7.2 BLM Praise Thread

**caffe_macchiato** · 03-29-2025 02:27 AM

This thread is for those who prefer 7.2 BLM over its predecessor. I personally do not understand why pushing buttons in sequence needs to have artificial difficulty (or as I call, “fake fun”). Your Astral/Umbral timer does not add anything substantive to the game. As of 7.2, your rotation has not changed AT ALL. The ONLY thing different is a number on the screen. Actually, something did change: you’ll finally be able to do mechanics! Your party members will be so happy with you that they’ll let you back in Party Finder.

Now, I know what you all are thinking: this was YOUR class, right? You in The Balance Discord who hoard “theorycrafting” “strategies”? You don’t want those “other people” playing “your” class. If BLM becomes a class for plebeians, you’re no longer special. Is that it?

I’ve been playing this game for over nine years. Black mage has never been difficult. You chose to make fake fan theories and write a whole book based on babble from The Balance Discord server. Well, guess what? It’s my class too. I’m not in your Discord, never have been, never will be, and most importantly, I don’t care about your “theorycrafting” or your “meta”. Black mage is the press-fire-then-ice class. That’s it.

If you don’t like it, please unsubscribe. Better yet, please liquidate The Balance Discord and all associated publications. This game belongs to the people.

**dairymoose** · 03-29-2025 02:43 AM

Your post is coming off a little combative. I am glad you like the changes. For me personally, I feel like part of the fun of games with multiple classes is you get a totally new gameplay experience picking another class. The changes in 7.2, to me, feel like they were specifically aimed at making BLM more like the other classes because its gameplay was too much of an outlier (they basically said as much when they explained why they did this).

For me personally I enjoyed the old BLM because I found myself totally bored playing the other classes and the game would start to feel like a chore for me. My personal experience was, I come from a background of playing other MMOs at a high level and I started playing FFXIV with a real life friend, and while I was part of their static that raided I was generally not in the same league as the other players (I was used to playing with much more hardcore players that would wipe very infrequently, in WoW anyway). The net result of this was, we would wipe on fights many many times and having raided before as Monk and BLM, and on Monk I was just so bored. On most fights I would literally press the exact same sequence of buttons at the exact same time, every wipe. Like at timestamp 2:36 into the fight I would use Demolish, every wipe, every time (this is just an example, not a real timestamp/statistics/etc). And there wasn't really any room for improvement, I was always doing the optimal button press sequence. On BLM I felt like I would learn from each wipe and figure out better ways to do things and it was fun to try different ways to approach the fight. This was fun for me, and if I was forced to play Monk I would not have enjoyed the game. This is just my personal experience. While I enjoyed playing at a high level and doing high damage, it was only because this was the only thing that was fun for me, especially in a static with real life friends that I did not fit in with, and kept wiping.

**Carighan** · 03-30-2025 06:24 PM

Originally Posted by dairymoose

Your post is coming off a little combative. I am glad you like the changes. For me personally, I feel like part of the fun of games with multiple classes is you get a totally new gameplay experience picking another class.

Ah, and you got that fix out of pressing "static rotation A" instead of "static rotation B" like you did on, say, Red Mage. That makes sense. I can see the "totally new gameplay experience" that provided.

/s, if that wasn't obvious enough...

(discussing gameplay differences in a game lacking 3 out of 4 types of class design is just absurd, they're all gameplay-wise the same? >.>)

Back to the topic, yeah I kinda agree. It's weird to no longer have at least 2.5s of casting, but the job definitely doesn't feel this outdated any more, which it previous quite did comparing all other ones (and since changing all of those to fit BLM more to then adjust all fight design was utopian for understandable reasons, this made sense). It also puts a bigger focus on "building up to Flare Star", which is cool given it's superb visuals.

So yeah, overall really nice. Mostly it's the same sequence of the same buttons, everything feels a bit faster, and you no longer instantly feel like you would not be letting your group down if you had just brought any other caster the moment a fight requires you to do stuff other than standing and casting.

**nguyentri11** · 03-29-2025 03:37 AM

This is less a praise thread and more of a having an agenda against the Balance thread.

