BLM needs a rework because of new content difficulty

[Ferrinus]

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.

I don't think this is true. I've said it before: if you're not trying to optimize your instant cast resources so that they shave down the maximum possible number of seconds off your GCDs, I think BLM is actually easier than before. A higher proportion of your spell casts are naturally instantaneous, you get 50% more uses of swiftcast, thunder needs to be hardcast under any circumstances and requires no weaving to make this happen, etc.

On the other hand, it's much harder to maximize the job's damage output. In fact, that's what this thread is about!

[Realfoxy]

I don't think this is true. I've said it before: if you're not trying to optimize your instant cast resources so that they shave down the maximum possible number of seconds off your GCDs, I think BLM is actually easier than before. A higher proportion of your spell casts are naturally instantaneous, you get 50% more uses of swiftcast, thunder needs to be hardcast under any circumstances and requires no weaving to make this happen, etc.

On the other hand, it's much harder to maximize the job's damage output. In fact, that's what this thread is about!

I'm not just talking about maximising your instant cast uses, I'm talking about all the other ways in which they've made the job harder:

- High Thunder can't be hardcast, so a long manafont fire phase can cause it to fall off

- High Thunder has such low upfront potency you lose a lot more damage refreshing it early, compared to throwing out an early T3P in Endwalker

- Flare Star makes the consequences for missing an F4 much greater

- Flare Star is an additional 3 second long hardcast

- If you mess up the end of your fire phase e.g. with an interrupted Despair cast, you can't transpose Para B1 B4 and then resume. You have to slowcast a B3 before you can get back to your normal rotation.

The only thing you could argue that makes DT BLM is easier is the free F3p, which I agree is an addition that makes the job easier. However you could get that in EW just by sharping fire every time (fun fact - you lose more damage by doing AF3 F3p instead of transpose AF1 F3p now, just to make it harder to do optimal damage).

All of the above contributes to the execution of the job being much less flexible than in Endwalker. Again, you can see this in the two Extreme trials we have. EX2 is a fight without much movement, it's very easy to budget your instant casts and the high movement mechanics are very spread out. The job functions fine.
However then you get into EX1. You have to fight adds which will force you to re-DOT and change targets. The movement is more continuous. Now you see the issues with DT BLM's kit.

RE: Maximising damage output: Sure, you could argue they've made it harder to do so. But they haven't done it in a very fun way. Here's another fun fact, Manafont is such a huge damage gain now that you absolutely do not want to lose a use due to drifting, but you don't have any short fire lines to adjust its alignment any more.

That's the issue with DT BLM. It's A LOT more clunky, and that makes it harder for newer players and veterans alike.

[Ferrinus]

I'm not just talking about maximising your instant cast uses, I'm talking about all the other ways in which they've made the job harder:

- High Thunder can't be hardcast, so a long manafont fire phase can cause it to fall off

- High Thunder has such low upfront potency you lose a lot more damage refreshing it early, compared to throwing out an early T3P in Endwalker

These two complaints are in tension with each other. Is Thunder in danger of falling off, or is Thunder in danger of getting clipped? In the first place, Thunderhead rationing means that you're never going to have a proc burning a hole in your pocket and demanding to be used early by sheer dint of its own timer; you'll only feel the need to burn early Thunderheads for movement (I often find myself doing this early in Ex2, clipping like ~5 seconds of the dot) if you're completely out of other movement tools. On the other end, Manafont gives you the Thunderhead buff, so you'd have to Manafont when your Thunder's already run out, then Thunder, then spend a full 30 seconds in Manafont's extra fire phase, which on paper and with 0 Spellspeed should contain 27.8 seconds' worth of fire spells, and that's assuming you used your F3P instead of saving it. If you also had to dump a couple Polyglots, well... then your enemy's going to not have a DoT on them for like two GCDs tops.

These aren't catastrophic or even significant failures on the level of dropping Enochian, missing a Flare Star, or overwriting a Polyglot. They're just damage shortfalls that can be fixed by better planning and optimization. They don't make the job harder to learn or play at a competent level, they make it harder to optimize.

