The (Possible) Shape of Black Mage to Come

[GartredZW]

-snip-

Oh boy here I go repeating myself again.
It's possible for something to be poorly designed completely independently of whether it's easier or harder to use.
You just ignored pretty much everything I said about mechanics and occasional clipping GCDs distracting players from their rotation, and threw in a "you'll have actually been playing BLM ... for more than zero seconds and have a sense for what you can or can't get away with" which makes me want to just dismiss you outright as a striking dummy only player once again. I thought you're glad that the class got easier because of the requests from newer players who didn't know how to play it properly yet.
Again, you ignore that I said slidecasting rules apply, so with the exception of having very bad latency, you could ALWAYS be certain about how much you can get away with at a 6 on Enochian.

You're right in that the way the timer works isn't built around Paradox having a cast bar. It's based around FireI having a cast bar. This has been the design ever since we got FireIV, and as I already broke down earlier in the thread, all the numbers fit together like a puzzle perfectly. Now there's a bunch of weird intricacies that I think make the class more annoying to play. Not harder, just less intelligently designed.

Also, I'm calling BS on you saying you were "safe at all 5s and many 4s"
when I used my 660 set with as much spell speed as I could possibly fit on my character, I had a 2.44s FireIV cast, and a 2.19s Paradox cast. that's 4.63s total which would show up as a 5. Maybe you meant under leylines though. Either way, it's not a big deal, Just a bit of noticing.

[Tigore]

@ Ramiee

Yeah, I realize Triple Cast is supposed to grant us the movement needed, although the problem is as you described. Flare Star has sometimes been more trouble than its worth pretty much forcing the use for the 2 minute meta. Plus the Aetherial Manipulation teleport obviously relies on other party members moving for you. A bit iffy in a Pug setting sometimes. VPR pretty much already has a better version of it too for them, so I thought it could be made into something different for BLM. Might work out with a floating witch aesthetic to BLM with facing the enemy while moving back at full speed.

I tend to like how the Warcraft Mage does the movement better since you sometimes have to move away from others too. We can't just say use the teleport when you are in your circle and need to move a spread / meteor marker away. And now that both Triple Casts are used up for DPS, oops. Gotta run and Scathe now >.> Swift cast may still not be good enough if it wasn't used for the burst yet.

[Ferrinus]

Latency dependence is the exception that makes you not "ALWAYS" safe at a given displayed count; you might have low enough spellspeed and mediocre enough internet that beginning your first of two casts at 5.1s leaves you shocked and disappointed. Which spellspeed we assume is going to change which numbers are safe, as is, more importantly, which spells' cast times we actually choose to sum. There still are absolutely trustworthy numbers at no matter option we choose, such as the 4 that's guaranteed safe under the current design or the 7 that's safe for F4+Despair at the end of the cycle. The 6 is not superior to the 4; both are accidental combinations of numbers which can and will change with gearing and circumstance.

When FireIV was first added to the game, it had a 3.0s cast time, such that the combined 5.5s of spells you needed to throw just one last F4 in there was basically a coin flip on a "6" Enochian timer even if you did have good latency. In fact, we're discounting another problem: Fire, itself, is how you keep Enochianian from falling off. So if your timer's down to 3, should you hardcast Fire, or swiftcast Fire just to be safe? Well, that "3" could be either 3.0 seconds remaining or 2.1 seconds remaining, and Fire needs 2.5s to cast, so are ya feeling lucky? None of these things actually "fit like a puzzle, perfectly" or are "intelligently designed". They're not bad or anything, just contingent on gear and preferred counting method.

I goofed on explaining the max-spellspeed "5" stuff; I was thinking of just two of your shortest GCDs back-to-back instead of F4-Fire specifically (Foul-Fire to avoid overcap, for instance). Leylines definitely shrinks those numbers into 4-on-the-gauge territory but even the 4.36ish territory that raid food could fit you pretty comfortably there.

[GartredZW]

when I said it all "fit like a puzzle, perfectly" and it was intelligently designed, I was mostly referring to how you could just barely get four FireIVs off in either half of your fire phase before. The way the timers tend to line up is just a bonus. I suppose we all take our own method of knowing where we are in the rotation. Some people check the number on the timer, some people count. The point is that in all of Endwalker, I was able to reliably keep enochian going just based on the imprecise number with very little issue. But now even after beating EX2 at least 80 times on Black Mage alone, and clearing the whole savage tier weekly, I still can't rely on that number with how Paradox works now. FireIV is just too long to do the same method I've been doing until now, and I end up panic-swiftcasting when I might not need to.

