BLM feedback.

[Taranok]

This job feels horrid to play. I've been playing a lot of pictomancer, and it's night and day. I just remember all those people who never touched BLM saying how accessible and "newbie friendly" it was going to become... yea, that's working out fantastic.
It's not just the potency either- this feels bad to play, like you're playing a job from HW but with modern encounter design.

Welcome to Black Mage. Not the fake black mage that nonstandard worshippers built up as somehow being the real class that was so flexible and freeform because of abusing bad design. The real, core Black Mage. It is a very sloppily designed class that has design decisions made before ARR even launched still present in it because the devs never bothered to actually fix the damned class. In part because of people constantly saying how much they loved the class because the class was so perfect, even though it relied on effectively turning the class into something it wasn't to achieve this. Look at the class without all the nonstandard exploits. This is Black Mage.

To give you an idea of how bad this class is, I saw the problems it has that people are complaining about right now back in 2021. Here's the thread I made where BLM mains who abused nonstandard claimed the class was perfect and I was crazy.

Personally, I don't like pictomancer. It feels like 5 core ideas roughly thrown together and called a class. It feels rough around the edges and half-baked. BLM is in a bad spot, but at least its idea is coherent, even if BLM's core is literally incompatible with DT, BLM itself is still a coherent rotation that has persisted since HW, and not just: "Random crap, go!" the class.

But I'm also going to say this, the only reason I'm happy with the state of BLM right now is that, now that the nonstandard wool has been removed from all BLM main's eyes, they can finally see just how rotten the class actually is.

I just hope that when this is all said and done, the devs revitalize the turret caster gameplay within their encounter meta. The death of turret caster gameplay will be the single largest example of homogenization the game has ever had if it finally and truly dies.

[Ririta]

Welcome to Black Mage. Not the fake black mage that nonstandard worshippers built up as somehow being the real class that was so flexible and freeform because of abusing bad design. The real, core Black Mage. It is a very sloppily designed class that has design decisions made before ARR even launched still present in it because the devs never bothered to actually fix the damned class. In part because of people constantly saying how much they loved the class because the class was so perfect, even though it relied on effectively turning the class into something it wasn't to achieve this. Look at the class without all the nonstandard exploits. This is Black Mage.

To give you an idea of how bad this class is, I saw the problems it has that people are complaining about right now back in 2021. Here's the thread I made where BLM mains who abused nonstandard claimed the class was perfect and I was crazy.

Personally, I don't like pictomancer. It feels like 5 core ideas roughly thrown together and called a class. It feels rough around the edges and half-baked. BLM is in a bad spot, but at least its idea is coherent, even if BLM's core is literally incompatible with DT, BLM itself is still a coherent rotation that has persisted since HW, and not just: "Random crap, go!" the class.

But I'm also going to say this, the only reason I'm happy with the state of BLM right now is that, now that the nonstandard wool has been removed from all BLM main's eyes, they can finally see just how rotten the class actually is.

I just hope that when this is all said and done, the devs revitalize the turret caster gameplay within their encounter meta. The death of turret caster gameplay will be the single largest example of homogenization the game has ever had if it finally and truly dies.

What is the "abuse of non standard" to you? You keep saying that but don't actually give examples of how it somehow sweetened the "poorly designed real black mage".

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

What is the "abuse of non standard" to you? You keep saying that but don't actually give examples of how it somehow sweetened the "poorly designed real black mage".

Apparently shortening Fire lines is "unintended gameplay" and "abusing bad game design", when the basic idea of "use as much Fire IV in a short time as possible" has been upheld the entire time. I find it unbelievable to call the use of one of your oldest skills, Transpose, in clever ways and skipping certain spells sometimes for fight or cooldown alignment "abuse".

What is actually sad though is how much the job had to be gutted (Umbral Paradox, Sharpcast management, MP recovery rework, Thunder rework) for them to return and put their tinfoil hat on and go "see, I told you the job is bad if you remove all the QoL that is intended to help you deal with new fight mechanics and be creative in your gameplay, it's a fundamentally badly designed job" like wow, no shit.