**EreAsha** · 03-29-2025 03:54 AM

For a thread that's meant to praise the new BLM, you don't praise it all.

I'm not part of the balance discord. I looked at once and went "lol nope". I've done just fine in extremes as BLM without needing to "optimize".

The 7.2 changes make BLM like everything else. I played it for a reason. It was satisfying keeping the timer up and dodging the mechanics. Now it's just spam one button because there should be no fail states ever, right? There's no tension anymore. And if you didn't want the tension, then there were other jobs. Nothing in this patch screams to me that we needed to get rid of the fail states. It I thought the raids were frustrating and unfun even going in as phys ranged for "constant movement". All I could think k of was how at least if I was playing old BLM, I could at least enjoy doing my best to optimize and figure out when it's safe to sit to cast my long spells and not.

**Roarmiaka** · 03-29-2025 06:51 AM

I don't mind the timer being gone. My only problem with it is that Paradox and Fire 3 feel off. The point of those skills is to refresh the timer, so if they don't plan to revert, maybe change those spells to do something else. I would personally think it's cool if they remove Firestarter and add a second skill to Paradox, which would give more reason to push Paradox. Paradox is Fire and Ice; it could be awesome to have a follow-up of Lightning and Fire.

**HikariKurosawa** · 03-29-2025 07:36 AM

Paradox needs to do something else, like maybe when used in UI it can "deep freeze" the umbral hearts and make them last twice as long(effectively being 3 extra umbral hearts without changing the job hud element). Then when in AF it can give 3 stacks of astral soul. I think it should also have AoE potency and make the AoE rotations enable twice as many casts of flare stare + flare.

Right now that's the only real thing that gets me about BLM design, paradox should be an AoE spell and it should do more than it does now.

Maybe this can all relate to 8.0 changes, and maybe the big spell will be an UI equivalent of flare star that is only usable when you have all "6" uses of umbral hearts active. Much longer AF phases + a UI finisher.

Overall though, the job is in the best place it has ever been.

**Asari5** · 03-29-2025 02:53 PM

'artificial difficulty'? i think people said the same about positionals... but what would non-artificial difficulty look like?

in the end its a case of everyones preferations. 20 jobs and its somehow not possible to have jobs for different preferations. xD

**Supersnow845** · 03-29-2025 02:58 PM

I love when people say “you can’t roll your face on the keyboard” is “artificial difficulty”

Not being able to just dump out xeno’s with no thought is not artificial difficulty, hell why does xeno even exist anymore? Why are you being rewarded for doing nothing at all. Actually having a use for paradox and fire 3 procs is not artificial difficulty. Actually having a reason to not stockpile triplecast is not “artificial difficulty”

By this logic the entirety of “true difficulty” is “can you maintain ABC” which gets boring real fast, ask the healers

**MitsukiKimura** · 03-29-2025 04:03 PM

Originally Posted by caffe_macchiato

This thread is for those who prefer 7.2 BLM over its predecessor. I personally do not understand why pushing buttons in sequence needs to have artificial difficulty (or as I call, “fake fun”). Your Astral/Umbral timer does not add anything substantive to the game. As of 7.2, your rotation has not changed AT ALL. The ONLY thing different is a number on the screen. Actually, something did change: you’ll finally be able to do mechanics! Your party members will be so happy with you that they’ll let you back in Party Finder.

Now, I know what you all are thinking: this was YOUR class, right? You in The Balance Discord who hoard “theorycrafting” “strategies”? You don’t want those “other people” playing “your” class. If BLM becomes a class for plebeians, you’re no longer special. Is that it?

I’ve been playing this game for over nine years. Black mage has never been difficult. You chose to make fake fan theories and write a whole book based on babble from The Balance Discord server. Well, guess what? It’s my class too. I’m not in your Discord, never have been, never will be, and most importantly, I don’t care about your “theorycrafting” or your “meta”. Black mage is the press-fire-then-ice class. That’s it.

If you don’t like it, please unsubscribe. Better yet, please liquidate The Balance Discord and all associated publications. This game belongs to the people.

People who spent enough time on the job and got good with it did mechanics even with the timer. Every class in the game is nobodies class. If you hate the balance sure by all means

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7.2 BLM Praise Thread