing.

You shouldn't be able to break the core identity of the job design and be more optimal by avoiding to play it as intended. I can see why people are uncomfortable around the changes, because they are used to not being punished as a black mage player. They are used to feeling comfort in adaptibility to avoid ever wasting, and on top of this they are playing in the most effective way possible from a potency perspective.

You act like people like me really care about where they stand in the skill level hierarchy. I care about what I am trying to aim at, and if non-standard is the meta then that would be what I am aiming at even if I currently play really poorly. I am a relative beginner to this game and will be for a long time. Non-standard destroys all urgency in black mage and replaces it with calculated adaptability. It's not harder once you learn it, it's actually easier. Which is why people are struggling with the changes. They will have to actually play BLM the hard way and deal with being punished for misplay. You will have to deal with not being able to get out astral soul all of the time. You will have to deal with the job design for once.

If you don't like the job design of blm, just play pictomancer or something else. BLM has always been about feeling really pressed to get all your potency out before your fire burns out. Non-standard removes this entire feeling from the job. It'd be fine if non-standard wasn't the meta, but the meta shouldn't destroy the core identity of the job.

You can throw a fit all you want and get as mad as you want to get at me, say whatever insults you want to say. At the end of the day I am correct and the devs are too.

The real benefit of nonstandard was the freedom to adjust how long your lines were and to move instants around to wherever you'd want them. It's incredibly liberating and with enough skill you can run circles around RDM. For a lot of people nonstandard is straight up easier, across all skill ranges. It doesn't take a postdoc in statistical thermodynamics to pick up the basics of double transposes or recovery lines. All these changes will do is compress the skill range and BLM does not need a higher skill floor than what it already has.

^^^^^^
I played non-standard to get the most out of my damage when I had to move I didn't do it because it did 2% more damage.

If you don't like playing a punishing job, just say so. Non-standard is not how black mage is supposed to feel.

[CoeliAlmr]

I seriously hope SE reconsider. Non-standard is just so damn fun.. I can't believe I'm not going to be able to do it any more in a few weeks :/

I play wizards/mage in every game where I can and 6.0-6.5 BLM is probably my favourite iteration of a mage across any game. There's just something so satisfying about using your tools to adjust when and how you move and to me that's exactly the kind of decision making I want on a mage.

Rather than giving abilities that restrict the length of a line, SE could lean into it this dynamic by making ice spells more mobile and/or allow all spells in ice to give mana. Would even be fulfilling gameplay to have multiple fire abilities to consider which adjust the length of a fire line more significantly.
Making adjustments to line length more accessible for new players would probably make the job more approachable for new players to get through mechanics honestly.

There are so many other ways that BLM could made more approachable but for some reason they chose to focus on removing the fun optimisation aspects which are very heavily enjoyed by some of the community? I don't understand why this was their priority?

I could be wrong but it doesn't seem much more approachable either anyway? Transposing out to Ice Paradox was comfy compared to a slow B3 and forcing 6F4s in a fire phase seem likes a decision which opposes this?



The number 1 complaint about BLM I hear from people not used to it is that levelling it is an awful experience. Watch any new content creator start the game and a lot of the community actively recommends starting on any job except BLM.
Make it more enjoyable in lower levels so people use it more in dungeons and become more comfortable for later content. Why not make give the first stack of triple cast earlier and let the level 66 ability be the second stack? What about adding a weaker F4 for low levels to be consistent?
Another common complaint which affects desirability: the inconsistency of caster raise.

Thanks for reading.
PS. Make Scathe 0 MP. At level 100, you won't have mana for Flare Star if you use it.
Also: Umbral Soul at lower level please - having no mana at the start of packs in DT is going to feel horrible.

[Doublejho]

[nonsense]

a few things;
- you're more likely to be punished for doing nonstandard wrong than standard
- standard can perform essentially equally to nonstandard for dps
- nonstandard comes with just as much urgency if not more than standard, standard doesn't put you into situations where you have literally 0 seconds of free time to waste, your procs matter less and your timers matter less than they do in nonstandard
- nonstandard is still about maximising your fire casts, it's just maximising the amount you do compared to everything else too
- nonstandard isn't the meta, standard is, hence why it's called standard and not non-standard; meta things are the standard, that's what a meta is
- nonstandard is more in the spirit of BLM because the job has always been about optimising your freeform rotation to match a fight, standard is not optimising your rotation and is putting it on rails
- nonstandard can also optimise your damage when stationary, and even render you LESS mobile than standard depending on the line you're doing, it's not something that suddenly turns you into a ranged physical dps necessarily

- finally, you're talking complete and utter nonsense here, i can only be astounded by your sheer confidence in your own opinion and how persistently you can keep pushing it despite you being the only one who thinks it's reflective of reality, if this isn't bait you are a marvel of ego

hope this helps

[wildvenonat]

It's easy to understand when you really think about it, people who master non-standard have optimized the punish out of the job.

I'm fascinated by your movement from how non-standard was impossibly hard to now that it's too easy and people just don't want to learn BLM.

Get thee to leveling roulettes as BLM with neither inherent ice regen nor triplecast nor Umbral Soul. Certainly you're the only person who claims to want this.

[Galvuu]

I really feel replying to Hikari just derails the topic and will never add anything of importance.
If we reply, they sometimes go on a flurry of incoherent responses, but if we just ignore them the posts are limited to one per day or so...
(Yes, the 180 spin on their opinion of non-standard is dully noted, but they don't actually understand how the job works anyway, so that's granted- they just piece random tidbits from what people are discussing, spin it together in a post and shed negative light on the whole thing)

[JoshiKousei]

I'm just going to throw in my 2 cents here as a decent enough BLM player:

- Thunderhead is a stupid system. Delete it and just make Thunder instant because the proc system is a huge noob trap.
- Ice Paradox had 0 reason to be removed as what killed non-standard was the MP changes and because it's gone clipping transpose after B4 for an AF1 F3P is now optimal.
- Despair needs to give Astral Souls as if you drop a F4 you just don't get access to the new capstone.
- Fire Paradox being instant makes the later half Astral Fire window tighter unless you play at a faster GCD.

Overall I dislike the changes but if I had to offer some immediate fixes it would be these.

[ThorneDynasty]

I'm fascinated by your movement from how non-standard was impossibly hard to now that it's too easy and people just don't want to learn BLM.

It's almost like they don't actually stand behind any of the garbage they spew over every topic they touch, but are instead just trying to aggravate all of you? I don't know, do people truly go on the internet just to revel in that kind of behavior?