The irony in their and other people's negative stance to "nonstandard" and how they are happy bordering on delusion that it got destroyed is that the steps that were taken to kill nonstandard (which wasnt even that crazy of a gain anyways) actually hurt Standard BLM equally and only made the job HARDER for beginners, NOT easier.

[Taranok]

What is the "abuse of non standard" to you? You keep saying that but don't actually give examples of how it somehow sweetened the "poorly designed real black mage".

Hypermeme, infinite paradox, and transpose firestarter are the big 3. These were all introduced by accident, were a consequence of QoL improvements and, ironically, attempts to kill hypermeme, and made the class worse to play while also feeling mandatory, especially in ultimates. The class didn't have any of these things in Stormblood and especially HW, and felt just fine despite the jank involved with HW enochian. Though HW BLM was its own....mess.

The reason I so vehemently attack nonstandard is because it derives as a consequence of actions the devs have taken over the years to advance the class, but demonstrably, especially with DT killing it, were never intended or indeed supported by the devs. And as it turns out, when you remove this crap from the class, it reveals the major underlying problems.

But Stormblood had a 13s AF/UI timer so short cycling only made sense on boss jumps. The flexibility of the rotation was basically choosing when to use sharpcast, whether it was for fire 1 or thunder 3, and little else. The AF/UI rotation combined after fire 1 lasted long enough to kill firestarter, so transpose firestarter didn't exist. Hypermeme can't exist without a 15s AF timer and despair, so unless you were using a foul, you kind of needed blizzard 4 to buffer for server tics to go back into AF3 with full mana anyways. So the only short cycle available was basically a thunder refresh into foul. Which itself you wouldn't want to really use if a boss was jumping for the reasons of clipping a DoT.

It was a pretty rigid rotation in HW and SB, and the major complaints coming out of BLMs was basically how punishing enochian was, not that the class was too rigid. Because the class was almost literally, exclusively, maximizing fire 4. Which was still true in ShB and EW, but the way to maximize fire 4 literally involved cutting core parts of the rotation out, which is why I call it nonstandard abuse. When you ignore core parts of a class, the class can only be badly designed. Imagine a SAM that ignores stickers, or a Monk that ignores its second and third step of the combo. Oh wait, we don't need to imagine that, that existed, it was called infinite dragon kick, and the devs killed that as well.

Apparently shortening Fire lines is "unintended gameplay" and "abusing bad game design", when the basic idea of "use as much Fire IV in a short time as possible" has been upheld the entire time. I find it unbelievable to call the use of one of your oldest skills, Transpose, in clever ways and skipping certain spells sometimes for fight or cooldown alignment "abuse".

What is actually sad though is how much the job had to be gutted (Umbral Paradox, Sharpcast management, MP recovery rework, Thunder rework) for them to return and put their tinfoil hat on and go "see, I told you the job is bad if you remove all the QoL that is intended to help you deal with new fight mechanics and be creative in your gameplay, it's a fundamentally badly designed job" like wow, no shit.

The irony in their and other people's negative stance to "nonstandard" and how they are happy bordering on delusion that it got destroyed is that the steps that were taken to kill nonstandard (which wasnt even that crazy of a gain anyways) actually hurt Standard BLM equally and only made the job HARDER for beginners, NOT easier.

If you knew the history of transpose, you'd know it was never intended for use in this way. The skill started with a 15s cooldown. Even with UI1, you'd be at max mana before it came back. Transposes entire purpose, its raison d'etre, is to get you back to full mana after a pull That is its design intent especially when taken in context of how ARR BLM operated, especially before fire/blizzard 3. This no longer exists as of DT and is now a weird, orphaned ability that can still be used to abuse nonstandard, just not nearly to the same degree. My favorite way currently is thunder mage during aoe pulls and pretending HB2 and HF2 don't exist because the devs screwed up the AoE rotation that badly in DT. But, you know, when you take away the grime of neglect, you tend to find things are in need of dire maintenance. So thunder mage. We can talk about flare and the aoe rotation, but as mentioned above, the aoe rotation has never been particularly well thought out. There was an entire jank rotation related to abusing server tics with just the right timing to basically chain back to back flares by using flare to get out of UI, getting a server tick after flare registers and consumes mana, but before UI is properly ended, and then flaring again. BLM has had a very fun history with extremely poorly thought out design choices that has resulted in jank and abuses of the design. Some of them the devs reasonably couldn't have been aware of, others a consequence of bad design.

