Quote Originally Posted by Realfoxy View Post
I don't have a problem with ShB style nonstandard coming back. The issue is that we don't even have that. We don't have any way to easily shift the alignment of the standard rotation loop versus the fight, beyond choosing AF3 F3p vs AF1 F3p or doing some stupidly cursed things with Lucid Dreaming. So you have LESS agency than in Endwalker when it comes to utilising those movement tools.

I also don't get why people think baseline BLM play needs to be harder. It already had the biggest skill gap of all the jobs in Endwalker. In a world where all jobs were in HW/Stormblood design and all of them had ways to mess things up, sure, maybe you could argue BLM could be more difficulty. But we're not in that world, we're in the one where melee uptime is nearly free, hitboxes are still huge, positionals are getting taken away, and mechanics still have you running back and forth across the entire arena. This isn't Eden's Promise any more.
I don't think BLM needed to be harder, but, I don't mind it getting harder. Like, if it remained as hard (even, with an aggressive enough boss, impossible) to use all your cooldowns for optimal damage as it is now, but hypothetical white-room BLM damage was increased such that doing the best job you could (even though you were objectively, measurably losing damage compared to what you could deal a training dummy) still gave you top-tier DPS, I'd be perfectly happy. It's what I play a job with long cast times for.

I agree that a little more control over astral/umbral cycle length would be good. If, for instance, completing a cast of Despair always filled your astral gauge no matter how many F4s you'd already cast (even if that resulted in a slightly weaker than average Flare Star) then we'd be in a situation in which the standard rotation is also the optimal rotation but the various second-best and third-best compromises black mages often have to make feel a little better to settle for.