Black Mage lacks spice and friction

[Skubator]

Like many others, I am overall rather displeased with the changes to Black Mage this patch. After playing the job for a few hours I will admit it's not as bad as I thought upon reading the patch notes, but it still leaves much to be desired now. The lack of Enochian timers is the biggest problem; there is now no pressure while playing the job. The way you sequence your spells during Astral Fire is now far too free form; with no timer you are no longer restricted on when you use your Paradox (or if you use it at all...), you do not need to plan for when you refresh your thunder DoT, and there is no longer any gain to using Triplecast during Fire windows. While each of these changes might seem innocuous in isolation, they amount to remove any sense of challenge or satisfaction that might be found in the job.

• Triplecast during Astral Fire windows leading to a DPS gain provides an interesting push-pull interaction; the player has to decide whether they want to use it for the additional DPS or save it for mobility later.
• The ability to drop Enochian is more important than you might realize; it creates a potential failure state, where if the player sequences their spells poorly they lose their Enochian state. It was punishing, but failure states like this are necessary; without the ability to fail, success is meaningless.
• Previously, the need to refresh your Thunder DoT created additional pressure, and forced the player to think about how they sequenced their actions during Astral Fire. Without Enochian timers, there is no longer any thought behind this action. The player is best served refreshing Thunder as soon as the DoT falls off.

The only thing about the new BLM that's even remotely interesting is using transpose + swiftcast Blizzard 3 to end Fire windows, but that's not much. It is my opinion that removal of Enochian timers could ultimately be fine, and I think it makes the job more healthy in outdoor/dungeon content, but it requires that additional pressure and friction be introduced to the job in other ways. This could manifest in the form of additional buffs that inform spell-sequencing; perhaps Fire 3 or Paradox provide the player with a buff called Firebound or something to that effect empowering your next two Fire 4s or something to that effect. It's not a perfect solution, I am just spitballing ideas here; it would at least provide some pressure and structure during the fire window instead of just "IDK, do whatever you want I guess."

Anyway, I'm starting to ramble now so I'll end it here. Tl;dr Black Mage changes are mostly a miss. I'm not saying we necessarily need to roll back the changes fully, but something needs to be done.

[Carighan]

Black Mage has always lacked "spice", that's the core issue the job has had since ARR, tbh. It wants to be the big badaboom turret caster, and yet even with Fire IV and all that, its spells feel anemic to use, lack "oomph" and don't convey slow, big, nukes well at all.

I'm not against a "pure" caster, but it would help to look at other games and readily take concepts from them, and rip out 75%++ of the Black Mage spell array to replace with that. Make it actually feel like a big nuke caster.

What I would maybe do with the current design to counteract the simplicity of movement that was already present with the insane amount of instant cast spells + now the shorter cast times is remove 1 charge of Triplecast. Maybe at some point in the future even both, but I would not want to do that in one step, need a few months to evaluate the in-between.

[Rithy255]

Black Mage has always lacked "spice", that's the core issue the job has had since ARR, tbh. It wants to be the big badaboom turret caster, and yet even with Fire IV and all that, its spells feel anemic to use, lack "oomph" and don't convey slow, big, nukes well at all.

I'm not against a "pure" caster, but it would help to look at other games and readily take concepts from them, and rip out 75%++ of the Black Mage spell array to replace with that. Make it actually feel like a big nuke caster.

What I would maybe do with the current design to counteract the simplicity of movement that was already present with the insane amount of instant cast spells + now the shorter cast times is remove 1 charge of Triplecast. Maybe at some point in the future even both, but I would not want to do that in one step, need a few months to evaluate the in-between.

I loved how fire 4 felt personally.

[Azurarok]

The enochian timer and longer cast gave FireIV a tension to it that nothing else in the game offered. It's completely gone now. The timer also limited Paradox's availability, which also forced us to consider the tradeoff in using the other instant cast options more often too.

The penalty for letting it drop should've been adjusted, not erased entirely like this.