Transpose Firestarter also didn't exist until Endwalker outside of a brief stint in ARR. The buff duration of fire 3 was too short to reliably limp the buff out of the AF phase into the UI phase, do the full UI phase, and then transpose firestarter. It required getting buffed from 18s to 30s to enable this behavior. While the old 12s buff in ARR worked because you could easily fire 1, blizzard 3, firestarter proc, and then transpose firestarter was used to reclaim some of the proc's damage due to the bad netcode implementation of FFXIV combined with the state ARR BLM was in.

And the fun thing is, they didn't gut the class to me. They restored and enforced the HW and SB rotation. The best aspects of BLM, the rotation that made me fall in love with the class. And by enforcing it, we can see just how bad a position BLM is in. And, lo and behold, the bad position BLM is in.

But sure, strawman my argument. The class is easier to understand now, and just as hard to play as it was in HW and SB. Just with the added punishment of messing up causing you to drop flare star, at least 1 fire 4, and whatever gauge was in progress for xenoglossy. Which I relish in being made worse because it means the devs will maybe, finally realize that the thing holding back BLM is, was, and always has been archaic design choices made in ARR that have been coopted into a major and extremely flimsy structural component prone to breaking at the slightest breeze. You know, literally what it was in HW and SB anyways.

Non of the nonstandard stuff was QOL intended to make the job easier to play. It exploited things intended to make the job easier to play to ignore core components of the class. That is why I am positively giddy that nonstandard has been mostly killed, and I look forward to the class finally getting the much-needed love it deserves, especially as DT moves to completely kill the turret caster playstyle. But, you know, clearly a 5s transpose to capitalize on a 30s firestarter buff was in the minds of the original ARR devs when the class was designed as a proc mage.

[Galvuu]

Welcome to Black Mage.

DT BLM has nothing to do with HW or ShB BLM.
Both had their own version of "short fire lines" and Sharpcast to deal with movement.
In fact, in HW, you'd sometimes hold the Enochian ogcd and let the one that was running (usually when the refresh was down to 20s) expire naturally to readjust when you'd re-enable it (since you could go into UI and use Thundercloud in ice to coordinate all this). HW BLM also had a damage steroid, so you'd also do that to setup your buff phase.
ShB had a different version of short fire lines, be it ones using Transpose or skipping Blizzard IV to go for a quadra Fire IV > Despair or penta Fire IV > Despair AF cycle under Ley Lines.
People act like this was some ground-breaking EW tech, but this sort of manipulating the length of your fire lines was present for 6ish years of post-ARR BLM.
SB was the closest to DT, but you incurred no penalty for cutting AF early.
This isn't some "great design problem that's been here all along". This is a new design problem brought on by the crappy DT changes, the Flare Star system, the removal of Sharpcast, etc.
Hell, I remember in HW using Sharpcast for mobility and being able to decide if I wanted to refresh AF early (Fire IV > Fire > Fire IV x3) or late (the opposite order of the aforementioned fire line). You could also "drop" AF after pressing Blizzard III because, as long as the spell went through and you got UI, it didn't matter as Enochian wasn't tied to AF/UI at all.
You're comparing very different realities of the BLM job.