I should add that I think Thunderhead is a pointless mechanic and that it'd be better if Thunder spells could just be cast at will whenever you had astral/umbral status (to protect newbies from losing the Enochian damage bonus) but while Thunderhead does exist it doesn't increase the job's difficulty so much as constrain (but not entirely remove) your ability to make mistakes.

- Flare Star makes the consequences for missing an F4 much greater

- Flare Star is an additional 3 second long hardcast

This is true (Flare Star definitely makes the job harder to play), but is counterbalanced by instant paradox and guaranteed F3P. If you're just working on making sure you get a Flare Star every astral cycle, you will, thanks to those particular QoL improvements. When I miss a Flare Star it's usually because of a combination of being flustered by boss mechanics and having greedily spent all my triple and swiftcasts last astral cycle to try to save a few extra seconds of cast time. The job is hard for me precisely because my spellspeed is much lower than usual and because I'm aware of, and constantly trying to perform, optimizations that increase my outgoing damage at the cost of risking that my whole rotation collapses.

- If you mess up the end of your fire phase e.g. with an interrupted Despair cast, you can't transpose Para B1 B4 and then resume. You have to slowcast a B3 before you can get back to your normal rotation.

Para -> B1 is two GCDs' worth of spellcasting, while hardcast B3 is 1.4 GCDs' worth, and so gets you back in gear faster. It's less damaging than the now-impossible alternative, sure... but so what? There's no more damaging option. It's not somehow easier doing the first thing than the second thing (in fact I would argue it is harder as it requires more button presses and more game knowledge).

All this is to reiterate that it being harder to maintain hypothetical maximum damage isn't the same as it being harder to just maintain uptime or execute the job's basic mechanics consistently. The difficulty that veterans are feeling is not something new players are feeling, and being able to relax and compromise on things that you wouldn't have to do in Stone, Sky, Sea (e.g. using F3P on mobility and AF maintenance rather than saving it for damage every single time you get it) makes the job feel a lot more able to adapt to movement-heavy bosses.

[Realfoxy]

These aren't catastrophic or even significant failures on the level of dropping Enochian, missing a Flare Star, or overwriting a Polyglot. They're just damage shortfalls that can be fixed by better planning and optimization. They don't make the job harder to learn or play at a competent level, they make it harder to optimize.

I should add that I think Thunderhead is a pointless mechanic and that it'd be better if Thunder spells could just be cast at will whenever you had astral/umbral status (to protect newbies from losing the Enochian damage bonus) but while Thunderhead does exist it doesn't increase the job's difficulty so much as constrain (but not entirely remove) your ability to make mistakes.

I think I see where we're disagreeing. Personally, I don't consider "just casting something, anything, to maintain the AF timer" to be the skill floor of BLM, I consider the skill floor to be "how hard is it to execute the developer intended rotation." It is true that the free F3p does help players avoid catastrophic failure more easily than in Endwalker, I just don't think that these "damage shortfalls" you mentioned are in the realm of optimisation tricks. They're what I consider the basics of the job - refresh your DOT on time, don't clip your GCD, etc.

Still, I consider the Thunderhead system to be not only clunky, but an actual trap for less experienced players - I have had to advise more than one person that you should in fact not hit the shiny thunder button as soon as it lights up, since it's equivalent upfront potency to Scathe.

...

All this is to reiterate that it being harder to maintain hypothetical maximum damage isn't the same as it being harder to just maintain uptime or execute the job's basic mechanics consistently. The difficulty that veterans are feeling is not something new players are feeling, and being able to relax and compromise on things that you wouldn't have to do in Stone, Sky, Sea (e.g. using F3P on mobility and AF maintenance rather than saving it for damage every single time you get it) makes the job feel a lot more able to adapt to movement-heavy bosses.

Sure, it is true that if you close your eyes and ignore all the "damage shortfalls" then yes, you could consider DT BLM to be easier. But I don't like this jobs' difficulty to now come from managing an awful DOT system and manafont drift. I don't think that anyone who misses one F4 should be punished so harshly.

(On that note, I consider it poor design that casting Flare Star as soon it becomes available is a mistake since it doesn't refresh your AF timer. Yet another thing the developers appear to have forgotten).

