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

[ElevatedCosmonaut]

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.

[Realfoxy]

I agree with most of what you said.

I think a fundamental problem with the MP system right now is that there's simply no way to go into a short fire phase without it feeling terrible. Having to cast a B4 just to get mana back, while knowing that a boss is about to die in 7-8 seconds just feels awful. To say nothing of the problems that current DT BLM has with aligning its rotation to the movement heavy fights in this expansion.

[velswen]

I agree! I've Paradox is dope, Fire Paradox should realistically not be instant cast given the AF timer, and Thunderclous procs going away is both less fun and makes using thunder for weaving feel way worse.

[Sunako]

what I found annoying sometimes, if you refresh your thunder very beginning of fire phase and use few xenoglossy during fire phase, you can not refresh thunder once it fall off, because the phase may last more than 30 seconds, but potentially that can be adjusted by using xeno in differet phase.

[Turtledeluxe]

Came to dps forum just to say most of what has been said. The job feels like an unbalanced mess to play now between the long astral fire phase, the messy and unrewarding execution of useless Flare Star, the timing of Thunder and other procs, the removal of Ice Paradox, etc. I cannot emphasize what a mess the rework is and I cannot imagine more people playing this job. They removed optional job complexity and put in unrewarding inflexibility. Dropping the job once I'm done with MSQ permanently.

And it especially feels terrible to play in the very fun new boss fights, which is a contradiction.

Potency increases are also welcome simply because, why would you even play this mess when PCT is right there? But potency alone isn't going to fix this job anymore.

[ToodlesElNoodles]

Really upset with BLM right now. It feels dysfunctional now.

Do they not test these changes in…any content? Or is this an understaffed/underpaid indie company?

[Taranok]

*snip*

I'd be surprised if they change the core rotation. Short of maybe merging skills like fire 1 with fire 3 or blizzard 1 with blizzard 3, plus some obvious things like merging fire 4/blizzard 4 and other mutually exclusive skills. Even then, the BLM community isn't advocating for a reduction to BLM's egregious button bloat, so I'm not expecting changes here.

1. The removal of ice paradox isn't really that big an issue. The ice rotation is exactly 3 skills unless you recast thunderhead, xenoglossy stacks combined with 40s swiftcast and 60s triplecast means if you absolutely need to, you should have options.

This is doubly so when factoring in you get a guaranteed triplecast, meaning you have over 4 instant casts per cycle. 1 xenoglossy, 1 paradox, 1 fire 3, 1 thunder. Averaging out to roughly 1 instant per 10 seconds before bringing in triplecast or amplifier instants. If that's not enough instants, then the issue is encounter design. And boy is encounter design exceedingly bad for casters right now. But that's another matter entirely.

2. I agree, though my position is that thunder feels orphaned. Personally, I'd prefer they reworked thunder outright into a multistep combo that was fed off of some mechanic other than timing or stance swapping. It is a newb trap, and it feels like a soft replacement for scathe.

3. Manafont is indeed extremely badly designed atm. If you get down to it, manafont is literally a 100s cooldown that saves you 3, whole, gcds. Blizzard 3, blizzard 4, fire 3. That is literally all manafont does. To call it extremely badly designed at this point is a gross understatement. It went from +2 GCDs at a specific time to -3 GCDs, also at a specific time. The button could literally be removed and I, personally, wouldn't notice a difference outside of missing quad flares below 100, and sextaflares at 100. Plus other obvious leveling changes.

The secondary issue is that, because of how long it is, flare star not refreshing timers, and the timers being completely pointless now, I have to question why the devs haven't just removed AF/UI timers. It'd drop the skill floor out from under the class and give them room to, I don't know, make the umbral ice phase more interesting than 3 meh GCDs and maybe a thunder refresh or transpose firestarter. Like giving room for a real thunder rotation as well. Plus it'd make the class more than just a fire mage 95% of the time.

