"Future battle design may cause difficulty with casting spells"

[Mecia]

So where the fuck is "Future battle design may cause difficulty with casting spells" because its not in any of the new normals besides maybe the back half of M7.

I sure hope savage justifies killing this job and playstyle.

[Ferrinus]

I don't really find the new BLM substantially more mobile than the old, because it has the same incentive to save all its movement tools for a damage gain at the end of its astral cycle (specifically, transpose + instant casting Blizzard 3). You're still choosing between damage and mobility and if you're too greedy you lose both.

I don't think I would've had trouble doing any of the new fights on 7.1 BLM, and don't really see that 7.2 BLM will let me do something requiring constant movement any better because the total count of instant GCDs available to me hasn't changed.

[Carighan]

I don't really find the new BLM substantially more mobile than the old, because it has the same incentive to save all its movement tools for a damage gain at the end of its astral cycle (specifically, transpose + instant casting Blizzard 3). You're still choosing between damage and mobility and if you're too greedy you lose both.

Yeah, hence me saying that it's a well-done modification in that it keeps the entire "feel" of playing the job. Sure, slidecasting is now easier to pull off, and you got more frequent windows. And the big thing - I guess what they were going for - is that with Enochian gone, you are free to place Paradox/Xeno/Thunder for movement optimization if needed. Works well enough.

[Ferrinus]

Yeah, hence me saying that it's a well-done modification in that it keeps the entire "feel" of playing the job. Sure, slidecasting is now easier to pull off, and you got more frequent windows. And the big thing - I guess what they were going for - is that with Enochian gone, you are free to place Paradox/Xeno/Thunder for movement optimization if needed. Works well enough.

It doesn't feel too different to play, but the changes they made don't really make sense as attempts to increase the job's mobility, because, well, they barely have. Being able to Paradox earlier or later in your cycle slightly increases your flexibility of when to move but it doesn't let you move more.

Except... it also doesn't actually increase your flexibility, just slightly mitigates your damage loss, because you could always throw an instant spell at the very start or very end of your astral cycle thanks to Paradox's guaranteed Firestarter proc.

[Voryn]

"Future battle design may cause difficulty with casting spells, so we have shortened the cast time for a variety of actions."

This was a very bad way for the devs to communicate their reasoning.

For content where job balance actually matters (Savage and Ultimate) we have very little idea what the future battle design will be like, or if it’s even going to be significantly different in the first place.

Will new mechanics that require more movement? Will they require faster movement? Will the movement need to happen at less predictable times? Will we need to “react” more?It could be any of these, or the mechanics could end up being the same as what we already have. As players, we don’t know. For someone to believe that it was worth it to remove things they found fun about Black Mage, they need to already have faith that there will be significant changes to battle design that will actually require these changes.

But all we have to look at so far in 7.2 is normal difficulty content (where the specifics of job balance don’t matter at all) and one Extreme trial that’s still using the existing design philosophies.

[Realfoxy]

Yeah, hence me saying that it's a well-done modification in that it keeps the entire "feel" of playing the job. Sure, slidecasting is now easier to pull off, and you got more frequent windows. And the big thing - I guess what they were going for - is that with Enochian gone, you are free to place Paradox/Xeno/Thunder for movement optimization if needed. Works well enough.

I personally think changing the cast times has been a MASSIVE change to how the job feels.

I played the new trial for the first time on 7.2 BLM and it's stunning how completely brainless the job is now. You don't even need to think about anything any more, to the point where I was almost forgetting to use Xeno / Paradox. Thunder DOT needs a refresh? Who cares what point your rotation is at, just mindlessly hit the button.

It's great if you love watching Netflix on the second monitor while doing your roulettes, but there's just...barely anything left to think about. It's depressing.

[Ferrinus]

I should add one addendum here, because there IS one change to BLM which definitely makes it more mobile than before: leylines lasting only 20s rather than 30.

[RirisuBlix]

The Leylines change would have been fine with a few other small changes, but with the reduction of F4 potency and the Enochian damage nerf, I am wondering if this last change is also supposed to be a shadow nerf to make the casters universally weaker than the melees (now that PCT is nerfed), not just to create a little more mobility (which I would accept without the other changes, of course).

Of course we don't have easy ways to measure or calculate this (thanks SE), but yeah I'm kinda mixed on this. Personally I found 30s very comfy because aligning with buff windows didn't have to come down to the GCD. 20s, alongside Flare Star and Xenoglossy potency buffs, means we're subtly being pushed back into the 2m meta, when one of BLM's strengths in 7.1 was doing excellent damage regardless of burst windows and buff alignment.

If the Savage and Ultimate fights from this point on are truly so punishing that fighting for even 20s of LL uptime is noticeably less miserable than 30s, though, I will probably just be annoyed about fights being so hectic when this game's net code and snapshotting are already barely keeping up with the pace of fights since EW. Golbez and P12S come to mind... even EX3 was kinda miserably quick in a way that wasn't fun to me (even on melee and tank).

[Asari5]

to me the whole thing sounds like 'we dont know how fights turn out in the future, so lets change blm as a precaution'

[Taranok]

to me the whole thing sounds like 'we dont know how fights turn out in the future, so lets change blm as a precaution'

I'd actually say it's closer to: "We don't know how to design fights to be challenging, but we boxed ourselves into a corner that we do or don't realize we're in, are incapable of fixing the actual problem that is encounter design, and have had to homogenize all tanks to tank the same way, all healers to heal the same way, and all casters to play like ranged phys because the only way to make things more challenging is to ramp up the speed and movement required."

There used to be a time where caster gameplay was about planning and prepositioning, doing greedcasts with sometimes pixel perfect precision. Now it's just awful DDR where the netcode makes it worse. Hell, for the people who loved multitasking, rphys was much more diverse in multitasking options and could make even relatively sedate fights decently multitask heavy.

If this is how the devs want the game to move forward, they're going to first edge out every single person who can't handle multitask mechanics. Given enough time, all cast bars will be removed, and even more after that will be just 1 button jobs while doing ultimate DDR in casual content.

At the end of the day the problem is simple. Instead of designing encounters to fit the classes, they're changing classes to fit the encounters. Instead of choosing a class to interface with an encounter in a unique way, everyone is being given the same experience, and it's very much a love it or leave it as the wrecking ball of encounter design demolishes class design.