And I'm not about to vouch for previous incarnations of Black Mage as I didn't play any of them, but there was a pretty common sentiment from old and new players alike that Endwalker was as close to perfection the class had ever gotten.

[Ramiee]

@ Ramiee

Yeah, I realize Triple Cast is supposed to grant us the movement needed, although the problem is as you described. Flare Star has sometimes been more trouble than its worth pretty much forcing the use for the 2 minute meta. Plus the Aetherial Manipulation teleport obviously relies on other party members moving for you. A bit iffy in a Pug setting sometimes. VPR pretty much already has a better version of it too for them, so I thought it could be made into something different for BLM. Might work out with a floating witch aesthetic to BLM with facing the enemy while moving back at full speed.

I tend to like how the Warcraft Mage does the movement better since you sometimes have to move away from others too. We can't just say use the teleport when you are in your circle and need to move a spread / meteor marker away. And now that both Triple Casts are used up for DPS, oops. Gotta run and Scathe now >.> Swift cast may still not be good enough if it wasn't used for the burst yet.

I would say that if at level 100 instead of flarestar we got an ability that allowed us to movecast that would of been massive and worthy of the level 100 milestone. BLM would of had to lose some of its movement tools or put it on a big timer even more then 2 minutes (maybe 2 1/2 or 3 minutes.) It would also be a true movement tool instead of something like triplecast/swiftcast which has a damage priority during the burst (though swiftcast now has more wiggleroom for movement since its on a 40 second cd)

[Tigore]

It could definitely be a debate if the BLM players are willing to give up Aetherial Manipulation for a Movecast cooldown or stacks of single use ones. Triple Cast would likely have to stay the same so the DPS numbers are not altered. Scathe also getting an improvement to its trait on refreshing the Astral and Umbral timers could help too. It sounds like it simplifies the gauge too much on paper, but it hits like a wet noodle compared to the proper spells. Arguably a fair trade that a very low GCD DPS move is used to keep Enochian going as a last resort for movement. Scathe is also a bit pricey on the mana cost for what it does currently.

[Ferrinus]

when I said it all "fit like a puzzle, perfectly" and it was intelligently designed, I was mostly referring to how you could just barely get four FireIVs off in either half of your fire phase before. The way the timers tend to line up is just a bonus. I suppose we all take our own method of knowing where we are in the rotation. Some people check the number on the timer, some people count. The point is that in all of Endwalker, I was able to reliably keep enochian going just based on the imprecise number with very little issue. But now even after beating EX2 at least 80 times on Black Mage alone, and clearing the whole savage tier weekly, I still can't rely on that number with how Paradox works now. FireIV is just too long to do the same method I've been doing until now, and I end up panic-swiftcasting when I might not need to.

And I'm not about to vouch for previous incarnations of Black Mage as I didn't play any of them, but there was a pretty common sentiment from old and new players alike that Endwalker was as close to perfection the class had ever gotten.

At minimum spellspeed, stuffing four F4s into the first half of your astral cycle was a really dicey proposition. You could only really get away with it if you fast-cast F3 rather than did a transpose into F3P; the total spells you wanted to get off wanted 13.7s of cast time, but you only actually had 13.25s of astral to work with. Very dicey until you got a decent amount of SPS, and with a decent amount of SPS you can fit four F4s into either half of your cycle whether or not F1 is instacast.

I've played it since late ARR, and a funny thing about DT BLM is that it kind of feels like it morphs from HW BLM to EW BLM as your spellspeed rises. If your casts are really slow, you'll probably end up using your Firestarter proc mid astral cycle, such that you cast your F4s in three sets of two rather than two sets of three... and as I recall, around two F4s to one F1 was the "safety" rotation in Heavensward (where you had 10s of AF3 per refresh and a 3.0s cast time on F4). Once you're a little faster, you can very comfortably fit four F4s before Paradox and probably fit four F4s after Paradox. The second half is tighter than the first on paper, but since you've got your F3P proc during it and since you'll almost certainly be swift or triplecasting your Despair in order to get the maximum DPS yield out of cast time removal, you end up almost always chasing some number of F4s with an instant cast that refreshes Astral (i.e. either Paradox, F3P, or a swift/triple Despair) such that your astral cycle ends up with a very consistent cadence to it.

Since I generally played standard, DT BLM feels to me like EW BLM with some mana tick-related jank removed. I'd rather play what we have now than go back because I'd miss Flare Star and the instant Paradox with guaranteed proc is very convenient.

[OliverQ]

One minor annoyance I wish they'd change is the sound effect for Flare Star. It sounds like someone his hitting a metal pot when it lands. How does that fit its spell effect? It should sound more like RDM's Scorch or RPR Communio.