I feel most of the 7.0 BLM changes are targeted at the most passionate and skilled players of the job, but not in a good way.
I'm a newer (serious) BLM player. I started studying nonstandard lines a few months ago and was having so much fun on the job even in casual content. Proper incorporation of nonstandard lines was delightfully challenging in a way no other job was. Yet the developers apparently found it unacceptable that people weren't 100% following the prescribed rotation they intended for us, and so they made every effort to kill those options as thoroughly as possible, seemingly without regard for how the job feels to play or how much people enjoyed it.
Able to gain damage skipping ice spells because passive MP regen gave us just enough mana to turn that into a damage gain? Okay, make casting ice spells the only viable way to recover MP.
UI Paradox, a staple of nonstandard lines, should logically count as an ice spell in this regard because it increases UI stacks when cast? Okay, get rid of it, even though the entire concept of the spell revolves around being able to use it in both Fire and Ice phases.
There's nothing stopping people from doing short Fire phases anyways? Okay, add a new gauge whose only purpose is to punish players when they don't cast 6x F4's in a single Fire phase. Oh, and give them a pity 100% Firestarter proc because they're probably gonna need it just to keep their rotation from going into a fail state while they're trying to avoid eating dirt in fights that require a lot of movement.
This has resulted in a very strict, very gross-feeling BLM that is incompatible with modern FFXIV fight design. Nonstandard wasn't just for raw potency-per-second increases. It was a valuable tool that could help Black Mage fit its immobility requirements around the timeline of a complicated fight. The absence of this flexibility is sorely felt in pretty much all mechanic-heavy scenarios.
I've been in duties with people who spam ice spells only, spam F3 the entire AF phase, alternate F3 and B3, and all sorts of other unobjectively wrong ways to play BLM. Why is their "playstyle" acceptable, but nonstandard is not?
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I'm a newer (serious) BLM player. I started studying nonstandard lines a few months ago and was having so much fun on the job even in casual content. Proper incorporation of nonstandard lines was delightfully challenging in a way no other job was. Yet the developers apparently found it unacceptable that people weren't 100% following the prescribed rotation they intended for us, and so they made every effort to kill those options as thoroughly as possible, seemingly without regard for how the job feels to play or how much people enjoyed it.
Able to gain damage skipping ice spells because passive MP regen gave us just enough mana to turn that into a damage gain? Okay, make casting ice spells the only viable way to recover MP.
UI Paradox, a staple of nonstandard lines, should logically count as an ice spell in this regard because it increases UI stacks when cast? Okay, get rid of it, even though the entire concept of the spell revolves around being able to use it in both Fire and Ice phases.
There's nothing stopping people from doing short Fire phases anyways? Okay, add a new gauge whose only purpose is to punish players when they don't cast 6x F4's in a single Fire phase. Oh, and give them a pity 100% Firestarter proc because they're probably gonna need it just to keep their rotation from going into a fail state while they're trying to avoid eating dirt in fights that require a lot of movement.
This has resulted in a very strict, very gross-feeling BLM that is incompatible with modern FFXIV fight design. Nonstandard wasn't just for raw potency-per-second increases. It was a valuable tool that could help Black Mage fit its immobility requirements around the timeline of a complicated fight. The absence of this flexibility is sorely felt in pretty much all mechanic-heavy scenarios.
I've been in duties with people who spam ice spells only, spam F3 the entire AF phase, alternate F3 and B3, and all sorts of other unobjectively wrong ways to play BLM. Why is their "playstyle" acceptable, but nonstandard is not?
Continue reading...