FFXIV – Every Black Mage Skill From Every Expansion (Retrospective)



Intro – 00:00
ARR – 00:54
Heavensward – 26:15
Stormblood – 36:06
Shadowbringers – 49:53
Endwalker – 59:36

We are now sponsored by Steelseries! Check out the gear here w/ a 12% discount using the code MRHAPPY http://steelseries.7eer.net/c/198881/100327/2390

We are also partnered with AdvancedGG! Save 30% on Energy, Focus and Hydration formula supplements to help keep your game going strong by using the discount code MRHAPPY30! https://advanced.gg/?ref=MRHAPPY

Facebook: www.facebook.com/mrhappy1227
Twitter: www.twitter.com/mrhappy1227
Twitch: www.twitch.tv/mrhappy1227

Green Man Gaming: http://www.greenmangaming.com/?tap_a=1964-996bbb&tap_s=3349-015e5

source

42 thoughts on “FFXIV – Every Black Mage Skill From Every Expansion (Retrospective)”

  1. Hold on, I feel level 50 blm STILL has the problem that when you cast fire 1, you can't see if firestarter proc is up before you start casting next spell. I do not like doing level 50 roulettes with blm because of it…

    Reply
  2. Hello, Scathe defender here. Obviously, it's use in savage/trial/raid content is basically non-existent but in the open world or a dungeon if a mob has a tiny sliver of health left Scathe usually finishes the job without having to hardcast anything.

    Reply
  3. So, for 7.0/Future BLM. I could see SE going the route of the WoW Arcane mage, or just taking some inspiration from it and adding multiple "burn" phases (Fire phases) to the rotation. Where through a spell or through "over producing" enough Ice stacks, you can either go "negative" mana or keep your mana in stasis for a short duration, or something along those (ley)lines, huhuh.

    Reply
  4. Yea but BLM will have to change a bit, or at least in hope of ‘adding to it’.. cause altho ppl think their jobs are great ‘as is’, if we went through a whole expansion and they didn’t get anything, ppl would complain that… it didn’t get anything.. so it’s really a ‘rock and a hard place’ for these jobs..
    cause ppl think DRK didn’t get jack from SHB to EW.. like 1 ogcd.. so I’m sure that’s a mini-nightmare for devs, trying to not just literally ‘balance’ jobs but also balance what they create/remove from jobs

    Reply
  5. BLM main here, first time watching retro series and found it kinda interesting having started playing FF:14 last year october..like 2 weeks before endwalker sales halt and 10k queue times.
    However, (1:07:25), I was hoping you would go over PvP because BLM has an identity crisis. And not many people talk about PVP. Sure I get that it's unbalanced, but yeah.

    Reply
  6. Oh man, about flare. If you were smart with mp ticks you would flare twice, transpose and start casting flare so that when you finish casting you would regain some mp, enough to cast it again. And then transpose again.
    You could infinitely cast flares and it was stronger than the intended rotation

    Reply
  7. I started playing ffxiv at the tail end of shadow bringers; I played Black Mage almost exclusively for my entire run through the MSQ and normal content, but when I started doing extreme/savage/ultimate content, I got intimidated, didn’t want to be a burden on parties by sucking so and I switched to phys ranged. I want to get back to it though, it’s such a fun job

    Reply
  8. As someone that played on a PS3 until they killed support for Stormblood, Blizzard II was a godsend for hunts and Odin/Behemoth. It was nigh impossible to actually see any of the targets, but since Blizzard II didn't require a target, I would absolutely stand where I thought the target was and spam the hell out of it. Lost count of the number of A and S ranks that I got full credit for that I never actually saw. Oh,btw, Lethargy was ultra useful in Turn 5 against those owlknight adds and the Allagan nodes in Turn 11.

    #BlackMagicMatters

    Reply
  9. honestly, scathe should be reworked into an almost mini polyglot to get players used to that sort of thing and give black mage at least a semi earlier ogcd to use, kinda like how they did with giving monk meditation while still a pugilist.

    Reply
  10. I keep hearing so-and-so spell was really toxic or too punishing, but the legend of Black Mage was built on high risk + high reward and a part of the fantasy and class identity. Similar to Dragoon taking more damage in exchange for equally greater damage, while lots of these changes are good for the class to be more playable and less intimidating takes away from the stories and appreciation for when things line up.

    I totally understand making the game more accessible, but really took away from basically all classes uniqueness and class identity with the homogenization and put-off a lot of players around the over later expansions. Going back and playing FFXI recently (Horizon) made me appreciate specialized roles again and the RPG'ness by comparison to FFXIV makes modern MMOs look super flat in regards to gameplay and basically removes nuance in lots of games. Different strokes, though, they are video games.

