Discussion: How To Make BLM More Relevant

hm, guess it wasn't malaise that used to be higher, was it focus languour then? I only remembered something nice got nuked. could swear at some point dunna did -45 and idris was 60. but that wasn't reflected on the page's history, so I'm just imagining it.

Un-nerf Death

Make Meteor castable without using Manafont.

Nerfs to Resolution and Leaden Salute would be a good first step? Some melee WS needs to be toned down and COR needs to be reverted to more of a support job, to be honest.

Stop thinking about single hit numbers, there is a reason melee's kick BLM's ***. It's called Damage Per Second there is a time component involved and this is where BLM needs boosting. BLM free nukes suck ***, end of story. Those need to be boosted and that's why I said to make it tied to TP gain via OA and a 10s timer. Then you can have BLM's tear into stuff without dicking around with waiting on SCH skillchains.

There is a reason we don't BLM burst anymore.

It was Focus, Langour, Vex, Attunment that were fixed. They where supposed to provide integer values and instead someone at SE screwed up and they were providing percentage values. That made them radically more powerful then anything else in the game and we abused the hell out of vex/langour. During that time the NM's had such ridiculous evasion that you had to throw every bit of accuracy just to hit them. SE reduced the NM's evasion scaling and *fixed* the bug in MEVD, while also messing with RDM and BRD to compensate.

To understand, imagine that instead of Idris Precision giving +100 accuracy, it instead gave around +600.

I'm fine with buff stacking being changed by nerfing support potency lol. Honestly I feel ffxi is WAY too support dependant as a mmo...

In a 18 man alliance theres only 4 slot for DD and a 6 man pt has 1 slot for DD, it's certainly very wrong in a way....

While we're at that, make buffs alliance wide instead of party wide.

Maybe 'making BLM more relevant' isn't the best way of wording it. It would be nice seeing blm's perform in more various job setups.

Just had another idea.. What if Skillchains could not be interrupted by weapon skills and only overridden by other Skillchains or when the 7 second window closes. This way if you see a 'darkness skillchain' you can MB even though several weapon skills went off afterwards. I guess this would also be indirectly buffing all skillchain setups because you could time Skillchains so that as soon as the 7 second window is down another skillchain is up meaning keeping a skillchain up for the entire duration of the fight!

Feels like that would be a buff in general. I often think about it, it'd be nice.

Remove cap for MB.

Way to be as condescending as possible. Good to see it's not just the DRG forums you like to talk down to people in. Herp derp, what's DPS??????

If you weren't hitting 4~6k DPS on BLM you were doing it wrong. And if you're trying to say your melee are so much higher than that, you're fibbing. If you're doing a 4-step skillchain, that means you're cycling 65~99k nukes constantly. Even our resisted nukes were above 60k, so even the nuke wall isn't a good excuse for bad DPS.

Right, must be nice where you life.

There is a reason everyone stopped using BLMs.

Why do you have such thin skin? All he did was lay down facts



All you did was just regurgitate what you said earlier... BLM is fen boring while being the slowest way. People want it changed because blm is only really needed for zerde and vagery. W3 is way more fun melee while being faster. BLM is in a terrible spot and cor and rng can do better

I’d bet giving BLM enemies WarpII would spice things up a bit.

The proper change would be to nerf Leaden and TF, but nobody wants that apparently.

Would that actually make BLM relevant again though? Or would it just make pure melee strats even better?

Dear Weeew,

The best way to make BLM relevent for you is to build an LS centered around mages. This way your resources can focus on burn strategies rather than zerg strategies much the same way SMN burn LSes or PET LSes work.

You will still need to adopt tanks although PLDs and RUNs technically are mage jobs. Technically, BLMs can mana wall super tank with the right gear and support.

However, once your LS gets good enough to complete Aeonic clears, your members will want to play melee jobs because the best Aeonic weapons favor melee classes and BRD. Thus, if you do Aeonic clears, you will end-up with people either choosing a BRD weapon or a melee class weapon.

Bear in mind, endgame LS evolution dictates that its members diversify. Thus, even if you intitially start off as an LS that favors BLM strategies, people will get bored and not want to play only WHM, only TANK, only BRD, only GEO, only BLM. This is why you see people arguing about how boring BLM can be versus how amazing BLM can be. Both camps are actually on the same page but at different stages of LS evolution.

For instance, Shozokui tends to deploy his heavy damage DRG during Dreadnaught's Dyna detritus farms and Wave3 clears. However, he is also prepared to come PLD, DRK, WAR, BLM, BRD, WHM, SCH etc. depending on the type of support available at an event. If not enough BRDs are available to favor melee strats, reconfigure alliance to include a combination of melee and mage damage.

Endgame has evolved to the point that it is not enough to be just a BIS melee. Not everyone can come melee even if you have a well-geared, master melee job. Melee is craptastic without the right support. Hence, successful endgame LSes are constantly on the look out for competent WHMs, BRDs and GEOs as veteran members already have BIS melee jobs + mage jobs.

Leaden TF WF would only be the start, a lot of things have to change to bring blm back.

Pure melee strats require more coordination and have more inherent risk, that's why we see people still using BLM strats now(even though RNG/COR are near-universally better).

BLM doesn't need to beat melee to have a place. It can't straight lose to RNG/COR though, because they have the same out of range benefit.

How is this so? I mean a proper blm setup would have rng/cor close sc so these jobs are used but thats still blm setup. In term of kill speed blm doesnt seem inferior.

Someone posted a rng setup done in dec using newest gears and their halphas boss took 8+ min, wave 3 took 17 min. Ive seen blm setup kill halphas in 5 min before may using much older gears, or wave 3 done in 16 min.

