BLM Media Tour Feedback - Retain Astral Gauge outside of Astral Fire

[LilimoLimomo]

After watching Media Tour videos on Dawntrail Black Mage, there's a lot that I think I won't know how to feel about until I get my hands on it, so I'm looking forward to trying it out. But there's one thing that I'm pretty confident is going to feel bad, so I wanted to provide my thoughts as feedback about that.

In short, I think the Astral Gauge emptying upon leaving Astral Fire is going to feel very bad whenever your Astral Fire phase ends without having been able to accumulate a full Astral Gauge to cast Flare Star.

I'm not the best Black Mage player, so I'm accustomed to having things go wrong and making mistakes and doing my best to dynamically recover. For example, maybe with everything I'm reacting to I misjudge my timers and then have to cast Transpose instead of Fire, losing my Fire Phase early so that I can maintain Enochian. These kinds of things happen, and it's part of what I love about Black Mage! It keeps me on my toes and keeps me engaged.

But building up 5/6 of the Astral Gauge and then losing it when I need to switch to Astral Ice because I botched something at some time during my Fire Phase? That's going to feel really bad every time it happens.

Right now, getting 1 less Fire IV during my Fire Phase doesn't feel great, but it also doesn't feel like a huge loss. I know I've lost some damage, but it's just one Fire IV. That makes it easy enough to dust myself off and keep trying my best, aspiring to do even better next time. But with the addition of the Astral Gauge, getting 1 less Fire IV won't just mean losing that Fire IV, it will also mean losing the entire Flare Star as well. And that's going to feel a lot worse because that's not only a more significant loss of damage, but it's also the loss of my big feel-good attack. It will distinctly feel like the Fire Phase has been "failed" in a way that doesn't exist in the current game.

The closest thing I can think of to this loss would be losing Enochian when it's 5/6 of the way to a Polyglot stack...except that keeping Enochian up is a much more forgiving process, in that you only have to do something every 16-ish seconds. That's a much smaller ask than not missing any Fire IV's during your Astral Fire Phase.

I think if the Astral Gauge kept its charges even outside of Astral Fire, this would feel much less punishing. Thanks for considering my feedback!

[Jeeqbit]

Sometimes I've had things like that go wrong already. For example, sometimes I don't have the MP to cast Despair, which is almost the same potency as Flare Star (-10).

What makes it recover is just the random procs of Lightning which effectively make up for it.

Usually rather than transpose I'd just Swiftcast something, whether that's Fire 1 or Blizzard 3. If you're lucky in Dawntrail, it'll coincide with the 2 minute burst anyway.

[MagiusNecros]

It's a risk reward thing I guess. I kind of find Flare Star underwhelming since comparing the potencies it's only 10 higher then Despair so it really just ends up being your 8th Fire 4 before you switch back to Ice mode for 1-2 GCDs. Just seems like an unnecessary limitation.

Dawntrail Fire Mage just seems to be 8 Fire 4's in ST and 3 Flares in AoE.

[Siritachi31]

Agreed 100%. I don't main Blm but I love playing it on the side. Now I feel like if I am not playing PERFECTLY i will be losing on more than one spell. Flare Star is a cool spell and I love the reference to Kuja. But at the same time, getting a flare star doesn't feel it's gonna be worth it to get, but it's also going to be painful to miss it. The dps seems similar to despair which you can cast pretty consistently if you just watch your mp. But now if I mess up my rotation even slightly I can miss out on a major finisher I wanna use and just by missing one fire IV cast on accident. It feels like the whole job is becoming too rigid and strict. If I don't play like they are intending I will lose out on dps and spells. As a casual player it seems like it's just not worth playing the job cause it's getting even more difficult. All this is done while doing mechs and not moving and that's already hard but now it's so strict on top of that I wouldn't be suprised if some people never even level it now