[Realfoxy]

Welcome to Black Mage. Not the fake black mage that nonstandard worshippers built up as somehow being the real class that was so flexible and freeform because of abusing bad design. The real, core Black Mage. It is a very sloppily designed class that has design decisions made before ARR even launched still present in it because the devs never bothered to actually fix the damned class. In part because of people constantly saying how much they loved the class because the class was so perfect, even though it relied on effectively turning the class into something it wasn't to achieve this. Look at the class without all the nonstandard exploits. This is Black Mage.

To give you an idea of how bad this class is, I saw the problems it has that people are complaining about right now back in 2021. Here's the thread I made where BLM mains who abused nonstandard claimed the class was perfect and I was crazy.

Personally, I don't like pictomancer. It feels like 5 core ideas roughly thrown together and called a class. It feels rough around the edges and half-baked. BLM is in a bad spot, but at least its idea is coherent, even if BLM's core is literally incompatible with DT, BLM itself is still a coherent rotation that has persisted since HW, and not just: "Random crap, go!" the class.

But I'm also going to say this, the only reason I'm happy with the state of BLM right now is that, now that the nonstandard wool has been removed from all BLM main's eyes, they can finally see just how rotten the class actually is.

I just hope that when this is all said and done, the devs revitalize the turret caster gameplay within their encounter meta. The death of turret caster gameplay will be the single largest example of homogenization the game has ever had if it finally and truly dies.

You know I actually agree with a lot of this. The AF timer is a punishing, skill floor mechanic. Turret caster gameplay is incompatible with Endwalker > Dawntrail fight design.

However, I simply disagree with your solutions. I, and many other black mage players, would prefer a return to the Endwalker style of flexibility and freedom of expression. We would prefer that the job retain the features that make it iconic - like the mastery of the AF timer, and the long F4 casts.

It's clear that you don't like the direction that BLM job design went after HW, so I suggest that you remove your BLM gearset and find another job to play.

PS: There has been nonstandard tech for BLM ever since the introduction of F4. Shortening fire phases has been a key part of the job ever since its inception.

[GartredZW]

You know I actually agree with a lot of this. The AF timer is a punishing, skill floor mechanic. Turret caster gameplay is incompatible with Endwalker > Dawntrail fight design.

The timer having a failstate is part of what makes it so fun. Mastering that 15 seconds, and fully planning out everything you need to do so you're not stuck in a situation where you've got four Fire 4s left to cast, you've got three seconds to use paradox, your DoT is about to fall off, and you're about to overcap on Xenoglossy. If you remove that aspect, you remove the fun of Black Mage, and make it into just another ranged DPS that stands still to do damage. it turns optimizations from something you're always keeping in mind to just a matter of keeping the GCD rolling.

After clearing the first extreme trial, It almost seems a bit too lenient, and restrictive at the same time. I barely ever use Triplecast because I've almost always got a movement button available. We get Paradox and Fire 3 to use whenever we need to just as long as we don't use both of them before our third Fire 4. Thunder however heavily punishes long fire phases where you use one too many xenoglossys. Dropping Fire phase in Endwalker was a simple matter of just using Fire 3, and blasting your remaining Fire 4s before Despair. Now it's a much more substantial DPS hit than it already was because of the lost Flare Star. Before, I would always keep a close eye on that timer so I made absolute sure to get three or four Fire 4s in before Paradox, then the remaining before Despair. None of the main rotation were movement tools aside from phase changes, and Ice Paradox. This means we've got to plan very closely what we use each charge of triplecast, swiftcast, xenoglossy, and even instant Thunder procs for. Now I don't feel the pressure to even bother when I know that I've essentially just got two free (reset timer) buttons to use. Also, this might be my own personal thing, but I'm finding myself gambling on timers much more now. I'll regularly try to start a cast when the timer says 3 in hopes it finishes just in time to cast Paradox at the end, and be fine. That wasn't the case in Endwalker because of how strict the paradox cast timing was. It also imbalances your fire phase to have up to five GCDs before Paradox, and three after.

It might seem like I'm just complaining that it's easier, and maybe it is, but I also thought it was better designed before, and encouraged the right kind of deliberate planning and executing gameplay.