BLM Post-Patch, and where to go from here.

[Realfoxy]

Compared to standard EW, the class is substantially more flexible on movement now.

No idea what you're on about here. Right now if your Ice phase aligns poorly you're forced into a damage negative Swift B4. Compare to Endwalker where you had options like extending with Transpose into Ice Paradox (not nonstandard btw, everyone could do the recovery line of Transpose Paradox B1 B4). Thunderhead inflexibility is another huge dead weight that the standard rotation has to drag around.

Free F3p is good, yes. That doesn't make up for the everything else they've saddled the job with.

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There's a reason I was screaming from the rooftops throughout all of EW at how bad BLM actually was, but the crowd of players completely addicted to nonstandard rotations drowned out the rather serious problem of BLM's core design. As it turns out, fixing nonstandard revealed just how bad BLM actually was. DT is an objective increase over EW's standard rotation, but holy hell is it still in a really bad place. Fun, but bad.


That all said, I'm kind of expecting BLM's main GCDs to get PCT treatment. 1.8s casts with 2.8s recasts for things like fire 4, or 2s casts with 3s recast despairs/flare stars. The class, now revealed to be in the dire straits it was in throughout all of EW even to the nonstandard junkies, is going to force the devs to give it a rework. Possibly even a rushed rework. Its problems are more than just potency related. It has no burst, it clips oGCDs too much, the class is almost entirely an AF phase now. Now that nonstandard is no longer hiding its issues, the class can finally get the rework it has needed since shadowbringers, but was always overshadowed by how much worse other classes were. Very much monk treatment.

Are these problems with Endwalker BLM in the room with us right now? Ignoring TOP P6 (which I blame more on fight design), EW BLM was more than capable of handling its Savage tier with Standard play. People liked the job!

Your proposal - to homogenise BLM into a burst job alongside all the others in the game, forcing it into the 2 min burst meta and removing the unique identity of its long casts, is certainly a design proposal. Just in the way that deleting ShB SMN was also a design proposal.

I certainly think SE could do such a thing, but I would very much prefer that they did not.