Black Mage Level 100 Spell (Flare Star) SUCKS!

[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.

[AzaelOrunitia]

Also non standard had a lot to do with planning. If you entered a non standard line at a specific moment in the fight it was because you knew that was the best option available and you weren't going to be interrupted in this specific line or that it was going to allow you more movement or whatever.
And that's not even taking into account boss timings where they'd disappear and you'd have to squeeze in as much potency as you coul, something non standard allowed for.
Now our planning tools are only present in the form of triple cast, xeno and swiftcast (arguably others but which would result in potency loss) which I hope will be sufficient for whatever boss designs they throw at us next.
And there's next to now way to adapt to a boss entering downtime : use despair earlier than normal, transpose and paradox? That's basically it.

[Ferrinus]

"Twice less rigid" doesn't really mean anything. The various short fire lines were in fact much more rigid than what standard play looks like right now because in order to skip as many low-potency spells as possible without suffering the kind of rotational collapse those spells are supposed to prevent you had to squeeze the absolute maximum amount of high-potency casts out of the partly-full MP gauge with zero umbral hearts you'd be entering Af3 with. It's not a gain to do some transpose-lucid-paradox-F3 nonsense if the mana ticks aren't on your side or if you end up only squeezing out a single F4 on the other side!

The current design actually allows you to drift your astral cycle's alignment over time based on whether you use F3P under AF3 or save it for transpose into AF1 and by whether you use or skip umbral paradox. At the end of the day, you have to cut short whatever you're doing and cast Despair if the boss is about to leave or otherwise force you to stop casting, but this was always the case. Your "only" option is always going to be the precise sequence of spells that maximizes your potency per second given a fight's constraints. If you don't like that that sequence of spells is harder to perform than before, you're complaining about a difficulty increase.

[AzaelOrunitia]

That means the only way to somewhat adapt to unfortunate timings is to actually sacrifice potency per second throughout the fight ? (Paradox has higher potency per second than a Fire IV and using firestarter in AF3 means casting a weak F3 from ice which is also a loss)
Ignoring spells doesn't sound difficult to mew but only having these two options to adapt to fight duration/boss timings does sound restrictive in my opinion.

Anyway mana regen being gone kills most non standard anyway, it's not just Flare Star's doing. But maybe we should go back to talking about Flare Star (my bad I got sidetracked as well)

[Supersnow845]

I’ll note that yoshi p specifically said that since they gave 100% fire starter chance to paradox and returned ice paradox transpose AF1 F3 is now “expected play” and casting fire 3 from ice is a DPS loss.

You can make it a conditional gain if you use fire starter to avoid dropping astral fire or for movement but it is at baseline a loss because that expectation of use is baked into BLM’s potency calculations

[Valence]

The irony is that they went back to shadowbringers BLM for AoE on the other hand and managed to make their Fire 2 and Blizzard 2 spells totally worthless (probably in line with F3/B3 in idea but..) since you're just doing essentially non standard instead because it's just better. Literally schoolbook non standard Flare(s) > ManaFont > Flare(s) > instant > Transpose > Freeze > Instant > Transpose > back to flares (with the first one being a lukewarm Flare).

[PyurBlue]

The stronger Flare Star is the more punishing it becomes, I don't think there is a problem with the potency. The cast time is easy to negate with Triplecast and Swiftcast too. It's a bit underwhelming and I wouldn't mind it going away. If it stays I don't think it needs major changes. Some way to carry AF stacks into ice is the only thing I'd consider.

[Turtledeluxe]

Flare Star is at odds with the job's more powerful spell, Xenoglossy, which is built up by maintaining (a now trivialized) flow of Enochian and insta cast. It feels bad to execute and doesn't make sense potency wise. I used to think increasing the potency would fix it, but actually I now think the problem with it is just how the job feels to play when combined with all the other factors. Ice Paradox isn't really enough to make the job feel like it once did.

You also can't just make it crazy potency anyway because of the methods by which you acquire it. It's really a mess imo. Just a poorly designed difficulty increase. I think diffculty is fine, this just isn't what I saw BLM becoming.

Honestly the whole Flare Star concept feels pre Enochian in nature to me, like they just slapped an old idea on bc they were out of ideas after changing the mana regen.

[remiff]

For me, the Black Mage's Flarestar simply needs to be completely reworked.
I know this might not make much sense, but in my opinion,
the only way to fix the problem would be to give us 2 stacks so we can accumulate them, and make it entirely instant-cast.