The Black Sacrament -- A Guide To Black Mage

Voidwatch was the best, most inclusive content they ever created. (the loot system was bad, I agree) It was great.

I'm shocked you think SE is going to put that much effort into the game. They are probably just going to give BLM a new Job Trait "Magic Damage Plus" with 5-8 tiers that increasingly improve the damage dealt by using single-target nukes. And then do something to the Magic Damage Bonus gift to make it even stronger (Elemental Affinity Bonus). Remove meritable spells to scrolls, change gifts to matt/macc per spell and call it a day. They aint fixing the mana wall at all.

I mean of course they won't fix anything balance related properly. No ones that naive. It's what they should do.

You're probably exact on what they will do.

New stance/trait - double the cost, double the damage basically W-magic "yay we fixed blm bois, call it a day!"

Maybe they'll change magic crits =o

They should give black mage warp 3...warp players back to the "75 era"

Make it so if you have 18 black mages in a party they get to cast a special spell that does a lot of damage. Boom everyone back on black mage.

also smol lol @arislan suggesting people suck now when some of his helm strats on guildwork include 3 geos

not sure how thats much different than death spam or acaf from a fairness standpoint

Would make AF+3 body that much better. I mean, what needs to happen is:
Single targets free nukes (subject to resists)

T1 nuke: 5~10k(buff end) damage
T2 nuke: 15k~
T3 nuke: 25k~
T4 nuke: 40k~
etc

At the rate a DD can do WSD and then the ensuing SC (i.e. an Empyrean wielder), a nuker cannot keep up in terms of damage in any scenario. Nukes need to be mini-large scale skillchains, and abilities like AM/AM2/Meteor/Comet need to do something OTHER THAN damage. Idk what, maybe add in some status debuff ailment to each high tier nuke, so that it's worth using vs just spamming t1s all day.

The only way to make BLM worth using is it you can nuke and keep up with a DRG jumping for 6k > ws for 50k > jump for 8k > ws for 50k within 8 seconds. Any other fix that doesn't massively improve free nuking is going to be a joke.

Another quote somewhere "free nukes do damage as though they had been bursted"

You mean experience points parties in garliage citadel and crawlers nest back in 2004? Because ever since people started hitting lvl 75 we have burned things. They may have had less optimized setups (4 DD + healer + bard, 3 dd bard rdm tank, etc etc) but they were still burn partries. I had a friend who played bard at the time and whenever she put her party flag up before a limbus, dynamis, salvage or w/e event she would typically get anywhere from 3-5 party invites in under a minute (often almost instantly). The term "princess bard" came from that era because tp burns refused to group without one, and many leaders demanded 2. So even then burn was a thing. Black Mage burns on Kirin dates back to 2005/06. Summoner burns happened to clear every promyvion zone, but especially Holla. Level synced summoner experience party burns happened all the time in Korroloka Tunnel.

I side with Nickeny on this one. Burnng things has ALWAYS been a part of ffxi. And always will be.

Black is important for when the timer on your warp ring isn't ready. So make sure you bring a black mage with you all the time.

Probably exactly what they'll do. Give BLM native tiers of Magic Crit chance.

None of that is the same. "Tp burn" yeah, sure, if you want to call it that. Is completely different than "use this one specific thing and all jobs are identical burn"

"mana burn" at wootz shells =/= "Death burn"

"tp burn" at merits =/= "shining one burn"

"smn burn" at korroloka on level 20 mobs =/= "conduit burn"

"TP Burn" is never going to go away. For sure. (when it can be done) But is it such a hard concept to agree that it would be better if it were drg+drk+war than it would be if it were war+war+war all with shining one. ("better" not to be confused with "more efficient") Or that instead of cor+cor+cor+cor you did rng+cor+blm.

