Dawntrail BLM | I'm so tired

[PyurBlue]

my point is, while rotation can be made easy, as long the dev make the add phase more engaging like m6s add, its fine.

some ppl may say m1-4s was so easy but you cant disargee that fact it is easy, it brought more players into trying it. thus as analogy, making 2target aoe abilities homogenize can reduce the friction for having more fun add phase fight with more things going on.

While a reduction in difficulty may result in increased player count, at least initially, it doesn't improve any part of my gameplay experience. I've never cared how many other people play BLM, I played it because it was fun. Trading the fun for more players isn't a gain.

What you said on class engagement vs encounter engagement is true to an extent. Though BLM was already a simple class in the first place and it feels less like it was adjusted for the sake of encounters and more like it was sanded down to remove the class engagement entirely.

People are going to have different opinions of course and that's fine. What isn't fine is upsetting one group to please another. Maybe what SE needs to consider is a wider array of content instead of trying to generalize everything.

[Shyxx]

Why should every job have a lot of players? It's more important that there is something for everyone, whether it's easy or hard. It doesn't matter if easier jobs get played more, in WoW BM hunter and retribution paladin are the easiest and most played specs and no one cares. They also do the same damage as every other spec and no one cares, there is no "difficulty tax" like in FFXIV. Their insistence of every job having the same amount of players leads to job homogenization, neutering of jobs and imbalance in job performance (they are afraid everyone would play the "easier" jobs if they did the same damage as "harder" jobs which is of course not true).

[meie]

So many reactionary changes over all these DT patches and avoidance to address things like aoe rotation and weird leveling rotations because f1 is not needed anymore between getting f4 and paradox, shows just how they have no vision for the class. They just change things to make the class work with the next high end encounter and the only answer is simplification. That being said m1s-4s was a joke and EW blm would have had no issues(source:gutfeeling). What is left feels like a fever dream. Cant wait to play the mobile version of Endwalker BLM in 10 years again, until this or some major changes from the ground up, I'm out.

[Komaru_Tatoro]

you got to understand, as a game dev they want more ppl to play the game for the games health/population.

battle design are evolving. what use to be more stationary now evolved to more movement. like every expansion since sb, blm while remained same rotation, new spells/abilites were added to provide some sort of mobile. for was it shb or ew where ppl start saying blm has even better mobility than rdm restrictive dualcast.

as combat/battle evolve, so are many jobs will eventually too. as much as i do want to get back the old hw/sb kinda gameplay, it pretty hard for the general playerbase to wrap their head around that kind of skill rotation.

while making the job easier wont improve your gameplay experience, it will incentive new player to try it out.

having a job that has high skill cieling would mean theres a big disparity between a vet and a new blm (or any other job) player.
when theres disparity, it will feed into meta and dps balancing for fights. you will see jobs gets bar from joining x fight.

thus why the dev have to maintain a healthy job balance to enable every job are viable for x fight. which some what relate to the game population health.

sadly of course no all changes are well thought out. looking at 7.0 launch blm and similar case in the past for other jobs that gets rework/change shortly.

[Supersnow845]

It will incentivise new players “to try it out” being the key words here.

All these reworks do is hollow out the core playerbase to temporarily bring in new players till they move to the next shiny thing and nobody sticks with a job

The current surge of BLM players were 7.0 PCT mains who were 6.0 SMN mains, now SMN is in the garbage and PCT’s crashing hard

How long will BLM’s popularity remain

[Absurdity]

you got to understand, as a game dev they want more ppl to play the game for the games health/population.

That's questionable to begin with.
Sure their intention might be to get more people to play the game and the stream of constant new players they have been relying on has been drying up.

But do these changes actually bring in new people? Or do they just get already existing players to maybe try out the reworked job, achieving nothing but shuffling numbers around and making a different one the "unpopular" job?

[Shyxx]

That's questionable to begin with.
Sure their intention might be to get more people to play the game and the stream of constant new players they have been relying on has been drying up.

But do these changes actually bring in new people? Or do they just get already existing players to maybe try out the reworked job, achieving nothing but shuffling numbers around and making a different one the "unpopular" job?

If anything it makes players quit because their favourite job got destroyed

[meie]

If they wanted to make BLM better for new players, they should start with the leveling experience and stop wasting new players time by making them learn new rotations every 10 levels. But instead, they seem to only care about how the class performs in the next big encounter.

Other classes get their basic 1-2-3 rotation pretty early on, while BLM is constantly changing. Like I mentioned before, this got even worse after DT for example, F1 is basically useless between levels 60–89, and the AoE rotation totally changes at level 100. They might say they're doing things for reason XYZ, but that does not mean its true.

Their unwillingness to adjust Pictos for an entire Savage/Ultimate tier has already caused casters aside from Picto to be excluded from many pf's.

And beyond class design, the entire game revolves around niche content most players don't touch. You just do whatever interests you and can still have a good time.

Aside from BLM having a reputation for being the hardest job, I don’t recall it ever being played less than other classes.

[Mecia]

you got to understand, as a game dev they want more ppl to play the game for the games health/population.

Player numbers were going up and retained even before the ShB blowout though. You know, when jobs had more depth. I dont think a potential buyer is looking up how jobs work before buying. MSQ marketing is what sells, a variety of content is what retains.

Taking Rebecca Ford (DE director) as an example, she picked BLM and stuck with it despite struggling to ABC because she liked the aesthetics. But that was obviously secondary to what she got out of the casual side of the game.

Is there any data on job simplifications being a positive on player numbers or is it just job shuffling as Supersnow845 has pointed out many times. Theres been less and less jobs i want to play and if it wasnt for BRD i would probably unsub.

[mallleable]

A couple of harsh truths about Black Mage: one, the core loop of BLM has always been spam fire until out of MP, refresh MP with ice. The recent changes didn't create this loop, they just brought it into focus. It has always been simple. And two, hitting reset on the job was warranted. Fight design getting faster, pictomancer, dwindling play rates, and the advent of the cast-less rotation, all of this was happening at the same time. It wasn't just one thing. Something had to give.