Dawntrail BLM | I'm so tired

[Supersnow845]

The reason I'm c/hoping it will be closer to monk with a full expansion rework than paladin is that enochian and greased lightning occupied the same sort of design concept among the several spinning plates they had pre rework. I'd like to believe the dps would be given more flesh later down the line, but we all know about summoner. Can't do anything but wait and see - it doesn't yet feel finished to me, but again summoner.

I mean even MNK’s (admittedly very good) proper rework it got in 6.0 only lasted till 7.0. Who’s to say that they won’t give BLM a good 6.0 MNK style rework only to lobotomise it again in 9.0.

Sure that’s a long way down the line and I doubt I’ll be playing by then but MNK was really the only bright spot in the rework space since 5.0 (PLD I feel like it has arguments either way, I fall on the side of preferring old PLD but it’s one of the few reworks I can see legit arguments for why new is better) and they somehow still ruined it in 7.0

[Komaru_Tatoro]

I keep seeing the argument the watering down of Jobs is to draw in more new players... I do not see it, In the past if I saw anything about FF14 it talked about how amazing the story is if I go now on forums or reviews a majority of them talk about how bad the current state of gameplay is, so I doubt that this will draw in new players.
Meanwhile old loyal players they already had feel now betrayed for there jobs getting gutted in order to appeal to potential illusive new player that may or may not stay.

All this do´s is boost player counts in the short term while sacrificing long term sustainability.
I for one will now renew my playtime and have given up on the game since the Dves made clear they Ignore the EN Forums while getting a very moderated view of the JP ones.

Generally its the word of mouth and story that attracts new player. As for these new player picking a job, usually its base of from aesthetic and then once they play the job, its how their game play. It's about retaining new players once they try out the job.
Hard rotation tend to sway away players that cant handle complexity.

Sadly, there's just way too many jobs to balance now. So when fight design are made, sometime some jobs (job's specific skills that dont jive with mechanic, eg rdm can't do 2min burst because its consider as range and mechanic happen to have range resolve their mechanic from afar etc) are overlooked when mechanics are made in mind for the basic party comp (4 melee [tank/melee dps] + 4 range [healer/range dps]).

The issue with old loyal player is that blm players are much less compare to other jobs. thus probably the dev would like to take the risk to evolve the job to be more new player friendly while hoping the old loyal blm player stays. (didn't happen the way they wanted at 7.0 launch...)

Flare star has become a really nice feeling attack and I think it could potentially be a good compromise for the faster cast times.
Instead of long casts I actually like us “supercharging” a strong attack and personally would like more of it through the ice phase which I was forever annoyed at how unwanted it was.
For instance, imagine ice phase actually charging up flare for aoes or the ability to overcharge thunder in some form.
I think that could be nice for BLM and give it back the feeling of power and skill expression.

I was really disappointed with the changes but I am surprised myself at how little I miss the timer honestly.
The problem is really mostly that the sceiling of the job is at the bottom right now imo.

I like that idea of "supercharging". We all know in a blm rotation, we dont really like the ice phase because how weak it is. the introduction of xeno then ice paradox made the ice phase a little better to digest. but then they made the big mp gain base of from casting ice spell instead of ui and timer; it then forces the rotation to retain atleast 2 ice spell to regen all 10k mp.
I hope they can expand on your supercharge idea, and perhaps give us like a upgraded bliz3 (BlizStar??) after using up 6 umbral hearts or the likes. thus atleast every 3rd ice phase, the bliz3 is souped up to be more powerful and more satisfying to use.

[TheInsomniac13]

As it stands right now the game do´s not feel like you are playing it anymore. Boss Health is just a timer which ticks down, tracking how long you have to play his pattern of Dance Dance revolution till the "fight" ends.
Rotations are pitifully simple, the only reactionary decision making left in the game is for a Healer if you have party members that bath in every single mechanic for the lols and when I started out this game, I thought it rather simple but saw potential on how dungeon and boss encounters could evolve but sadly while progressing though the expansions I had to learn that the game went the exact oposed direction.