[Ferrinus]

I think I see where we're disagreeing. Personally, I don't consider "just casting something, anything, to maintain the AF timer" to be the skill floor of BLM, I consider the skill floor to be "how hard is it to execute the developer intended rotation." It is true that the free F3p does help players avoid catastrophic failure more easily than in Endwalker, I just don't think that these "damage shortfalls" you mentioned are in the realm of optimisation tricks. They're what I consider the basics of the job - refresh your DOT on time, don't clip your GCD, etc.

Still, I consider the Thunderhead system to be not only clunky, but an actual trap for less experienced players - I have had to advise more than one person that you should in fact not hit the shiny thunder button as soon as it lights up, since it's equivalent upfront potency to Scathe.

Well, no, I do think the skill floor is getting a Flare Star each astral cycle. I just think the job gives you the tools to do that reliably if you don't try to spend those tools on increasing your damage instead. Someone who plays conservatively and hangs on to their triple/swift/xeno is going to be able to do the standard rotation consistently, they'll just put out less damage than someone who knows how to cut corners and spend every spare triple/swift/xeno at optimal rather than conservative times.

As much as I agree with you that Thunderhead is bad, I don't think it creates any danger of DoT clipping aside from the way it might mislead new players into thinking they should do that on purpose. There's basically no pressure to refresh your DoT early unless you're so completely out of movement options that even a high-level player would've made the spot decision to do so, and insofar as there are unavoidable gaps in DoT upkeep, those are, you know, unavoidable. If some otherwise-defensible sequence of Thunder refresh and Manafont activation and so on puts you in a situation where your Thunder falls off and then stays off for 3 or 4 seconds before being reapplied, that's just how the job works, no more your fault than a failure to cast more than one Flare Star per astral cycle is. It's like how the GNB Bow Shock or whatever it's called DoT doesn't actually have 100% uptime either.

Sure, it is true that if you close your eyes and ignore all the "damage shortfalls" then yes, you could consider DT BLM to be easier. But I don't like this jobs' difficulty to now come from managing an awful DOT system and manafont drift. I don't think that anyone who misses one F4 should be punished so harshly.

(On that note, I consider it poor design that casting Flare Star as soon it becomes available is a mistake since it doesn't refresh your AF timer. Yet another thing the developers appear to have forgotten).

I don't think Manafont drift is a serious issue either because, like the very occasional DoT elapse above, it's just a fact of life that's no one's fault and therefore no one's problem. Like, you can, at any time, do a "short fire line" in order to line your rotation up so that you can Manafont on cooldown—you just have to cast Despair early, and bam, your astral cycle has been truncated. Obviously, doing this means you lose out on one or more Fire IVs and a Flare Star, and therefore costs you more damage than being able to Manafont earlier would gain you, so you don't do it. But what's wrong with that? I think it'd actually be worse if it gave you better damage, rather than worse, to truncate your rotation to fit Manafont's cooldown exactly, because it'd be less mathematically obvious that it's a good idea and people wouldn't realize they were losing out on damage by performing the rotation the job appears to expect of them.

That said, I agree with you that there should be a consolation prize for missing an F4 and that there's no reason for Flare Star itself to not refresh AF. I think I suggested somewhere in this thread or another that zeroing your MP with either Flare or Despair could automatically fill your Astral Gauge with dimmer/less valuable pips or something, and depending on how many actual F4s/non-zeroing-Flares you were able to cast, the final damage of Flare Star would be scaled somewhere between that of Despair's own damage and Flare Star's listed maximum potency.

Hell, they could just make Despair work exactly like Flare such that it gives you three pips when it lands (though this might make it look and feel weird to sometimes find yourself swapping to ice mode with 3/6 pips on your bar). The important thing to me is that a 6xF4 astral cycle should remain decisively optimal in terms of potency per second; skipping spells should be a best-of-two-bad-options thing rather than an obscure way to do better than standard.

[Realfoxy]

Well, no, I do think the skill floor is getting a Flare Star each astral cycle. I just think the job gives you the tools to do that reliably if you don't try to spend those tools on increasing your damage instead...


If some otherwise-defensible sequence of Thunder refresh and Manafont activation and so on puts you in a situation where your Thunder falls off and then stays off for 3 or 4 seconds before being reapplied, that's just how the job works, no more your fault than a failure to cast more than one Flare Star per astral cycle is. It's like how the GNB Bow Shock or whatever it's called DoT doesn't actually have 100% uptime either...