Except when you consider the difference in relative power level for the respective era it IS exactly the same thing. When I merited on greater colibris an 1800 damage sneak attacked dancing edge was absurdely strong and chunked a good 90% of the birds health off. How is that any different from my rudra's storms today chunking Ilvl 140 mobs to shreds. When a summoner burn unleashed its astral flow on korolokka tunnel they cleared 35-40 mobs worth of stuff to gain 4-7 levels in an instant. That was crazy powerful for the time, easily two to five hours worth of effort elsewhere in 3 minutes of killing. The mobs only had 600-700 hp, so 350 damage apiece per flow was more than enough to flatten them all and put in perspective was a MASSIVE amount of burst. Weaponskills would do only 150-200 apiece at the time so 350 to everything was crazy.

You can't say a low level burn is any different from a high level one just because it plays on a different scale. level 75 mobs had level 75 stats, Ilvl mobs have Ilvl stats. The principles behind the burn however are identical. It's silly to argue otherwise.

At some point you have to put this squarely on the players and their insanely narrow-minded tunnel vision approach and not on the developers not balancing job and battle mechanics properly. SE isn't going to rebalance anything at this point, they stated as much in the interview and this game just isn't going to get the attention it once did anymore.

The real issue is players are just looking at things in terms of dps/seconds/clear time/ease vs any other number of things. It doesn;t matter what SE does, the underlying issue is just how the players view the jobs in general. Whatever fix they put to undo the burn meta will just be outsmarted by the players as they find some other workaround to circumvent the changes. I get you're just talking about what SE "should" do, but it's a fruitless debate. The most SE us going to do is tell you to "stop looking at things in terms of who does the most damage". And nobody is going to start thinking that route in a bot-heavy game.

It's a huge difference between burning trash mobs and burning bosses. What works on endless waves of mobs, shouldn't work on the boss.


Of course. Square should do the big-boy thing, admit they *** up and fix it. The criminals are always one step ahead of the crime solvers. Does that mean the crime solvers just give up? What a world that would be. Eh *** it, they'll figure it out anyway let's just let them go at it.

The entire point is balance. Fix it, they break it. Fix it again. Broken. Guess what, another fix.

Why? Aside from the fact that this is how people play it in literally EVERY OTHER MMO. Wow, FFXIV, Guild Wars, you name it. Literally, just go read the FFXIV forms and all the end game raids talk about is optimizing DPS to figure out how to kill whatever ultimate primal they're after a few minutes faster by changing up ability rotations to improve burst windows.

Aside from that what is so intrinsically special about a boss? A boss is literally just a trash mob with much higher stats and some fancy loot pool tacked onto it. They may come with unique attacks and mechanics, be a lot harder to kill and much more capable of wiping us, but at the end of the day it's just another target for us to organize a group together to beat up on to get stuff from. The whole point of an MMO is "If it walks we find a way to beat its face in and get its loot". Trash mobs are farmed for trash mob loot, boss mobs are farmed for boss mob loot. This has nothing to do with job balance either. It's just an MMO thing. Its what we get our kicks out of and at the end of the day why we even play the game to begin with. But the whole point of this thread is supposed to be "How do we make BLM a bit more relevant again" not "How do we change player mentality in how they run boss fights". This isn't a meta changing thread. It's a black mage improvement thread. And I already chimed in with my ideas.

1. Add a free nuke elemental affinity merit category in place of ancient magic. Say 5% per merit and merits 5 levels deep. That would give us a fulltime 25% affinity bonus to black mage's free nukes, and since it wouldn't affect magic bursts it wouldn't throw off any important balance factors. That would certainly help mitigate the gap between black mages "not bursting" damage and tp burns sustained OMGWTF dps output.

2. Remove the penalty to elemental magic AoE for extra targets being hit. Blue mage doesnt suffer the penalty. Warrior doesn't suffer the penalty. Thief's aeolian edge doesn't either. It's a relic of the 2003 era that's no longer relevant. Just get rid of it. If Thundaja did FULL damage on every target it hit suddenly black mage's would actually be reasonably placed in the meta.

Neither of those suggestions would break a damn thing in the game and we all know it too. But I bet it would make BLM a whole hell of a lot more fun to play, and a lot more relavant to boot.

