Removing elemental nukes from WHM

[fusional]

I am wrong then about the damage types then, but don't all melees also have combos that ingore defense from certain positions?

no, and even if they did it's hardly the same. spell cooldowns are ~8-15 seconds. WS cooldowns are 30/45/60/80. and even more troublesome is the fact that a combo action which ignores defense requires a combo in the first place, which means 1-2 actions preceding it which are dampened by the melee defense. and then what do you do in the downtime, be useless?

I mentioned before that when I talk about fire/ice spells I refer to Fire/Fira/Firaga and Blizzard/Blizzara. They are the useless spells, along with flare. Freeze is really only good for it's enmity drop, but it's damage is great. How many times do I have to repeat myself on this?

but seriously, on what planet are you calling fire spells useless? fire spells are the primary reason BLM is capable of 170 dps on MM, and the primary reason why they tend to thrash every other job in burst aoe situations (ie: av/cc trash). freeze is primarily for the enmity drop, yes, but the damage-to-mp ratio was so nice that it should be factored into an optimal rotation regardless.

Do you spam blizzard/blizzara on Gardua?

no, but blizzard is perfectly fine to use as filler if thunder and thundara are on cooldown. as i've said multiple times now- dps comes from your rotation, and optimal rotations maximize actions per minute. that means limiting any dead space whatsoever. you should never not be doing something.

Do you spam only fire spells on Miser?

nope, but it's the bulk of your damage for sure.

Do a parse on their weaknesses, i bet they won't be nearly as good as using Thunder combo

then why would monk use fist of fire rather than fists of wind? if fire isn't a weakness, then monk would stand more to gain from reduced WS cooldowns. but this isn't the case. *the entire reason* monk performs so well on mistress is because of fire. and why are you telling me to parse? are you forgetting who you're talking to? do you think our blms get 170 dps on MM from using thunder line? maybe i was unclear or for whatever reason you felt i was implying this was the case, but i suppose i assumed it was fairly obvious that MM is *very* weak to fire and that's why BLM and MNK destroy her.

And when you run into a mob that has lightning resistance what would you do, you would still use a black mage when it's not optimal?

that depends on what kind of damage it can do with fire, like with mistress. it also depends on secondary and tertiary functions such as aoe requirements (as blm was the strongest on-demand aoe class due to lower cooldowns and lack of TP- though this may change in 2.0) and sleep duty. if fire rotation does less than stellar boss dps *and either* aoe isn't necessary or sleep isn't necessary, then no, you generally don't bring BLM. and the weird thing about that is, there were next to no situations like that in 1.0.

Did you have the black mage use lightning on the basilisk in the in the drg af fight while the paladin/warrior kited the drg boss. Or spam thunder on the rock golem in skirmish?

you got me there. i don't remember and i don't care, because that content isn't endgame and is therefore trivial to us. that doesn't mean BLM sucks in any of those situations for whatever reasons, it just means we never did it or paid much attention to it so we can't really give you a definitive answer.

Blm is a situational powerhouse. I want it to be more than that.

but again, it's strong in *most* situations and strongest in some. that's already more than we can say for warrior, monk and dragoon- which have to be swapped out from fight to fight either for each other or for more BLMs.

I want to be able to go to every situation as a black mage

in 1.0, you pretty much could without exception. however,

but until 2.0 comes we won't truly know what lies in store for end-game black mage.

Let's say the spells stay exactly the same right now. I will take your word on your miser fight, if you take my word on this

If the spells work exactly the same, and ramuh or titan come out, are you really gonna bring a black mage to that fight, if their main way of dpsing is negated?

you do have a point in that we don't know how 2.0 will play out. especially now since dps will have a short global cooldown rather than a mix of longer cooldowns (which i personally am not a fan of, as on the surface it seems to discourage skillful play) plus start with TP rather than needing to build it up. one of the biggest reasons BLM was always the aoe powerhouse in av/cc was because melee just didn't have the ability to keep TP in between pulls to have aoe ws ready all the time. BLM had aoe on demand. it will be interesting to see how that's impacted in 2.0

as far as the miser fight, you don't need to take my word for it. i posted proof.