They see pretty identical in term of efficency. And blm has the advantage of water element and aoe adds.

Are we really pretending 1 setup of each decides which is better..? It seems pretty much universally accepted that blm has less damage peak than COR/RNG (2 sec cast, 3 sec cooldown = 5 seconds for max 99k and only during SCMB, cor or rng ws every 6-7 sec for 99k fulltime and can make skillchain to as much as double it).

You can still make BLM work, but it's in a worse place than MNK was right now. It's meant to be the magic damage job, and some reason SE allowed COR/RNG to surpass it for that. They even get reduced hate too.

IMO, if balance is goal, magic WS need to be severely reduced or given full enmity for their damage dealt. Otherwise, BLM can't do anything that RNG and COR can't do better.

By dmg peak you mean dmg "ceiling"? Because in real endgame the ceiling you described certainly doesnt happen full time.

This is rng setup done in dec and I dont see none stop 99999 every 6 sec entire time on wave 3 boss. Most of them are 30k to 50k range.



Also in blm setup you have to calculate 1) sch dot 2) free nuke dmg between mb, which many blm commonly do 3) extra dps from cor or rng sc. Add that together blm clear speed doesnt seem worse than rng. Otherwise how would you explain 16 min clears with blm before sept update.

If you ask me, I dont see blm have much slower kill speed than leaden/TF spam in longer fights based on info from videos.

Leaden/TF also doesnt seem to do well on Halphas.

Suckless

Give BLM the Ultima spell and make it good

No new spell is going to change anything...

...unless it's essentially free, does absolutely obscene damage and has zero recast and generates zero or negative enmity. without being bursted.

So instead of doing "that" just fix the existing spells/system to be more modern. Just plop a *10 on the end and call it a day. then remove all enmity from nukes. and you might get people on blm again.

BLM is in a terrible spot right now, but all they really need to do is overhaul BLM free nukes to correct it. Even when it's buffed BLM free nuking just doesn't hold up against buffed melee and that's where the issue is. Dynamis D is one of the few events that blm is used in nowadays, and if the setup is a traditional RP farm with cors and melee the DPS output lags way way waaay behind. I bring my empy thief to dyna D and my DPS is so far ahead of blm it's not even funny. With empyrean aftermath up, capped haste, and a fully optimized rudra's build my DPS soars, but you know what..... the corsairs in my linkshell STILL come out on top in the parse because a well geared cor is just THAT much stronger than everything else in Dyna D that NOTHING can touch a nearly optmized cor. BLM's damage just gets left behind in the dust.

In addition to free nuking BLM also needs an overhaul to fix its piss poor AoE situation. Blm's AoE nuking is still getting watered down for every additional target it hits, and that mechanic is an antiquated relic of the past that needs to go BADLY. Blue mages can cleave for 20-30K damage PER TARGET in Reisinjima, whereas the max a Thundaja will hit for on a dozen or so mobs is in the 6-8k range apiece. Hell my THF can aeolian edge for 10-12k per target and not get any damage reduction, and I still have room to improve my set to push the numbers closer to 15k per. So why does BLM... the job that's supposed to be the KING of AoE magic damage just get brutalized like that? AoE nukes doing less damage for every additional target hit is a balancing feature that dates back to the games original implementation. All the cleaving options that came about post abyssea with no per target damage reduction and all the gear available to make them do stupid high damage have rendered this mechanic obsolete.

The issue with Blm is exactly what saevel described. Blm free nuking just scaless too poorly. And it's really not that hard of a fix. All the other jobs get percentile damage increases, whereas BLM gets mainly linear ones. Saevel's percentile multiplier is the perfect adjustment IMO. All they need to do to make BLM more fun to play is change 3 things

1. Add some form of percentile multiplier into the magic damage formula that allows BLM free nuking to scale properly in the current age. It doesn't have to be massive, just enough to bring DpS a little bit closer in line with modern times.

2. Remove the damage reduction per additional target hit by AoE nukes. Just get rid of it. It isn't necessary anymore. Blue mage, thief, warrior.... among plenty of other jobs can all cleave better than blm. This would bring AoEs more in line with modern times.

3. For the love of all that is holy give blm some REAL nuking food to eat!!! FFS, as a melee I can eat sublime sushi and get a percentile bonus to accuracy and easily hit the 100 accuracy cap, or eat red curry buns and get a percentile attack bonus to easily hit the 150 attack cap. With the way the magic accuracy formula works pear crepe is more in line with sushi, but it's still weaker in the hit rate increases. And nothing blm can eat is gonna increase their nuking power like 150 attack can for a melee job.... there's still no proper MaB food to this day that compares to a melee's red curry buns and that's just sad.

Marine stew pots give 90 macc

But yeah.. blm is a unfun mess atm

Oh, I wasn't aware that food existed. I must've been taking a break from the game when they added it a year and a half ago. I never was a big fan of AoE foods, especially given the cost per use, but the fact that it's there is welcome. They could honestly add a magic attack counterpart and give it +100 to Attack, Ranged Attack, and Magic Attack and it still wouldn't be enough to get BLMs free nukes where they need to be, but it would sure be a good start. Honestly they just need to reevaluate the way magic damage is calculated and update the fomula so nukes scale better. They did it once before, but enough time and changes have come to pass that it needs to be done again.

LEAKED NFORMATION

June Version Update: New Black Mage Job Ability - Hover Cast

Ability:- Hover Cast
Level acquired:- 95
Recast Time:- 3 minutes
Duration:- 60 minutes
Effect:- Increases magic damage, magic accuracy and magic attack bonus, as well as decreases enmity, when casting magic on an enemy from a location one yalm or more from where you last attacked it.