Black Mage changes aren't enough. (As far as we know.)

[ThorneDynasty]

Except there's no amount of AF timer that will cover for MP regeneration issues. What if you come out UI downtime with just 2 umbral charges from Umbral Soul? Being forced to cast B4 just for 1 or 2 hearts is highly unintuitive - Like wasn't the whole point to make the job more easy to approach for newbies? It just seems riddled with newbie traps now - Hell, I can't tell the right way to handle these scenarios by glance.

[Melphina_Dragonfyre]

Removing thundercloud was a mistake. Thunderhead is fine by itself, but thundercloud is what made weaving thunder into the rotation fluent. I'd be fine if they had both in simultaneously, but if I was forced to pick one over the other its hands down thundercloud all the way. It's been mentioned once or twice already, but thunder is so much worse without thundercloud.

[Poppet]

Please completely remove Flare Star and bring back Ice Paradox.

[ThorneDynasty]

Looking forward to the panicked overreaction from SE, digging this job even deeper like they do every time they screw up a rework. Rolling back to a perfectly good state would be too much like admitting a mistake I suppose. They'll probably instead try removing cast times next and make Flare Star higher potency on a 120s uninteractive cooldown or something equally horrible.

[Altera]

Please completely remove Flare Star and bring back Ice Paradox.

This graph looks depressing. Never seen BLM ranked this low since I started playing BLM in the original 1.0 when they added the Job System to the game and I was a THM before the Jobs xD

[wereotter]

2. Thunderhead, while an interesting change to the Thunder Dot, has done more harm than good in my eyes. I've seen a few Black Mages press it every single time they change phase, and I think it's a newbie trap, in the same way Freecure is on White Mage.

Just wanted to say thank you for bringing this up. I hadn't seriously played the job in a while and assumed thunderhead worked the same as thundercloud from before (deal the full potency of all the DOT damage plus refresh the DOT) Checked the job guide again and saw it's just refresh the DOT.

Wouldn't be surprised if I'm not the only one who saw the dancing ants around the thunder spell and went back to the old way of thinking and assumed it's still fine to refresh it every time you phase shift.

[wildvenonat]

If Thunder was turned into an ogcd it wouldn't be anywhere near as bad a newbie trap.

[CoeliAlmr]

I really agree with most of this post. I disagree with the aspect that we should keep Flare Star. I feel that Flare Star's existence is fundamentally redundant with polyglot. They are both resources that build up to a nuke, and everything definitely feels too tight and restrictive. I agree with the thunder changes, they are just so far out there. It hits a point where there are too many mechanics at once and I think even if they loosened everything up, it wouldn't help much. I think a better solution would be an expantion of aetherial maniuplation to allow BLM to have More instant Cast mobility. Upon completing a rotation, Aetherial manipulation would reset the CD. I think mobility is the solution, not bigger boom. Mobility dictates the metagame of a game. I see no reason why a BLM that's peaking in the execution of their rotation shouldn't be able to easily phase in and out of the void and manipulate it to thier advantage. it solves the mechanical overwhelm BLM is feeling, it allow SE to continue to design high mobility fights without having to worry about BLM, and it leans into the existing lore previously establish by even the Thaumaturge quest lines in Ul'Dah. As a game designer myself, I really understand things in a lot of ways most people cannot.

I agree with you about Flare Star, it creates a lot of problems. If I had complete freedom to change the class, I would remove it. Unfortunately, I think it is very unlikely that SE will. They would need to create a new ability for Lvl 100 which is a much bigger commitment (obviously it would involve making assets, code logic, testing etc). As far as I'm aware, they've never removed a current max level ability (as in Level 80/90/100 etc) and I don't think they want to set the precedent.
Sadly, I just don't see SE even considering removing it, it's a lot of work and it's bad optics for them.

So the question becomes how do you fix Flare Star? I've seen 3 common ideas.
a) Allow it to be used with fewer stacks
b) Make it instant (This is better than current but this alone doesn't fix the rigidity. Maybe this & option a) )
c) Allow the fire stacks to carry through ice (Please no, flare star will appear all over the place in your rotation)

I'm personally fine with AM as it is. I like the 10s CD and adding anything to it means they need make the CD longer as you've kind of said. 10s CD is nice for using it several times quickly (e.g. P12S Superchain 1, putting LL center and using manip to people then use BtL to get back was quite common).
I like the idea of instant casts after AM ONLY IF it does not become a DPS gain to spam it and it is done in a way that doesn't prevent using it several times quickly (E.g. a stack system with 2 or 3 uses).
Yeah, I'm mainly thinking about adjusting the length of fire phases for the sake of mobility. Ice phases used to be the more mobile ones with ice paradox (RIP). I'm less fussed about the DPS gains, the flexibility is more important.

