Black Mage skills - What are they good for?

[Inuakurei]

I love Black Mage, but I feel that the skills a BLM gets simply don't live up to what a Black Mage is supposed to be.

Black Mage really adds nothing to the THM class. If you look at other classes, like say Warrior, the Marauder class acts as a base with a little bit of damage and some tankyness and the Warrior job adds on the enmitty / sustain / and extra tankyness to take the base class of Marauder and shift the class into a tank direction.

All of the other classes / Job combinations in the game work this way. Even Conjurer has a good bit of damage, heals, and CC with White Mage taking the healing part of the class and adding to that.

Black mage is the only one that seems really out of place. THM seems to have everything it needs in it's class while the job of Black Mage adds very little. Even the skills you do get from Black Mage seem very random and lack a focus. The skills gained from other class's job extensions all focus on something from the base class and enhance it (conjures healing, marauder's hp and enmitty, arcanist's pet healing, ect.) the Black Mage job doesn't focus on anything from the THM class. It seems like a bunch of random things thrown together. Let's take a look at the skills.

Convert: Near useless unless you mess up your rotation and end up with not enough mp to cast BlizIII. Could be used after a Flare but with a 3 minute cooldown on a class that already restores it's own mana incredibly fast makes its near useless.

Freeze: Another situational spell. Low damage, high casting time, and binds. Kind of moot when we already have an aoe sleep spell. Very situational but it does go along with the ice spell's theme of slows/binds so I can't hate on it too much.

Apocastasis: The only use I've found for this is to cast on a party member right before a primal ultimate attack, which is kind of moot since the attack shouldn't kill you if you've done the fight correctly anyway. Useless.

Manawall: Again mostly useless as you won't be getting hit much anyway. Seems like a pvp skill but why give it to BLM? Why not just put it on THM and give BLM something more damage dealing focused? Also I'd like to point out that this skill does not block red circle attacks, or at least not the ones I've tested it on.

Flare: A complete letdown. Costs all your mana and does barely more damage than a Fire III. It is aoe but for costing all your mana it just isn't worth it unless it will hit more than 3 targets, otherwise a faster BlizzIII > FireIII > Fire will do more damage. It also has a minimum mp cost of around 300mp meaning it can be used at the end of a rotation as a finisher, but considering you'll need to use Swiftcast to make it worth using, and it reduces your mp to 0 making Transpose or Convert the only ways to regain mana afterwards it just doesn't make it worth using. It could make a good combo with Convert if Convert didn't have a ludicrously long cooldown.

Also because of the way THM is set up (lots of damage in the base class with little else) the class is pretty much locked into a heavy DD field. No matter what job THM turns into, it will still always have Fire 1-2-3, Umbral/Astral 1-2-3, Thundercloud, and Firestarter. This poses a potential problem when a second job is eventually added to the THM class as the BLM class could be phased out completely.

IMO, it would have been a better idea to move one (or two) of THM's big DD passives into Black Mage. Firestarter for example would have been a good trait to have as a Black Mage only (after casting fire there is a 40% chance of your next fireIII spell costing no mana, and having no cast time). That would have moved a lot of the classes damage to Black Mage and identified Black Mage as THM's heavy magic damage job branch, leaving the THM class with different ways to branch off.

Alternatively moving the 3rd stack of umbral / astral to Black Mage would work as well, or even just giving Black Mage access to a 4th stack would be nice.

As it stands currently Black Mage adds nothing to THM that THM can't do on it's own. Aside from the stat increase and job specific gear there isn't much reason to roll as a Black Mage over a THM in most cases.

[Denkish]

While I completly agree on your analysis, All the BLM skills are useless and doesn't rfeel rewarding at all to gain new skills you just want 50 so you can get better GEAR. But don't forget that BLM is still a pretty kickass class. We have awesome aoe, we have slow, we have sick mp regen, we have sick singular damage, and we have aoe sleep. I mostly use convert and teleport thingy. Convert can be good when you need to sleep asap and it doesnt really fit your rotation so you go oom, and teleport is nice for getting out of red circles. Even if our job didn't make us superior in any way, we're still aweome.

[-Snow]

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IMO, it would have been a better idea to move one (or two) of THM's big DD passives into Black Mage. Firestarter for example would have been a good trait to have as a Black Mage only (after casting fire there is a 40% chance of your next fireIII spell costing no mana, and having no cast time). That would have moved a lot of the classes damage to Black Mage and identified Black Mage as THM's heavy magic damage job branch, leaving the THM class with different ways to branch off.

Alternatively moving the 3rd stack of umbral / astral to Black Mage would work as well, or even just giving Black Mage access to a 4th stack would be nice.
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That would be a way to solve this problem, but are you sure it really would be an solution ?

We would only switch some spells here and there, but in the ende it would be the same as we have now. We wouldn't even notice the change until we read it in the patch notes.

It sounds like a way to solve this, but it feels wrong.