That's what I want. Expanded/stronger UI phase, no timers, thunder doing more than just a dot. You know, using more than 1 element. Though that type of rework won't happen until 8.0 I feel.

[Taranok]

Really upset with BLM right now. It feels dysfunctional now.

Do they not test these changes in…any content? Or is this an understaffed/underpaid indie company?

It's more to do with the devs testing the class in a specific way, and when players play it outside how they expect, they both don't know how to respond and also try to move it back towards how they want. Likewise, devs have a serious "Tested on 0 ping," problem. And they appear to be sadistic in encounter design towards casters. When even your newest job feels very bleh on fights due to the design of the fight itself, there's a serious issue with the design process. Though YMMV. PCT feels like a bunch of good ideas thrown into a blender, then at a wall to see what sticks. With encounters designed primarily with summoner in mind.

[CoeliAlmr]

I've been a BLM main since I started playing. I still want to be one but this version of the job just feels bad and has so many small frustrations.

I agree so much with what the original poster said about thunderhead, it's just frustrating having to think about it. There are times when I'm about to cast it and the timer drops and it's just confusing. It feels like unnecessary jank that I now have to track.
I would rather they let Thunder be instant and always usable or at least increase the duration of the thunderhead buff. The buff is currently the same length as the DoT, so if you use the High Thunder to weave transpose into the AF1 Firestarter, the ideal reapplication becomes just as the buff is about to drop which is also at the end of a tight fire line under low spell speed.

Swapping to fire and using the Firestarter is ok but it just feels so tight to use it every time. Now that the optimisation is simple it feels mandatory to do it and you feel forced to try and make it work.
In 6.X, the optimisation was complex. I knew that I wouldn't be the best but there were always small bits I could learn for marginal gains if I wanted and I like that being there.
I didn't feel pressured to learn all of it because I knew it wasn't necessary. There were some basic improvements I did and after that it was diminishing returns.
Now there is only one optimisation with firestarter, I feel obligated to use it because I know that is how you do the most damage and it feels bad to not do it.

The manafont change sounded ok before I played it but it's just so much fire that I barely have time out of it to spend polyglots. I'm now also worried about drifting it.

6.X BLM felt so good, it was so free flowing and fluid and now it's so rigid, with no ways to correct it's rigidity. I'm playing PCT at the moment which is quite fun but I can't stop thinking about how I would rather be playing previous BLM.

I loved non-standard, it was so much fun and more accessible than outsiders realise. 90% of it was just swap to ice, use some instants and do a short fire line.
It took a bit of time to get used to actually using it but it felt so satisfying. Learning about it filled a lot of the time for me between patches whilst there wasn't much content and having these new options made me enjoy the new raid in P9-P12 so much more.
E.g. the double transpose opener, involved an early refresh of thunder which gave the thunder DoT a very different alignment for the rest of the fight.
The first time I used this to make it align better for movement for the rest of the fight felt awesome.

I hope SE bring back ice paradox or leave some more room for optimisation. Another suggestion I like is allowing Flare Star to work with fewer stacks for less damage. I really like everything content wise about Dawntrail so far but I just wish BLM didn't feel so bad :/
Please can we have less jank and more room for creativity SE? Please?

[bitterhorn]

^this is all very well said, and goes to show that the previous BLM iteration with more moving parts and more choices to make that weren't Uniformly Wrong... wasn't just engaging for tippy-top-tier min-maxers, but for people who needed or liked variety, or the space to improvise a little when we screwed up or something didn't go exactly the way we predicted.

Someone in one of these threads called the new BLM design "braindead" which I don't think is entirely fair, it still requires a lot of cognitive energy, it's just... a less creative sort of cognitive energy. Unsurprisingly reminiscent of the reason I stopped playing SMN completely in EW, and why RPR didn't really have the depth to keep me interested after the novelty wore off.

Anyway, I've said enough. I hope someday the job design folks stop confusing "making something easier/more accessible" and "making something less flexible/more repetitive." But I do not really believe they will.