[kuje]

Adding my voice to this, as someone who's dabbled in Black Mage since around 5.4, graduating into maining it in savage Pandaemonium throughout 6.x.
TL;DR: Bring nonstandard back, and allow for flexibility and meaningful decision-making again.

The 7.0 changes are severely disappointing, even as someone who generally favored standard gameplay, only using basic optimizations like shorter fire phases to pump out more damage before boss disengagement or death, and salvaging movement-heavy situations. This kind of situational assessment and the ability to respond accordingly are what made Black Mage fun for me. As a direct result of the new changes, the latter half of the equation appears completely absent.

The current form of Flare Star and the necessity of casting Blizzard 4 to restore mana (and thus to do a fire phase at all) are the biggest issues I have with this iteration. Especially combined together, these make the gameplay experience extremely rigid and fairly miserable.

I'm not much of a theory crafter and even less of a game designer, but I would still like to share my thoughts on how these two elements could be adjusted for a smoother experience.

Flare Star:
As per CoeliAlmr's message above, Flare Star would work best if it could be used with fewer stacks, increasing in potency as it reaches full charge. It would still work as a reward for a full Fire phase, but not punish the player unduly for the often necessary shorter phases; this might actually be fun to juggle. That said, I definitely would not miss it if it were removed entirely. It's not worth the trade-off of flexible fire phases.

Umbral Ice:
Having a more reliable mana restoration tool does help with server tick and lag issues, but I would like to see this element added on top of the boosted mana regen instead of replacing it completely. (I realize this is a bit superfluous.)
If keeping mana regen tied to spells is what the development team really wants to do in the future, then I'd like to see Ice Paradox make a comeback as an alternative mana restoration cast to Blizzard 4; it could have higher potency, but grant no Umbral Hearts/less mana. This would really only have value with the Flare Star change, though. In any case, being forced to prepare a full fire phase when it's clear the boss will die or disengage before you can finish it feels just bad.

I think something along these lines would be preferable to how the class currently plays.

...Or just revert the class back to how it was in 6.x and allow nonstandard play to exist. I would genuinely be more excited about a rollback than I am about any of the new toys Black Mage got in 7.0. It might be an unrealistic request, but the current iteration just feels inferior to 6.x, and potency buffs alone won't help with that.

To any of the development team who this might reach, thank you for reading. I hope our thoughts are earnestly taken into account for a future revision of the class, ideally before 8.0.

[AevumNova]

With the planned adjustments to BLM being the following,

Before learning the action Umbral Soul, black mage has difficulty recovering MP. We plan to address this with adjustments in Patch 7.01, with plans to make further adjustments to action potencies in Patch 7.05.

I feel like we might be getting more substantial improvements to our standard rotation come 7.08 and 7.1. This is rather disheartening to hear, as I was hoping change would come faster. In the meantime though, I will continue to strive and educate why Black Mage feels so bad at this moment, and hopefully, influence some change.

1. Ice Paradox This has been one of the most pressing issues with Black Mage going into Dawntrail. As I understand it, the class is more like how it was in Shadowbringers, going from more mobile in Endwalker, to more of a turret. While I don't inherently disagree with going back to a design that worked back then, currently, I do not believe that the encounter design currently, allows for Black Mage to comfortably perform its rotation, as there's a lot of movement, and we don't have that anymore. That's not even mentioning how Black Mage will feel in earlier content.

2. Thunderhead, while an interesting change to the Thunder Dot, has done more harm than good in my eyes. I've seen a few Black Mages press it every single time they change phase, and I think it's a newbie trap, in the same way Freecure is on White Mage.

3. The Length of Astral Fire. This is an issue for three reasons. The first, is that it being so long (especially with the new way Manafont works), leads to thunder being harder to keep uptime with.

The second reason, is that with only 2 instant casts, (Paradox and Fire 3), we don't have many free weaving slots as we did in Endwalker, and as such it feels worse to cast our oGCD's like Triplecast, Swiftcast, Addle, Manaward, Transpose, Aetherial Manipulation, and Leylines.

The third reason is how punishing AF is now, with no real reward. Flare Star simply isn't a good enough reward for all the effort we have to put in with a tighter AF phase, and harder thunder uptime. It should be instant cast, or something else to make it feel worthwhile.

If you have any other complaints, please let me know.

I agree, I also feel that ice phase being 2 gcds for standard rotation makes it feel less meaningful. Thanks for making this polite feedback, hopefully the devs will listen to our concerns.