Quote Originally Posted by Ferrinus View Post
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.
The reason I keep going on about BLM getting harder is that in EW we had the perfect solution - the job got easier at a base level with the addition of Paradox, while simultaneously harder to get maximum damage on. Lower skill floor, higher skill ceiling.

In Dawntrail they've done the opposite, raising the skill required to get an acceptable level of damage out of BLM, while simultaneously destroying the skill ceiling of the job.

And having the basic level of BLM play get harder to execute, with the less flexible Thunderhead system and rigid Flare Star, just makes it the job a walking balance problem. We can see it in the Ex1 damage numbers. If you buff BLM so that the average player does acceptable damage, the top end players will be doing imbalanced levels of damage.