I don't think Manafont drift is a serious issue either...

See the issue I have with the above statements is that none of these were problems with Endwalker Black Mage. In Endwalker, we didn't have this Thunderhead system and you were much more free with your DOT refresh. In Endwalker, you didn't have a restrictive Flare Star system so you didn't have to play super conservatively with your fire phase. In Endwalker, Manafont wasn't such a major damage cooldown that drifting it didn't feel as bad. A well designed job should lead players into the standard rotation and make it feel good to execute. Dawntrail BLM doesn't do that. It has a number of traps for new players, and while free F3p helps, it has more ways to bleed damage than in Endwalker.

I should be excited about a new expansion and new things added to my job. I expect better from SE, and while sure I can settle I don't consider "oh missing DOT / unavoidable drift etc. are just part of the job now. Have fun!" to be good design. They have deliberately introduced these things into the job! They didn't have to do that!

There are lots of ways to fix things - e.g. your suggested change to Despair. For example, they could allow the thunder DOT timer to be increased to 60s and increase the proc to 40s - that would give some freedom back. However I'm not going to close my eyes and pretend the job as it is right now in 7.0 is any kind of improvement over 6.5 BLM.

[Ferrinus]

See the issue I have with the above statements is that none of these were problems with Endwalker Black Mage. In Endwalker, we didn't have this Thunderhead system and you were much more free with your DOT refresh. In Endwalker, you didn't have a restrictive Flare Star system so you didn't have to play super conservatively with your fire phase. In Endwalker, Manafont wasn't such a major damage cooldown that drifting it didn't feel as bad. A well designed job should lead players into the standard rotation and make it feel good to execute. Dawntrail BLM doesn't do that. It has a number of traps for new players, and while free F3p helps, it has more ways to bleed damage than in Endwalker.

I should be excited about a new expansion and new things added to my job. I expect better from SE, and while sure I can settle I don't consider "oh missing DOT / unavoidable drift etc. are just part of the job now. Have fun!" to be good design. They have deliberately introduced these things into the job! They didn't have to do that!

There are lots of ways to fix things - e.g. your suggested change to Despair. For example, they could allow the thunder DOT timer to be increased to 60s and increase the proc to 40s - that would give some freedom back. However I'm not going to close my eyes and pretend the job as it is right now in 7.0 is any kind of improvement over 6.5 BLM.

They weren't problems with EW Black Mage... which is why I agree the job has gotten harder to play at a higher level. But I don't think it's gotten harder to play or more forbidding at a lower level, because it's more obvious what you're supposed to do and extra instant casts + less frequent oGCD weaving has made doing that thing more forgiving. I definitely think removing Thunderhead entirely would make things less frustrating for experienced players while either not affecting or actually helping beginner players (my assumption here is that the Thunder spells remain 0s cast time and 0mp DoTs only castable when in an elemental aspect), and some mechanic by which a Flare Star is guaranteed at the end of every astral cycle will help everybody.

I think it'd be difficult to retool the class such that Manafont doesn't drift because of the nature of what Manafont actually gives you; it's not like Amplifier or Delirium or something, after all, it actually cares about your current resource totals, and your resources are what you spend to deal damage, and you already want to spend those most efficiently whenever you've got them. Actually, it occurs to me that you could make Manafont work like an MP-based Excogitation: it'd give you a ~30s status that, upon your MP dropping below 800 in astral phase, instantly triggers and refreshes all your resources. The 100s cooldown has been working for me, but going back to a 120s cooldown and making the actual effect a delayed trigger could make everyone happy.

I've posted it elsewhere, but here's an HUD-only change I'm desperate for: instead of a separate Astral Gauge, they should just make Astral Soul stacks replace Umbral Hearts as you gain them. Then, once you've got three, those three light up one by one, and then you can Flare Star. (Then, for an actual mechanical change, dropping to 0mp by casting Flare or Despair could automatically light up any existing astral hearts with a slightly dimmer glow indicating that each one is sapping your Flare Star of 20 potency or something.)