What are your impressions of BLM's current "game feel" ?

[Potch]

I made this thread because I wanted to share my own impressions about BLM's current game feel, after having played the current normal raid tier and extreme trial, and also see what other players feel.

What do you currently enjoy about BLM's gameplay, and why ?

Similarly, what do you currently not enjoy, and why ?

Now for my impressions :

I currently feel like I'm a Fire 4 machine gun, and every 2 minutes I become a Xenoglossy machine gun for 10 seconds. It's not very engaging or interesting.

I think the Astral Fire timer had the huge benefit of adding some amount of stress to the rotation, making me feel like I'm taking some risk when I almost run out of time, and feel very rewarding when I can refresh the timer just in time.

I very often forget to cast Paradox and cast an additional Fire 4, because Paradox doesn't feel useful since we don't need it to refresh Astral Fire anymore.

I often feel lost in my fire phase, because I don't realize I have already cast six Fire 4.
I think this also comes from the removal of the Astral Fire timer, because before that I had to keep track of it and there was some rhythm to the "Fire 4 casts -> refresh -> Fire 4 casts -> fire finishers" line.

I don't like that I can't use Thunder spells without the Thunderhead buff being active. It just doesn't feel good or natural for me to have to wait until I switch to Astral Fire or Umbral Ice to do it.

For example on the latest extreme trial, often just after the adds phase I just can't apply Thunder to the boss because I have already spent it on an add and I can't just switch to UI to get Thunderhead because I'll lose my Astral Souls stacks. It just feels bad when stuff like that happens.

I still find some enjoyment in the core gameplay of alternating between Fire and Ice phases, but now that the "pressure" of the timer is gone, it just feels really bland to me.

[Supersnow845]

Current BLM now feels like a healer, where you just kinda zone out spamming whatever key your fire 4 is on because you don’t have to pay attention to anything

[Halala]

At least with a healer there's the occasional pressure of keeping the rest of the party alive to add some variety to things...

I agree with OP, BLM now feels very bland and boring. I've been progging Omega (O12S) with a couple of statics, and the difference between BLM before 7.2 and BLM after 7.2 is extremely noticeable. In a bad way. We're at the point in prog where we're working on getting a clear, so now there are just huge swaths of time where I'm doing nothing but casting Fire IV, and I realized that I'm just straight-up *bored,* which never ever happened when I had a timer to keep an eye on. There's no pressure keeping me on top of things, so my attention drifted and I actually performed Worse than I did before the timer was removed. Honestly at this point I'm considering swapping jobs so that I have *something* to do.

Honestly, if the future fights are gonna be so movement heavy that keeping enochian up is impossible even with umbral heart freezing the timer in ice phase, then instead of removing it from BLM entirely, they could've just added a trait or something at level 100 that does the same job without removing the complexity of gameplay at lower levels...

[Mecia]

Its hollow and any game feel was wiped. Everything is handed to you on a silver platter and you just watch the fireworks.

The ticking timer and 2.50+ GCD did so much in conjunction with XIVs encounters, theres nothing like it anymore.

[OliverQ]

New BLM feels like a WHM without the heals. Almost the entire rotation is just spamming Fire IV non-stop, especially at anything below 100.

[PyurBlue]

BLM feels soulless right now. There is nothing to think about besides overcapping Polyglot. Triplecast and Swiftcast can almost be removed too.

[Rithy255]

Don't intend on touching it again unless it gets changes, but from what I've played it felt utterly dull.

I mean that's what happens when you take away any room to mess up, it's not like they even bothered to try and give it something else to manage.

[MicahZerrshia]

If SE is so worried about movement, just allow blm to move while casting. They can keep some of the big hard hitting spells as stand to cast, but there is no reason we should have to sacrifice complexity for movement, esp if it means more interesting battles. And its not like being able to move while casting would be as disruptive or controversial as just dumbing the job down completely.

[ChidoriYumitori]

I picked up BLM in Shadowbringers, and continued with it into Endwalker and Dawntrail. I'm no raider; I prefer to do high end content as a sort of silly group activity with friends, BUT I've gotten pretty efficient with it in other normal content and extreme trials. I still had, and still have quite a bit of room to improve, but I think I'm pretty much the kind of person the devs were thinking about with this rework.

Some QoL stuff is nice. Not spamming Umbral Soul is great, and having Triplecast be a movement tool is good. Rotation also feels more straightforward and, admittedly, there is comfort that I can stop and think and regain my bearings without dropping Enochian and having to restart my entire combo. Not having to worry about Firestarter and Thundercloud is also nice.

However, it comes with downsides. Paradox is just movement tech, as is Thunder. AoE Fire/Blizzard feel weak especially compared to your main Fire IV line. The fact you only get a single Flare Star out of an full AoE Fire combo but easily get two out of a single target combo feels bad. Leylines conflicts more than ever given how short it is and how much BLM can move now. Firestarter and Thundercloud also feel silly now; what's the point of them when other classes can shift between their combo lines and apply dots at will?

But most importantly, it's lost the brutally honest method by which it taught its players. Black Mage has always been exceptionally harsh in terms of its toolkit; you either adapted to it, or switched to another job. You could absolutely make it work, but the onus was entirely on you, the player, to make it shine. Other jobs you could get away with being mediocre or even bad with; it was fully apparent when someone fumbled BLM. It has lost a lot of its skill ceiling and player expression in how people could react and improvise with BLM in adverse situations.

To offer a counterpoint as an example, I look to my experience as WHM. #HealerStrike besides, at min ilvl WHM can be demanding when things go belly up in any form of content. It is those clutch moments, knowing that you were skillful enough to fend off the jaws of defeat and help your party claim victory when a wipe would have been ensured that give a certain dose of dopamine and serotonin, even if no-one else saw it.

BLM before this rework had that intrinsically. How long can you keep Enochian up? Can you dance through all these AoEs without dropping your combo, or dropping Enochian? Can you dance between your allies and your leylines to do mechanics while keeping your uptime? It was certainly not for everyone, but BLM had for those willing to be honest with themselves, a built-in intrinsic motivator to be better, to constantly improve. THAT, in my humble opinion, is what BLM lost this patch, and I do hope it finds it one day.

I don't mind current BLM. But I don't have nearly as much of a reason to keep playing it.

[EreAsha]

I played blm because I enjoyed the challenge of keeping timers up while moving. Aetherial manipulation is on a 10 second timer. I loved sitting still and greeting my casts before clicking on a party member and nyooming over, only to immediately between the lines back to my leylines to keep turretting.

I gave 7.2 blm an honest try and... it's boring. Mistiming my attacks thanks to the shorter cast time is frustrating and it's not fun to lack a fail states