Insted of giving dungeons and encounters interesting twists it´s the same over and over again. For mobs pull wall to wall and burn them down all at once. For Boss keep pressing your dedicated buttons and play it´s DDR.

[Komaru_Tatoro]

dungeon's mob killing hasnt been much other than tank and spank since ARR. atleast the dev are making dungeon boss battle more interesting again.

right now, the only gameplay or battle content that can give you more things/mechanic to do is extremes and savage/ultimates raids. the ones that actually push you to use your tools and also play as the f4 blm since HW. which is to have better fight knowledge and plan your abilities around certain mechanics.

when they removed the rngness of th/f3 proc and now ui/af timer, i thought it would be some rigid spreadsheet rotation like mch would be. but the need to still 2s cast time and the occasional LL with certain boss savage mech have rng, it can really make every fight against the same boss feel different. in addition, blm loves sps and sps varies from person to person's preference. (mch want 2.5 because of abilities drifts etc) so thing does change up differently since gcd effect the overall timing of when your rotation lands on what the boss mechanic is doing.

[Taranok]

While I disagree with what you said about timers, Personally I'm someone who liked the timer but can live without it my main issue was always the casting time changes, but I still kinda liked the timer.

But I do agree that cast bars being lost on Casters is a major issue, I feel as if fight design is unironically killing all and any interesting aspects about job design in general, but you can see the problem tenfold with casters as it becomes apparent that removing cast times (the thing that separates them from phys ranged) is being done for the sake of fight design. This is ontop of other aspects such as job design in general becoming more blander. To me black mage was most fun re-learning fights because of its cast times, added actual replay value to me.

This results in gameplay where only dodge the mech and learn the mech becomes important and jobs feel superficial.

The problem is mostly that the timers flat limit job design. Want to interject a giant ad hoc thunder combo? Well, 15 seconds of timer and it's gone, so you can't divert for more than 6 seconds at best. Want to teach people how to play the job? Really hard to when the rotation is derived by timers. There's an obvious intended way even amongst timer enjoyers, but you especially can't teach nonstandard lines because it's very much not intended to bypass intended class features such as blizzard 4 to short-cycle the AF phase. "The class has all the movement it needs with nonstandard lines!" If it needed nonstandard to function, it was already pretty broken and people were just willfully ignoring its major flaws.

But as other posters have said, the class is in a limbo state. It is very much 5.4 monk, the class feels hollow without both timers and cast bars. While the timers, to me, can be demonstrated to hurt the class, alongside a ton of bloat built up to enable the timer-based structure, it was a major distraction of the class. While I always wanted timers gone, I knew the class needed new structure to shore it up afterwards because the class was always a pretty simple job. Its difficulty came from the skill cliff that was timers at the low end (and in mid-ShB, high-end,) and at the high end from the Always Be Casting aspect. Well, it's easy to cast. Not necessarily fun, but easy.

Unfortunately, the devs don't believe in actual class design anymore. BLM will survive without timers. Casters won't survive in EW/DT fight design. Given enough time, ley lines will be removed, starry sky will be removed, and if they don't add PVP's cast-on-the-move, I'd be absolutely shocked. Because they're trying to pivot the game from the gameplay that made it successful -- that is slow, methodical gameplay with thoughtful movement and rotations to a GW2/WoW/TERA/etc-styled gameplay where it's extremely reactionary, high-paced, adrenaline pumping (well, as much as a tab-target MMO can be.) And they're sacrificing job design to do it.

Summoner was the first red flag when they turned it into rphys. The second was Tower of Zot's massive mechanics vomit high-movement dungeon design, followed by literally every single EW fight. Every last one. PCT launching as closer to SMN than BLM was the third major red flag, because it's clear the devs don't want cast bars when the 3 newest casters in terms of launch and reworks are all extremely mobile.

This major gameplay shift will alienate every single possible caster main who loved the old style, and the new style will be defended by everyone else because no one wants old style anymore. Hell, you can ask people on 220 ping that they love the new fights, and then quip: "I won't play caster with it." Well gee, that's kind of the problem, isn't it?!

