Why turned BLM into just another DPS... boring...

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Honestly, even though I will still probably continue BLM (albeit disgruntledly), I am mad that even with this completely unwanted overhaul of casts and removal of having a failstate (which diminishes the enjoyment of performing it correctly)...

...they somehow couldn't even be consistent with this update and at least fix the other AOE spells. Fire II, High Fire II, Blizzard II and High Blizzard II are all spells that have a cast time of 3s, where they even moved Flare and Freeze down to 2s. Not only that, instead of reverting the potencies like they were back in Endwalker when they FIXED their uselessness for having too little potency, they kept the potencies AND cast time that ultimately made them useless again since Dawntrail's launch. They couldn't even reinstate the Flare-synergy of Fire II/High Fire II.

That and Scathe still exists in this poor state. The 100 potency made sense back in ARR when Fire I was 150 base potency and Fire III was 200(?). The fact it is still this weak AND even costs MP (which severely messes up both Fire and Ice cycles) is mindblowing.

Also that Leyline duration nerf was just uncalled for.

[Valence]

...they somehow couldn't even be consistent with this update and at least fix the other AOE spells. Fire II, High Fire II, Blizzard II and High Blizzard II are all spells that have a cast time of 3s, where they even moved Flare and Freeze down to 2s.

Makes you think about it right? They probably know that current BLM is back to ShB BLM with non standard transpose lines being the optimal and only way to play AoE, and the easiest way at that. Else they'd have adjusted those AoE unused spells as well if they didn't know. They know half the AoE kit is useless, and they don't care.

[Tint]

...they somehow couldn't even be consistent with this update and at least fix the other AOE spells. Fire II, High Fire II, Blizzard II and High Blizzard II are all spells that have a cast time of 3s, where they even moved Flare and Freeze down to 2s.

That's because Fire 2 and Blizzard 2 are basically only used to switch betweem UI3 and AF3 and then the cast time is halved (and the potency lowered anyway). If Fire 2 and Blizzard 2 were 2 second casts they would drop down to 1 second in practice, even less with spell speed. At this point they could simply make them instant casts.

In practice they are already at 1.5 seconds.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

That's because Fire 2 and Blizzard 2 are basically only used to switch betweem UI3 and AF3 and then the cast time is halved (and the potency lowered anyway). If Fire 2 and Blizzard 2 were 2 second casts they would drop down to 1 second in practice, even less with spell speed. At this point they could simply make them instant casts.

In practice they are already at 1.5 seconds.

With Blizzard II/High Blizzard II after Freeze, fair enough. You don't really use them excessively unless you Transpose then B2/HB2. I lowkey blame the boring design of Ice phases for this one.

With Fire II/High Fire II, the story is very different. This spell by design of how MP and Umbral Hearts work is designed around being used more than a stance swapper (AOE Fire III). It even was so during Endwalker when they not only boosted the potency to 100/120, but also created an Astral Fire effect that boosts Flare damage when used beforehand. They buffed it because in Shadowbringers these spells were the potencies we have today, i.e. too weak.

Going 1-2 F2/HF2 then 2-4 Flare (Manafont, Ether) was a normal thing to do during Astral Fire beyond the stance swap. It felt organic and right.

Except now they reverted the potency in DT, making it so bad that using Fire II or Blizzard II spells after Lv58 (Umbral Hearts) is an active damage loss over just using Transpose, even if clipped / not woven in. The potency-per-second is just plain too low, both for stance swapping and for normal attack usage. This was true even when Flare had a higher AOE penalty of 40% and 4s cast time, even without swift/triple.

Potency per second can be improved by speeding up cast time, which they did TWICE with Flare in Dawntrail, cutting off a second each. It can also be increased by increasing base potency, naturally.

The fact they did neither is baffling, both because these spells are functionally useless for how weak they are and because they were inconsistent with their casttime treatment. Given this was also a patch where they jumbled around AOE damage numbers on almost all jobs, even BLM with Foul, but fail to adress the basic AOE spells feels like a great oversight to me. That or the person in charge of potencies can't do BLM math, which I dearly hope is not true.

That said, we had AST do 0.5s casts on Gravity a long time ago under Lightspeed. Esuna previously was also an extremely short cast under 1.5s. Having stanceswap casts do that is not exactly illogical, given the contextual precedent.