The vision for 7.0 Black Mage

[SoleilBigMountain]

Quite honestly, I just don't see it.

Usually, there is some through line with the changes, to make it easier to play for casuals/people learning the job or to remove some clunk and make the job more fun to play. But for the BLM changes there is no vision. I see a lot of people saying well it's just high end BLM's that will be upset the casuals will love this and it will make the job more approachable, while it might read that it actually isn't going to end up being the case.

To go over it from the start leveling the job is going to be an outright nightmare, pre umbral soul the job just won't function in some older content and for a lot of others it will require black mages to swift a blizzard 1/3/4 before downtime to actually be able to play the game, and even once they get umbral soul the job won't feel good until paradox at 90. I understand it's a very popular opinion that BLM is a nightmare to level but now it just got even worse, and SE should still strive to making leveling jobs as painless as possible so people don't feel forced to buy a level skip. It's both lazy and tone deaf to say jobs will always be miserable to level and not at least make them passable. My only hope for this is an easy fix of at least giving umbral soul way earlier so leveling it feels better and the job can function in older content.

For people learning the job it may read more approachable but the job itself will actually be both harder to play and more punishing. With the removal of sharpcast, ice paradox, and thunder flexibility gone the job actually has net neutral movement even with the guaranteed fire starter proc from AF paradox at best having +0.5, with the added flare star making movement tighter. AF para also has an unintended side effect now being instant there's actually 2 less seconds on the time, because before it would refresh at the end of the cast when you can immediately hit the next GCD but now it refreshes at the start meaning you have 2 seconds of being able to do nothing as the timer ticks down. While with 3 xenoglossy's and high thunder you end up needing more GCD's and more time in AF to dump them without over capping or letting your dot drop despite losing time. You then add into the fact that UI is now a quick two GCD in and out adventure rather then being as long as you need to dump stuff and spend your movement in EW, the rotation ends up being far stricter with much less room for error. All of this being said now AF is more punishing to drop then ever, even losing a fire IV now costs people both that and a flare star. I don't see how people can look at these changes and go "it's more approachable now" it feels like people just looked at the leylines changes and said oh it's more forgiving because you don't have to worry about abandoning 1 oGCD every 2 minutes and ignored the rest of the changes. It's both more punishing and harder to learn.

[SoleilBigMountain]

Then at the very least it's a very universal agreement that these changes are very unpopular and bad for high end BLM players. On the lowest end we lost player expression with free form ice and fire phase, sharpcast use and planning, and dot management. Now on the other end non standard is guaranteed dead and might only exist in some very small capacity. I don't want to argue if non standard being dead or not is a good thing, if unintended ways to play the job should be allowed or not, I just want to acknowledge a reason and way a group of people played BLM is gone. And that it being gone does not effect learning the job or people who want to approach the job despite what a lot of people may have thought you did not need to even touch non standard to learn and do well on the job.

Again I would like to reiterate I don't want to argue about where the difficulty of BLM should be placed, it's clearly moving towards a managing what few movement tools you have now to not lose your fire line, but to me I don't see these changes as healthy for any level of the job it is worse for high ends and HARDER for anyone below that. As a new player you're going to hear and feel how terrible leveling a job is and how bad it is for older content (which jobs should at least be PLAYABLE in older content), as a learning BLM it's going to be harder and stricter, then when you reach the top there isn't going to be any reason to stick around because at best you have 0 ways to express and enjoy yourself while at worst having why you played the job just be removed. Before I get off my soap box I would also like to say you don't have to master a job to enjoy it, you should be able to enjoy a job at all levels of play and asking for the skill ceiling to crash into the floor will never be a healthy way to balance a job.

If you ultimately see these changes as positive I cannot take that away from you, I just see these as changes that are going to be bad and poison BLM at all levels, if there was one way to grasp onto it I would but just being able to move leylines and fixing some MP tick jank that would happen once a fight if you were high end SPS is not going to smooth over a lot of these changes. A lot of people seem to think these changes solely as effecting a high end BLM thing when that isn't the case. And sincerely even if this is a better baseline to balance the job moving forward I have even less hope, considering how SE has treated jobs that were supposed to be a baseline for future changes moving forward already like how SMN is going.

[MagiusNecros]

Fire 4 spam. That is the vision.