if spells work the same, BLM would almost categorically suck against ramuh, absolutely. as far as titan, it's difficult to say- but i think it would be far more reasonable to assume he'd just have really high melee defense. but one thing you're failing to consider here is how the devs, as 1.0 went along, progressively learned to better balance job roles in groups.

while you can argue that, in practice, garuda and ifrit extreme didn't quite execute there- we can see the intention was clearly present.

with garuda, one sister resisted physical damage and the other resisted magical damage, so you needed forms of both. no stacking. garuda herself had pretty low magic defense, but her plumes were highly magic resistant. with ifrit extreme, BLM wrecks him... but you can't just stack BLM because you have to deal with nails, plus the fight is so movement-heavy that it can be hard to stand still long enough to get back MP. you also can't just stack only one melee class because you need to have jobs/classes present which can knock off both of his horns.

in practice, garuda could still be melee burned with monks and dragoons, or even *just* monks if you were good at managing fists. but most people primarily just used blms and had bards handle plumes. and ifrit extreme *almost* delegitimized BLM to the point of not being used at all. only the most skillful teams could execute a strategy which included a BLM. so they just barely missed the balancing mark there.

but darnus hard was a culmination of their efforts. darnus himself was strong-ish to magic but you had to deal with meteors and BLM wrecked them (bard sort of worked the same way, but you didn't need more than 1 of them). golems were strong to everything but wind, so you either needed a monk with fists of wind or a nuking whm to aerora them down. and dragoon destroyed darnus in single-target damage.

and while it's possible they could forget what they learned in 1.0, could just barely fail in execution again, or just regress a bit under the new engine until they can get back into the swing of things- the pattern we can see from av/cc through the end of 1.0 is that devs learned the community wants job variety for encounters. and since they know the community doesn't want to stack one job for every fight, and actively tried to design fights around that toward the end, i'm at least mostly confident they will continue along this path in 2.0

...especially since we're getting 24 man raids, and it will be extremely awful if they can't find a way to design the fights in a way which encourages us to bring *all jobs* to the fray.

in the end, while it's possible BLM could be lost in the fold- i doubt it, and it would only be temporary anyway. you can guarantee they'd rebalance to make sure BLM is still a coveted job.

[KoujiGeki]

The spell skill set wont be the same in 2.0 has alrdy been stated, also we wont be limited to 15/20 skills anymore so they can add single target spells for every element for blm and 1 Aoe option as well. People need to stop acting like 2.0 is gonna be the same as 1.0 they are not revising the battle system for the 100th time for no reason.

ya they did say that there wont be the 15 limit in 2.0. but they havent said that the would rework the spells at all. and thats one of the main concerns are for Thunder Mage. If the 2 other spells they had were both good dmg and mp efficient i would bet you money a thread like this would exist. Its out of fear that when titan and ramuh come along that Thunder Mage is going to be useless for those fight. If the Ice and Fire lines where like Thunder, Thunder Mages wouldnt even care that whm has Aero Water and Earth. And people cant get to mad at Blms from 11 if they lived through the days of ToAU when birds mimic magic, and Blm got no pt invites which would be like The Nam flashbacks lol.

[whoopeeragon]

ya they did say that there wont be the 15 limit in 2.0. but they havent said that the would rework the spells at all. and thats one of the main concerns are for Thunder Mage. If the 2 other spells they had were both good dmg and mp efficient i would bet you money a thread like this would exist. Its out of fear that when titan and ramuh come along that Thunder Mage is going to be useless for those fight. If the Ice and Fire lines where like Thunder, Thunder Mages wouldnt even care that whm has Aero Water and Earth. And people cant get to mad at Blms from 11 if they lived through the days of ToAU when birds mimic magic, and Blm got no pt invites which would be like The Nam flashbacks lol.

Actually, while it hasn't been said, you can watch the video of the alpha footage about quests, and look at the CNJ's set. Stone has already been reworked - it's a DMG onry spell now, no more magic evasion down debuff. CNJs have new spells (Water shown), not to mention the GCD will also affect everything, so there has to be a rework of spells.

