Black Mage Level 100 Spell (Flare Star) SUCKS!

[AzaelOrunitia]

Hahaha thank you for calculating it!
Ok so they have more room than I thought! Though with triple cast I imagine they don't have that much since Flare's recast time is 2.5... also I wonder about 3 Fire IV + flare lines with would only need a swiftcast..
That is not to ask for another calculation hahaha I'll go do it on my own using your examples! But they won't upgrade it by that much anyway

[LilimoLimomo]

What makes Flare Star feel "stuck" at this point is that the requirements to cast it are possible but very easy to entirely fail, and because of that Flare Star's potency needs to be limited to make sure that failure doesn't result in a devastating loss of damage output.

The easy solution to that is to just mitigate the possibility for such extreme failure. One easy way to do that would be to just let the Astral Gauge persist through Umbral Ice. Now instead of losing ALL of your Flare Star progress because you couldn't get that last Fire IV off during an Astral Fire phase, you only lose 1/6 of your Flare Star progress. By making imperfection less punishing and allowing players to keep their progress, you can now send Flare Star's potency to the moon without causing a drastic disparity between sub-optimal play and optimal play.

And as a bonus, now less skilled players get to dependably cast Flare Star, which they'll enjoy because it's their big boom...they'll just be casting it less often than their more skilled peers. And hey, now your Astral Fire phase doesn't have two finishers, because Flare Star can be held over to the beginning of your Fire Phase; as a BLM, I like having more flexibility.

(And as a side-note, Flare Star shouldn't be able to be assigned to the hotbar; Fire IV should become Flare Star when your Astral Gauge is full, since there's no sensible reason to cast Fire IV at that time.)

[Ferrinus]

There is a way to win: not force people to cast 6 F4 to cast it, which is the real reason behind its introduction in conjunction with the systematic demolition of non standard or even just early ice swaps for mechanical reasons.

Else the reason such skills as current Flare Star work on other jobs is because they don't necessarily rely on cutting short their rotation half way like BLM can.

Perhaps not losing stacks when swaping to Ice would help it immensely for starters. Could even bring some funky optimization of double flare stars in some astral fire windows, but we wouldn't want people to have some depth to their job right?

It doesn't matter; your sixth Fire IV would still increase your potency per second, which means you would lose potency for cutting it, which means you are forced to cast it, which means you are punished for cutting your fire cycle short. The same incentives remain in effect.

Now, casting Flare Star is fun, so making it easier to cast might be a good idea (I do not agree with making astral stacks carry over to ice but there are plenty of other ways to do it). But this has nothing to do with the supposed rigidity it imposes, because all those same complaints technically apply to Despair as well as every other fire spell you cast.

[Kabooa]

It doesn't matter; your sixth Fire IV would still increase your potency per second, which means you would lose potency for cutting it, which means you are forced to cast it, which means you are punished for cutting your fire cycle short. The same incentives remain in effect.

Now, casting Flare Star is fun, so making it easier to cast might be a good idea (I do not agree with making astral stacks carry over to ice but there are plenty of other ways to do it). But this has nothing to do with the supposed rigidity it imposes, because all those same complaints technically apply to Despair as well as every other fire spell you cast.

I'm generally in favor of Astral Souls carrying over for a few reasons.

1) It lessens the rigidity by a small amount and you are punished less if you can't hit 6 F4s for any reason.
2) It creates a soft overcap limit of up to 6 F4s per fight before you "Lose" a Flarestar, similar to how other job gauges have lost technically no dps from gauge surpluses that aren't a multiple of their lowest consumer.
3) It creates another avenue of risk-reward GCD swapping of reducing Paradox AF refreshes in order to generate more souls via using Firestarter as the sole refresher instead, though this is admittedly limited to Manafont restores.

I would also combine this with Flarestar being an AF refresh because this compounds with 3) The more you can push AF refreshes off of Paradox, the more F4 and thus the more Flarestars you can cast, but the gain for doing so should be easily lost if not played well around.

[Ferrinus]

The thing about perpetual astral stacks is that they would immediately cause Flare Star drift (as in, you would basically never cap off a cycle with it if you use the largely standard F3 opener) and also do nothing about "rigidity", a word I am increasingly suspicious of being meaningless, because you would always have to cast Flare Star the moment you reached six stacks before proceeding with F4 spam or else lose a fractional Flare Star. The result is that you are still compelled to cast six F4s per cycle, but your Flare Star comes after the second rather than the last. Also, if you make any mistake that changes which F4 you need to chase with FS, for the rest of the fight, until you make another mistake. Not great!

My favorite idea for giving BLMs more choice as to where to place FS and less of a punishment for cutting the astral cycle short was put forward by someone in a different thread: astral souls only go up to 3, you only need 3 to cast Flare Star, and you only get astral souls by consuming umbral hearts. Boom, one Flare Star per B4/Manafont, a little more variety in where that Star can go (although triplecast-despair-flarestar-transpose-blizz3 probably remains optimal), and, most importantly, no separate "astral gauge". Astral souls can just live on the regular elemental gauge, replacing umbral hearts one by one.