    Fire III? Man, when I discovered the nuances of the class/job it was a game changer and provided that "A-Ha!" moment that you hardly find anymore. The cleanliness across classes is great for balance, but mostly removes the interesting parts of the job gameplay for minimally smaller optimizations left to find. 🤷‍♀

    Reply
  11. Hey you forgot to mention the fact that going from Shadowbringers to Endwalker Ino-chan went from being a skill to a trait! It's now no longer a button and just activated when you are able to build 3 stacks of Astral Fire and Umbral Ice in Heavensward. Are people still afraid of playing Black Mages? Cuz you no longer have to worry about dropping Ino-chan and waiting for its cooldown to reapply it.

    Reply
  12. We enjoy an easy enmity system today, but back in ARR, if a Black Mage did a double flare before the tank could really get aggro, they could completely strip them of threat. This is why quelling strikes was so important and became even more so in Heavensward when stance dancing became more prevalent.

    I remember being blamed as a Bard for grabbing aggro off the tank in early Stormblood after quelling strikes had been removed.

    Reply
  13. This has to be all from 2.0 in 1.0. I swear manaward was tied to your mp and it would just use your mp bar as your hp for a specified time so using it was like cutting off your arm since the only mp refresh came from aether pots or foods and if you used it when low on mp all you could do was run away as you would run out of mp. Can you find the info of the job from 1.0 as a comparison? Because I remember having different skill builds depending if I was solo ( stoneskin etc) vs in a party.

    Reply
  14. Yeah, it's pretty sad when you genuinely try to help people but they act like they mastered the job when the reality can't be further from the truth. Ignorance is bliss, maybe?

    Reply
  15. >Circle fades upon leaving it.
    Hemingway needed six words to tell a tragic story, FFXIV only needed five words.

    Lucid Dreaming and mana ticks were important because you need 2 GCDs to guarantee full MP regeneration from your umbral ice phase, BUT if you get lucky you'll get a mana tick right after Blizzard 3 and then you can get the second one during the cast time of Fire 3. In Shadowbringers and earlier you didn't always have a Thundercloud or anything else ready to go, so your options were to waste time on another low-potency ice spell, overcap Thunder, or time your Fire 3 cast so that the mana tick happened before the spell completed. Lucid Dreaming could be leveraged to squeeze a little more MP into that time frame and potentially enable another Fire 4.
    None of that is important today with the addition of Ice Paradox ensuring you have a second ice phase GCD, but some of the more cursed rotations can leverage a well-timed mana tick to squeeze out some DPS.

    Reply
  16. in some video you could include the character sheet from way back when with the adjustable attributes and all the elemental resistances (I still had a wind materia in shb for some reason. damn hoarder)

    Reply
  17. Its funny hearing people bemoan having to move as black mage. Imo, figuring out how to move effectively is the entire reason the job is fun. If you could just plant in one spot and barely move, it'd be the most boring job in the game by far.

    Very cool seeing how its grown over the years, lots of little changes, not a lot of big ones. Heavensward black mage definitely sounds like where a lot of the intimidation comes from.

    Reply
  18. I don't play the job nearly well enough to actually play it this way, but I love so much that higher level BLM play basically discards the idea of a rotation entirely. Optimizing the job works by running through a series of "lines" (a sequences of casts which ends after an AF phase), where as one line is ending you decide which one you're going to run next based on on procs, MP ticks, upcoming forced movement/downtime, and available resources (polyglot stacks, sharpcasts, triplecasts, swiftcast, paradox).

    The gains are very small so it's not mandatory (or even important) for anything except absolutely top tier parsing or maybe world first racing/day 1 prog, but it opens up an improvisional, extremely high-skill playstyle that just doesn't exist for most other jobs. (It can also be used for the other extreme, precisely mapping every cast for an entire fight for parsing purposes, which turns it into Spreadsheets: the Game instead lol)

    The one big problem is that a fair bit of that optimization unavoidably depends on the dreaded Third Party Programs, because with the vanilla interface there's no way to see the timing of your MP ticks while you're in AF or to predict the timing of your Lucid Dreaming ticks and those timings can dramatically alter which lines you have available.

    Reply
  19. transpose paradox is an actual gain if you do it as a planned nonstandard rotation. Its a huge instant cast spender so if you do it and end up having no resources for movement later on you kinda lose its benefits. Paradox became a contention to many players because it is so strong it enables a dozen more nonstandard lines, which makes “true optimization” on the job much more complex because without mana tick plugins (which i don’t use) you have to be able to on the fly react to your mana ticks in UI and choose an optimal cycle by accounting for rotation length, resources, movement in the near future, etc.

    Disclaimer: It is very probable to parse pink with standard BLM. Doing nonstandard your whole way through the fight would only net you about 5% dps gain on average, which is generally unachievable without plugins and spreadsheeting, or a massive 4090RTX brain.

    Reply

Leave a Comment