There's other problems, like the netcode not functioning at even 50 ping in a fight like m5s, and so on and so forth. But this massive style shift is sinking the game. It's just not fun doing 'Everyone does the same thing' mechanics when they're so limited in design that the only way to make them challenging is to break class design and the game itself.

I miss stormblood. I'd even take every DT fight being a rehash of stormblood and force-resetting every single job in the game to stormblood's design, even the stupid tank stance, the idiotic timers, and MCH's nigh-dead design, if it meant having good gameplay again.

[Rithy255]

I mean even MNK’s (admittedly very good) proper rework it got in 6.0 only lasted till 7.0. Who’s to say that they won’t give BLM a good 6.0 MNK style rework only to lobotomise it again in 9.0.

Sure that’s a long way down the line and I doubt I’ll be playing by then but MNK was really the only bright spot in the rework space since 5.0 (PLD I feel like it has arguments either way, I fall on the side of preferring old PLD but it’s one of the few reworks I can see legit arguments for why new is better) and they somehow still ruined it in 7.0

The only good thing about the paladin rework as having divine veil just be more functional and bulwark, sheltron changes (though i visually miss pressing it and seeing my character block you only get that with random/bulwark now). All the other "rework" changes felt like a spit in the face as someone who's stuck by the job.

They didn't even try to make goring blade a "interesting button" I can understand maybe making it less strict but changing it into a Generic 60s burst button when we have magic attacks for burst made no sense other then they were lazy and didn't care about how old paladin players feel. Goring blade and atonement used to compliment each other as skills as atonement felt nicer when it wasn't as spammy (At least to me), they've tried to fix that with adding a few visual differences but honestly the new sword attack animations look outright bad and unfitting, atonement felt satisfying.

Fight or flight is a Pointless cooldown, the entire point in having both FOF and Req was that they were separate bursts, you might as well merge both at this point the only reason its not is because they got to keep the illusion it's still there!

[Sylvain]

I mean, tbh I really enjoy the 7.2 BLM
I LOVED ShB and EW BLM.

However DT BLM was really the worst. Sure movement wasn't an issue anymore with so many instant but god forbide, with so many xeno, the new thunder and instant paradox and our new shiny lv100, it really felt like I was just juggling with timers rather than "cast uptime + encohian". For the first time, it wasn't fun.

For this tier tho I went back to BLM and tbh, I'm having fun. Sure, no more enochian/timer and it IS easier (no denying). But it just feels better. I think there's still plenty to optimise with transpose B3 requiring an instant (thus applying pressure on 3cast/SC, altough I'm positive this will be "fixed") and Xeno hoarding for burst phase (if there's some raid buff). Maybe (surely?) it has to do with the faster pace of the recent savage tier. I don't think 7.1 BLM would have been an enjoyable pick (to me at meast). M5S has 2 interupt which, as of 7.1, would have been REALLY annoying. M6S has jumps and the add phase etc.

However I agree that the state of AoE is just outrageous.

[Absurdity]

However DT BLM was really the worst. Sure movement wasn't an issue anymore with so many instant but god forbide, with so many xeno, the new thunder and instant paradox and our new shiny lv100, it really felt like I was just juggling with timers rather than "cast uptime + encohian". For the first time, it wasn't fun.

Let me put my tinfoil hat on for a second.
Dawntrail Blackmage felt like a thinly disguised attempt to make everyone hate the job, to soften the backlash of completely changing how it functions. The job design in this game has been a mess for a while but they managed to mess up every single good aspect of Endwalker BLM with 7.0, felt too intentional even for them.

[Carighan]

Let me put my tinfoil hat on for a second.
Dawntrail Blackmage felt like a thinly disguised attempt to make everyone hate the job, to soften the backlash of completely changing how it functions. The job design in this game has been a mess for a while but they managed to mess up every single good aspect of Endwalker BLM with 7.0, felt too intentional even for them.

This reasoning violates Hanlon's Razor, however.

[Absurdity]

This reasoning violates Hanlon's Razor, however.

That's why I said "even for them", usually I just attribute terrible decisions in job design to them just having no clue.