Black mage changes are probably my breaking point with this game

[Absurdity]

I think you just honestly needed to get better at playing black mage if the timer was a problem for you

Don't bother, you have a more productive time arguing with a brick wall.
Hikari only ever comes out of the woodworks to claim they now suddenly enjoy a job after it got hit with the stupid stick, happened with Summoner, happened with Dragoon, happening now with Black Mage.

Their entire shtick can be boiled down to "players wrong, job changes good", especially when it involves turning another job into a mindless sequence of button presses.

[Rithy255]

I have zero interest in rapier mage, summoner, or painter mage. That's why it's so bad to gatekeep the best job themes by making them extremely contrived and convoluted to play. It's just a game, learn to have fun. Like I've said before, if you want to flex your brain, become a doctor, become a lawyer, engage in something actually intellectual. MMOs aint it.

Black mage and becoming a lawyer or doctor isn't even comparable what are you even talking about???

So should job choice entirely just be based on visual preference? if that was the case couldn't we just make jobs different animation packs from one another so that we don't actually have to think, I always thought the point of having many classes and playstyles was that you can make classes that appeal to different types of players.

I'm a fairly casual player, especially when it comes to DPS roles and still managed to pickup and enjoy black mage even when I messed up, you know why I liked black mage? because there was actually room to make mistakes so it felt good the times where I was performing well with it. If you take out the skill expression out of a thing then sure it maybe more approachable, but theirs fun in exceeding at something difficult, I want to feel rewarded for investing some time into a job. I don't feel any reward for playing current black mage well, because theirs no actual room to play it well as a baseline you can pick it up and play it well.

[Supersnow845]

Don't bother, you have a more productive time arguing with a brick wall.
Hikari only ever comes out of the woodworks to claim they now suddenly enjoy a job after it got hit with the stupid stick, happened with Summoner, happened with Dragoon, happening now with Black Mage.

Their entire shtick can be boiled down to "players wrong, job changes good", especially when it involves turning another job into a mindless sequence of button presses.

Don’t forget that they also love to say that some jobs are just “cooler” than others when it comes to design and you shouldn’t gate a “cool” job behind difficulty (never mind the list of “cool” jobs is basically always just “jobs that hit with the simple stick” and “uncool” jobs are “jobs I want to get hit with the simple stick”)

I’m just waiting for them to suddenly do a 180 on how “cool” RDM and SCH are when they inevitably get hit with the simple stick

[Azurarok]

Black mage and becoming a lawyer or doctor isn't even comparable what are you even talking about???

Actually maybe that holds some water. Afaik an old Scholar main in here is a medical professional and an old Machinist main's a veteran game dev.

/s

[Supersnow845]

As a doctor I can confidently say

HW BLM was harder than anything I did in med school

[HikariKurosawa]

Don’t forget that they also love to say that some jobs are just “cooler” than others when it comes to design and you shouldn’t gate a “cool” job behind difficulty (never mind the list of “cool” jobs is basically always just “jobs that hit with the simple stick” and “uncool” jobs are “jobs I want to get hit with the simple stick”)

I’m just waiting for them to suddenly do a 180 on how “cool” RDM and SCH are when they inevitably get hit with the simple stick

I appreciate SCH but do you really think fairies are cool? lol. SMN also holds zero appeal to me despite being streamlined and made into an actual summoner in comparison to the dot abomination it was pre-rework.

RDM cool? Literally the corniest weapon(rapier) paired with rose magic. It was historically the simplest caster in the game too, so I don't know what you're on about. Why would they simplify the beginner caster even further?

The fact that you can't recognize that some jobs are just cooler than others is just weird and out of touch to me. That said, most people are not very cool and there is a reason why that is.

Black mage and becoming a lawyer or doctor isn't even comparable what are you even talking about???

So should job choice entirely just be based on visual preference? if that was the case couldn't we just make jobs different animation packs from one another so that we don't actually have to think, I always thought the point of having many classes and playstyles was that you can make classes that appeal to different types of players.

I'm a fairly casual player, especially when it comes to DPS roles and still managed to pickup and enjoy black mage even when I messed up, you know why I liked black mage? because there was actually room to make mistakes so it felt good the times where I was performing well with it. If you take out the skill expression out of a thing then sure it maybe more approachable, but theirs fun in exceeding at something difficult, I want to feel rewarded for investing some time into a job. I don't feel any reward for playing current black mage well, because theirs no actual room to play it well as a baseline you can pick it up and play it well.

Thematic preference is the word you're looking for here, but yes, you should be playing a job in an rpg because you prefer the theme of it. That's kinda the whole point of rpgs existing, to embrace your fantasy and live it out in a fantasy world.

Don't bother, you have a more productive time arguing with a brick wall.
Hikari only ever comes out of the woodworks to claim they now suddenly enjoy a job after it got hit with the stupid stick, happened with Summoner, happened with Dragoon, happening now with Black Mage.

Their entire shtick can be boiled down to "players wrong, job changes good", especially when it involves turning another job into a mindless sequence of button presses.