Also, I don't see a need where BLM needs to be useful in everything. DRGs and MNKs get shafted enough from content in 1.0 - why does BLM have to be the special child? And why do you need to bring up XI's BLM? I have yet to see more than one type of fight exclude BLM on a regular basis (IE) so your point about no pt invites is redundant in XIV's context. As a response to JG's comment on the DRG AF final fight - yes, Thunder was god awful on the drake. However, you neglected the one true enemy of that fight - the DRG boss. And the golem boss in skirmish was just ONE BOSS in what...5 or 6? Don't tell me that BLMs were useless in the other bosses either, because that is plain bull.

[fusional]

why does BLM have to be the special child?

because they play it

And why do you need to bring up XI's BLM?

because they played it

[KoujiGeki]

well to be honest idc for Thunder Mage, i only play it cause of the lack of options for mages. Now that Summoner is coming out im whatever about it. I do agree that thunder mage is a poorly designed job and hopefully its spells are fixed in 2.0.

[fusional]

i still don't understand why you use the word "fixed" when there's nothing broken about them. they work just fine. more than fine. and in fact, the job is designed pretty well for its function, which it executes admirably in more situations than any other DPS did in 1.0

but you guys confuse your personal preference with something being fundamentally wrong with the job, which is completely wrong.

[Pebe]

I'm really late to this this discussion, and only a read a few pages so this might have already been mentioned but... here goes nothing.

I think it is okay for conjurer to keep the elemental nukes it has. Conjurer is not white mage, conjurer is a user of the nature based elements. That being said I highly anticipate they will add a second job to conjurer down the lane called Sage or something that is a master of the nature based nukes. They will probably get Flood, Quake and Tornado. As well as some other interesting nature based spells. I don't see anything wrong with this imo. Having just one magic DD that does everything is boring. Its more fun when you have a variety of different jobs useful in different situations. For instance if you were fighting titan (water still beats earth right? such a weird elemental wheel.....) you might want to take a sage as your DPS instead of a blm, and I see nothing wrong with that. With the class/job system FFXIV encourages the leveling of multiple jobs, you could just limit yourself to one, but why not level both nukers and switch to the one that is better for the occasion. I think it will add variety and longevity to the game. Also, no one knows how blm has been changed yet. I honestly hope they fixed the blizzard elements and added Blizzaga. We'll have to wait to Beta Phase 2 to see that I believe.

Edit: Also while I'm here, the whole archer bard thing. I think they will probably job add a ranger job quest line to archer with new ranger abilities. Some people well say then brd and ranger won't be that different because they have the same class skillset. But I counter with we have no idea how many abilities jobs are getting or how the job system changed so I think it will work.

Also, bards do have instruments for those who were saying otherwise. Their bows turn into harps, hopefully we'll see more of this. Actually hopefully these harpbows become brd's main choice of bow with special song effects with Artemis Bow being the best until endgame weapons come out. I remember SE saying that when bards sing songs their bows will turn into harp form for 2.0, should be interesting to watch.

[Firon]

ya they did say that there wont be the 15 limit in 2.0. but they havent said that the would rework the spells at all. and thats one of the main concerns are for Thunder Mage. If the 2 other spells they had were both good dmg and mp efficient i would bet you money a thread like this would exist. Its out of fear that when titan and ramuh come along that Thunder Mage is going to be useless for those fight. If the Ice and Fire lines where like Thunder, Thunder Mages wouldnt even care that whm has Aero Water and Earth. And people cant get to mad at Blms from 11 if they lived through the days of ToAU when birds mimic magic, and Blm got no pt invites which would be like The Nam flashbacks lol.

The road map clearly stated class balance and tweaks that's all that needed to be said. Also they said the stuff we had 1.0 was mostly filler.

[Alhanelem]

well to be honest idc for Thunder Mage, i only play it cause of the lack of options for mages. Now that Summoner is coming out im whatever about it. I do agree that thunder mage is a poorly designed job and hopefully its spells are fixed in 2.0.

If you're calling it Thunder Mage, then you're playing it wrong.