1/5
I want to share my thoughts after trying out black mage in the 7.2 patch. It is my (almost exclusive) main job, and I was anxious that the changes to the play style would be detrimental to the feel of the job, which would then negatively affect my experience of the entire game, and now that seems to be so.
Cast times
The job fantasy from Lodestone: "Movement is restricted by casting times, but they excel at inflicting high burst damage." This used to be the core of black mage specifically. The new shorter casts make the "big damage" spells, especially Fire IV, Flare and Flare star feel weaker and less impactful than before now that there's no commitment and anticipation in casting them. There isn't a rhythm between short and long casts anymore, they all just feel the same.
For movement there already was a wide variety of options, even more with updates after 7.0. Using Xenoglossy, Paradox, Despair etc. could amount to a lot of movement already, and when the mechanics required long movements e.g. running across the arena, you could use Triplecast or Swiftcast. You could also make small optimizations to save time on long casts by making them instant even when movement wasn't needed, and it was a choice of "will I need this later?" That planning of using instants for movement was a key point of mastering fights with black mage, and now it's completely gone, since you can slidecast or Paradox out of any AoE. The new normal raids and extreme could be completed without using Triplecast and I could skip uses of it even in the current Ultimate, where I previously had to carefully plan them out to execute mechanics. It feels weird to not really care about your rotation in the hardest difficulty tier in the game.
So far the new battle design has turned out to be just mechanics resolving slightly faster, and likely could've been played with the old kit. Maybe there's something more in the upcoming savage tier, but it's not warranted to rework the job just for that.
Enochian timer
I can understand the thought behind removing of the Enochian timer somewhat, since it does feel bad to drop it if there's forced downtime that you can't anticipate, even though for short stuns it's possible to keep it up by knowing how the fight will play out. But refreshing the timer was otherwise part of the core experience in full uptime fights, since it gave incentive to use different actions – such as refreshing with Paradox instead of casting one more Fire IV. There was good tension in there, like greeding one more fire spell before refreshing, or deicing on the order of using refreshes and movement tools. The timer was a simple system but satisfying to execute the correct action to keep it up and keep the cast bar rolling.
Continue reading...
I want to share my thoughts after trying out black mage in the 7.2 patch. It is my (almost exclusive) main job, and I was anxious that the changes to the play style would be detrimental to the feel of the job, which would then negatively affect my experience of the entire game, and now that seems to be so.
Cast times
The job fantasy from Lodestone: "Movement is restricted by casting times, but they excel at inflicting high burst damage." This used to be the core of black mage specifically. The new shorter casts make the "big damage" spells, especially Fire IV, Flare and Flare star feel weaker and less impactful than before now that there's no commitment and anticipation in casting them. There isn't a rhythm between short and long casts anymore, they all just feel the same.
For movement there already was a wide variety of options, even more with updates after 7.0. Using Xenoglossy, Paradox, Despair etc. could amount to a lot of movement already, and when the mechanics required long movements e.g. running across the arena, you could use Triplecast or Swiftcast. You could also make small optimizations to save time on long casts by making them instant even when movement wasn't needed, and it was a choice of "will I need this later?" That planning of using instants for movement was a key point of mastering fights with black mage, and now it's completely gone, since you can slidecast or Paradox out of any AoE. The new normal raids and extreme could be completed without using Triplecast and I could skip uses of it even in the current Ultimate, where I previously had to carefully plan them out to execute mechanics. It feels weird to not really care about your rotation in the hardest difficulty tier in the game.
So far the new battle design has turned out to be just mechanics resolving slightly faster, and likely could've been played with the old kit. Maybe there's something more in the upcoming savage tier, but it's not warranted to rework the job just for that.
Enochian timer
I can understand the thought behind removing of the Enochian timer somewhat, since it does feel bad to drop it if there's forced downtime that you can't anticipate, even though for short stuns it's possible to keep it up by knowing how the fight will play out. But refreshing the timer was otherwise part of the core experience in full uptime fights, since it gave incentive to use different actions – such as refreshing with Paradox instead of casting one more Fire IV. There was good tension in there, like greeding one more fire spell before refreshing, or deicing on the order of using refreshes and movement tools. The timer was a simple system but satisfying to execute the correct action to keep it up and keep the cast bar rolling.
Continue reading...