There is nothing mindless about any job, even smn, in this game. You've played enough that it's muscle memory to you. Just like beating the last boss of elden ring dlc is muscle memory to me. Difference is I can recognize how hard what I am doing is, something you fail to do for some reason. I wonder why people have this perspective, they get good at something and make it muscle memory then all of a sudden they view it as easy even though they put in so many hours of work to get to that point. Maybe get a life lol

[Rithy255]

Thematic preference is the word you're looking for here, but yes, you should be playing a job in an rpg because you prefer the theme of it. That's kinda the whole point of rpgs existing, to embrace your fantasy and live it out in a fantasy world.

Thematic Preference should play a part into the design, but people don't entirely just pick something based on visuals of job, gameplay is also a big reason to pick something If a RPG made the same class 15 times but gave them different "Thematic/visuals" then you'd find yourself very bored when trying out something new.

Thematic aspects should also reflect gameplay, Part of mage gameplay such as black mage is casting long and big spells, If I'm playing a mage that doesn't really cast much I don't feel like a Mage, same with healers who don't have to heal I don't really feel like a healer when most of the gameplay is spamming one damage button.

Oh well I suppose at the end of the day we don't want the same thing from the game, seems like you would want everyjob to just be thematics and visual effects while I want jobs to be different and some that are complex, Perhaps your opinion is main stream and maybe that's just the direction the game is heading, I can accept that even if I don't really want to see ff14 go in that direction. Not much I can do.

[Carighan]

You hopefully realize that just because one job has you press 2 or 3 buttons every 2.5s doesn't actually make it more involved than pressing 1 button, since the order is still a static solution?

In the absence of jobs properly based on randomness (Dancer comes closest, tbh), all jobs in FFXIV are static rotation type that might as well we played optimally by the software your gaming keyboard comes with. You could have a button for each GCD slot that'd macro the oGCDs after the GCD or something. It's ridiculous that in the absence of actual class gameplay, players in FFXIV have trained themselves to think of this rote button presses as "complexity". Yeah right. You'd implode if you played a game where classes have actual complexity mid-fight like needing to react to changing circumstances contrasting against your own non-stable rotation.

Plus wouldn't that logic make BLM the easiest job since it had long non-weaving cast times, making it even "easier" to play than Summoner (applying the same logic I mean)? That just highlights how absurd the idea that APM=difficulty really is. Summoner is easy, but it's because of the ranged physical levels of mobility coupled with the variable order of minor summons. Black Mage was difficult because of the binary failure state of either producing or not a Flare Star. Pictomancer is easy due to the extreme freeform flow of its combat (it's like a static rotation only you can just about screw it up in every way and have the same net result). Reaper is difficult because its net-negative and you need to know the moment per-fight when to roll with it. Of course, all of these are in the context of FFXIV, where lacking both non-static-rotation type classes and having no static rotation that's actually difficult to pull as they all "fit" means we're discussing "Easy" vs "Very Easy" we just call it "Difficult" and "Easy" here.

[Eastwall]

As a doctor I can confidently say

HW BLM was harder than anything I did in med school

Interesting information. Can l ask you when you patients Come in, do you ever ask them about their diet? Or you go right into prescription for the symptoms?

[HikariKurosawa]

Thematic Preference should play a part into the design, but people don't entirely just pick something based on visuals of job, gameplay is also a big reason to pick something If a RPG made the same class 15 times but gave them different "Thematic/visuals" then you'd find yourself very bored when trying out something new.

Thematic aspects should also reflect gameplay, Part of mage gameplay such as black mage is casting long and big spells, If I'm playing a mage that doesn't really cast much I don't feel like a Mage, same with healers who don't have to heal I don't really feel like a healer when most of the gameplay is spamming one damage button.

Oh well I suppose at the end of the day we don't want the same thing from the game, seems like you would want everyjob to just be thematics and visual effects while I want jobs to be different and some that are complex, Perhaps your opinion is main stream and maybe that's just the direction the game is heading, I can accept that even if I don't really want to see ff14 go in that direction. Not much I can do.

If such a captivating and popular theme is held hostage and made into a niche job(objectively true when you look at the number of black mage players pre-rework) because of mechanic design, then honestly the entire concept of the job has failed the fantasy of the game entirely and needs to be reworked. The level of entitlement the oldheaded black mages in this community had is insane and honestly, thank god they finally betrayed their interests.

I don't care what you think or what your perspective is because what you desire is against the nature of mmorpgs entirely when you think about them the right way.

Hopefully you get something like chronomancer in the future that can be based entirely around managing timing and timers, dots, whatever it is. You can get a raid buff called hastaga, and you can stop complaining about mechanics again. It can have a fast phase and a slow phase, and you can constantly worry about a timer running out, because stress is good right? We all play games to be stressed out right? The job gauge can literally be the sands of time running out, which can be fleshed out even further by one side being fast, one side being slow, with hastaga buffing both sides and making the slow fast, the fast instant. That way people will know what the job is really based on and never get it confused or worry about it changing. At least chronomancer is thematically related to timers and also wouldn't have mainstream appeal so they have a lot more freedom to play with the job design.

Black mage is not that job and should have never been that job. Your opinion is bad and wrong. The fact that you equate themes to visuals too, you're just out of touch with RPG. I don't think you care about the RPG part of mmoRPG at all. You're just here for the gameplay.