[wildvenonat]

Fire 4 spam. That is the vision.

The awful thing about this is that people organically gravitated towards Fire 4 spam even without a "you only get this bonus from casting enough Fire 4". Fire 4 spam was already fun. It did not need you to be punished for not fitting enough F4 in Fire phase.

[MagiusNecros]

BLM will need to stack enough SpS to reliably get 6 F4 before AF ends and start casting FS. Once AF drops or swaps to UI you lose all your stacks.

I guess if it is too difficult they will just increase AF timer.

[SoleilBigMountain]

It's like the devs are lumping freedom and expression in with being hard to learn and making it scary for new players, before you could drop a F4 and be fine especially if you were just learning, this new version is going to end up being harder for new players to learn while making it less free form and more punishing.

[Mecia]

I really want to see how BLM is going to play with DT encounters due to the new strictness. I foresee caster balance being total trash.

[OgruMogru]

No controllable procs for lvl90 and below content. No mana regen. No ice paradox means no emergency contingency for mistakes and also means no weaving window for smooth transpose into AF1 F3 which doesn't make sense seeing as they just made the transpose F1 more accessible with the guaranteed proc change! And they can't increase the potency on the thunder too much because people will abuse it for infinite insta-casts because it's like they insisted on retooling it to work off of the abandoned polyglot generation on switching stances.

[Taranok]

BLM's theme is simple. ARR was defined around a proc mage with hastily thrown together and extremely janky proc interaction. HW heavily marginalized procs in favor of fire 4 spam with fire 1 to mix it up, as a common complaint in ARR was classes casting the same skill over and over multiple times in a row. SB was also a marginalized proc mage that focused on explosions. ShB, also, was an even more marginalized proc mage focused on more explosions, with an accidentally added exploit that allowed for slight DPS gains by completely ignoring the Stormblood rotation that was still present in the class. Endwalker is also an even, even more marginalized proc mage (notice the trend?) that had a second exploit added because the devs wanted to make the all-but-guaranteed-already procs easier to use by upping the timer duration, the 50,000th time the class has had proc timers increased,, and managed to bring back some of ARR's jank. That's right, transpose firestarter existed in ARR as a consequence of netcode and bad ability design, especially related to when timers refreshed, which coincided with when the procs showed up. They were extremely delayed so you often could be halfway through casting blizzard 3 before you even saw the proc, and transpose firestarter let you salvage some of the damage of the missed proc.

Dawntrail is an explosion mage getting yet more explosions while fixing the mistakes erroneously added to the class in both ShB and EW. They also decided that proc mage, an already heavily marginalized concept, was just removed because it has long since been a core identity of the class.

And, of course, it's still a boom and bust cycle across all iterations.

No controllable procs for lvl90 and below content. No mana regen. No ice paradox means no emergency contingency for mistakes and also means no weaving window for smooth transpose into AF1 F3 which doesn't make sense seeing as they just made the transpose F1 more accessible with the guaranteed proc change! And they can't increase the potency on the thunder too much because people will abuse it for infinite insta-casts because it's like they insisted on retooling it to work off of the abandoned polyglot generation on switching stances.

This is why the ice phase is now only 2 GCDs. Blizzard 4 and fire 3. You also have thunderhead as your emergency movement in UI3. You also won't ever use transpose firestarter because they nerfed AF1 to no longer increase fire damage at all, and UI3 hardcast of fire 3 is now 100% damage as per the aspect mastery 3 tooltip. UI 1 and 2 list damage drops, UI3 does not. Fire 3 is also DPS neutral with fire 4 (slight gain) so using a transpose firestarter is now actively bad for you, as per all known tooltips on the class.

No, really, here's the tooltips. People abused transpose firestarter so much that the devs straight up nerfed BLM below level 20 just to make sure no one would again, and made sure that there was no damage penalty at AF/UI3 as well so even if it did have gains, the gain is no longer enough to matter compared to the damage of just casting it in AF3.

[JoshiKousei]

No, really, here's the tooltips. People abused transpose firestarter so much that the devs straight up nerfed BLM below level 20 just to make sure no one would again, and made sure that there was no damage penalty at AF/UI3 as well so even if it did have gains, the gain is no longer enough to matter compared to the damage of just casting it in AF3.

It's a typo with English. JP tooltips list the -30% dmg while in UI3 properly.