That was something they cared to do 8 years ago. They are prepared to hit the red autopilot button on this game and check in quarterly to address bugs and fixes. That is all. No more devoting countless hours to a game that has seen it's better days behind it. The job adjustments are the only consistent thing you can expect from FFXI until the 20th anniversary, and those will be only minor changes (not fixes). Just looks at the list of what they've done so far with job adjustments:

DRG - delink jump timers, simple fix but good change
DNC - something minor, i forget. delinking waltzes i think
WHM - Esuna buff/nerf, pro/shell scroll change
Dia Bio - minor
H2H - minor adjustment to the math, ended up being a good improvement.
RNG - huge nothingburger
PUP - new attachments, good additions, nothing job-altering

I miss anything? Anyways, you can see the trend so far. Nothing they've done has been large scale fixes to any mechanics or content. Just "Adjustments" on a fundamental level (their own words). You (we) have to accept that is the most you can expect from FFXI, period. Anything more than that you are disappointing yourself.

It does apply to everything currently that deals magic damage though. Spells, WS, pets and JAs.

If it does it needs more fine tuning. It should apply more to Flaming crush and Cor/Rng magic WS. If the goal of the resist wall is to reduce magic damage across the board instead of just making the caster DD underpowered.

Only RDM :[

OK my mistake. RDM was a much bigger adjustment and helped that job out a bit. But still just a ability adjustment, not a major mechanic change or shift. When was the last time SE actually changed anything that was a major game mechanic improvement?

The last major change was the smn adjustment

Or overall evasion/stat on mobs nerf

As silly as it may sound to others, I'm really hoping for a rework of elemental debuffs with the incoming update. There's really no reason why they shouldn't be able to scale higher, and could even potentially help with our non-MB damage output a bit.

Just need to change the formulas to:
Damage/tick = INT
ATTR-down = 3 + (INT/10)

Both uncapped.. and we're no longer the weakest stat down (assuming relic+3 feet)(BLU and SMN both can do INT-63 Burn effects), and a 300~500 DPS increase. Not enough of either to break anything, but enough to make it feel more worthwhile casting not-Burn at least. :D

I'd accept higher values as well if the devs feel generous.

That's not gonna happen, they've already stated how elemental debuffs were "set at a power and level matched at which they are learned" when I made a thread asking for changes on those >_>.

Get rid of blm and shining one. Problem solved.
Seriously guy, just quit ffxi.

It's always possible they could change their minds, especially if their goals have changed (or when you asked, as they did give those spells a boost via gear).

For instance, they could add an increase to elemental damage taken to them a la Gambit, or Quick Draw with Empyrean boots. Scale the effect (and DoT perhaps) with Magic Damage, to create more of a use for that gear and keep it from being too strong at low levels or from mobs.

Coupling that with maybe making lowered resistance to other elements a standard property elemental magic, not just for Ninjitsu and Ancient Magic, and it could open up some strategy for free nuking.
Or, heck, if changing that, give AM skillchain properties or something.

I like the idea of giving ancient magic skillchain properties, but the problem with that is that the black mage will always end up being the one closing the skillchain unless the group is specifcally coordinating a skillchain burst scenario around it, and at that point why not just bring a scholar to do it instead? If ancient magic closes the skillchain the black mage won't have enough time to cast anything higher than a tier 2 or 3 nuke before the magic burst window closes. We have to start casting our highest tier nukes roughly around the time the skillchain OPENER begins in order to finish them during the magic burst window. And that's not even going into the whole mess of how haphazard it would be to start throwing around ancient magic and praying that it would actually sync up and create a skillchain when melees are weaponskill spamming like typical TP burns do. Basically if ancient magic opens the skillchain it's a precoordinated effort, which is something we can already make happen and only bother to do in very specific scenarios. And that isn't going to change. If ancient magic closes the skillchain it's off random chance, and the window to take advantage of it is too small to put any real damage numbers up.

I really do love the novelty of the idea, but in practice I highly doubt it would help black mage in any relavant way.

DNC also had Presto change so that when you use Presto Step you get an additional 5 finishing moves instead of just one previously. That in itself was pretty big.

Code-wise, WHM change wasn't any less effort than melphina's proposed BLM changes. There's certainly room to fix BLM.