[Bacillus]

I think that this spell should be instant and follow Despair, i mean, despair/flare becomes flarestar, rather than all that crap of the astral souls.

[Ramiee]

Flare star is a really really mid skill, feels like something that would be given to you mid levelling in a previous expansion instead of a capstone spell.
Well the only change I really want is for it to transform fire 4 into flare star when it's available, I really don't think it needs it's own button it's nothing special.

[LilyPendragon]

It's funny to see people complain in the same breath that Flare Star is so strong it's impossible to adjust one's rotation but so weak that it's not worth the effort to cast.

Because that is the irony of flare star. It is both too strong, and too weak.

Too strong to justify skipping, too weak to really feel impactful.

[Valence]

It doesn't matter; your sixth Fire IV would still increase your potency per second, which means you would lose potency for cutting it, which means you are forced to cast it, which means you are punished for cutting your fire cycle short. The same incentives remain in effect.

Now, casting Flare Star is fun, so making it easier to cast might be a good idea (I do not agree with making astral stacks carry over to ice but there are plenty of other ways to do it). But this has nothing to do with the supposed rigidity it imposes, because all those same complaints technically apply to Despair as well as every other fire spell you cast.

Cutting short astral fire early has never been a problem before provided you'd use non standard setups, and yet, here we are, so no, it matters quite a lot actually.

I do agree that the solution you mentioned about 3 gauge stacks from umbral hearts is also interesting though.

I think that this spell should be instant and follow Despair, i mean, despair/flare becomes flarestar, rather than all that crap of the astral souls.

Like all those 120s buttons on other jobs that turn into another without any thought or input? Thanks but no thanks.

[LilimoLimomo]

The thing about perpetual astral stacks is that they would immediately cause Flare Star drift (as in, you would basically never cap off a cycle with it if you use the largely standard F3 opener) and also do nothing about "rigidity", a word I am increasingly suspicious of being meaningless, because you would always have to cast Flare Star the moment you reached six stacks before proceeding with F4 spam or else lose a fractional Flare Star. The result is that you are still compelled to cast six F4s per cycle, but your Flare Star comes after the second rather than the last. Also, if you make any mistake that changes which F4 you need to chase with FS, for the rest of the fight, until you make another mistake. Not great!

My favorite idea for giving BLMs more choice as to where to place FS and less of a punishment for cutting the astral cycle short was put forward by someone in a different thread: astral souls only go up to 3, you only need 3 to cast Flare Star, and you only get astral souls by consuming umbral hearts. Boom, one Flare Star per B4/Manafont, a little more variety in where that Star can go (although triplecast-despair-flarestar-transpose-blizz3 probably remains optimal), and, most importantly, no separate "astral gauge". Astral souls can just live on the regular elemental gauge, replacing umbral hearts one by one.

I mostly like this idea. It also combats another side-effect of a permanent Astral Gauge that wasn't mentioned here, which is that if you can just hold it forever, Flare Star ends up feeling less like a "reward" for doing something in your Astral Fire phase, and more like another resource you can just stock like Polyglots. Ever since the Umbral Soul changes, in the open worlds it's become normal to start every single boss FATE with a full reserve of Xenoglossies, and I can imagine that if I could save up a Flare Star as well that it would lose a bit of the magic it has.

While I like the elegance of the suggestion to trade Umbral Hearts for a 3-sized Astral Gauge, the one part I'm not a fan of is that it only requires 3 Fire IV casts. There is a minor sense of accomplishment that comes from getting 6 Fire IV's within your Astral Fire phase, and I think that would be entirely lost if we went as low as 3. Because at that point Flare Star won't feel like a reward for doing something, it will just feel like the spell I cast at a specific point in my Astral Fire phase, since somehow managing to cast 3 Fire IV's all but inevitable for the majority of players. And I don't think Flare Star will feel as good if it feels inevitable. I would like a design that still makes Flare Star feel like something that was meaningfully "earned", just not with the exact degree of "strict and punishing" that it is now.

So I was actually thinking along the same lines as this suggestion; specifically, keep the fact that the Astral Gauge empties outside of Astral Fire, and simply make the Gauge require 5 Astral Fires to fill. Which is to say, keep how punishing the Astral Gauge is when it doesn't get filled, but lower the difficulty of filling it to give more wiggle room. The main thing I dislike with this tactic is that from a UI perspective, the current UI would show a single tick in the Astral Gauge when you did 6 Fire IV's, and that feels potentially misleading and a bit sloppy. So maybe tying the ability to start filling the Astral Gauge to Umbral Hearts would be needed, or maybe you can't fill it unless you have some new resource like an Umbral Tongue that gets spent alongside Flare Star, etc. But whatever the case, I think 3 Flare Stars is too few and thus would undercut the good feeling my brain sends me when I've built up and cast a Flare Star.