GSDGamingx: I only started playing the game in the middle of Endwalker, and was so casual that leveling multiple jobs was not a thing for me. So i only unlocked thaumaturge and leveled Black Mage after 7.2. So i have zero bearing for the changes. However, my totally uninformed 2 cents, is that i enjoy current black mage so much that i swapped from melee to Black Mage for the currnet raid tier (Heavyweight). As someone who ONLY knows the new black mage, i like it alot. Its simple enough to understand at a bsse level but optimizing still feels like it has a few conceptual AND mechanical muscles to flex. But to my understanding, not nearly AS MANY wacky off meta rotations

alfredvonsfer7136: I may be a bit of a doomer, but i did love ShB to pre 7.2 BLM. Not every job should be easy, not every job should be mastered in an hour. Understanding what to do with your job at all points makes you a master, but when they removed the non-standard rotations from viability, this mastery and those who mastered it died. Whatever there reason for doing so, it killed a unique playstyle that many enjoyed. Should we cater to hardcore? should we neuter every job till anyone can pick it up and master it in one dungeon? How far towards simplicity do we go before our actions only matter in terms of boss mechanics? My opinion doesnt matter, but if it did, some jobs would be easy, others would be hard, but none would be the same.

SUP3RSH4DOW: The worst part of the BLM change saga was how obviously combative it was. Sometimes they make changes and it has side effects but all of the blm changes have been direct, knowledgeable attacks at parts of the rotation SE considers bad or degenerate for whatever reason. It was never about improving the job, but removing aspects of the job they didn’t like the playerbase doing. None of which you ever even had to do. Getting fingerwagged for things that were marginal gains in hyper specific scenarios.

gazel7424: THUNDERCLOUD!!!

I haven't finished the video but I loved Thundercloud, or simply the ability to cast Thunder spells when you want; even if Sharpcast has to go no matter what, I wish they kept Thundercloud...

brachyzoid: The changes killed the job for me. I liked the slight feeling of stress of keeping up the timer since keeping a good pace felt rewarding to see it not fall off.

Now my brain turns off and I get no satisfaction from playing the job.

FFXIV becoming more and more simple/accessible/convenient/less time consuming is actively making the game less fun for me.

I live in fear of the day they remove stationary casting or cast timers from the game entirely due to their obsession with constant movement mechanics

MCM0791: BLM old timer here, just to add my 2 cents: sure, we grieve the loss of transpose lines, and current BLM is not that bad given how more people get to enjoy the job, but want to know the REAL shame and loss here? How SE buried Nonstandard. In an unforseen twist of fate, SE created by accident a golden formula that could become the groundwork for amazing future job design with clear identity and paradoxically (wink) both complexity and simplicity at the same time, being as simple or complicated as the player wanted, both dishing out damage either way. Pure cinema and brilliance, the once in a lifetime kind that only happens by random luck. Aaand its gone, SE chose to bury it. BLMs are the least of our problems here, SE found something with soul and in the most corporate way they decided to kill it. Imagine a golden goose that after years of good service gives birth to a 2nd golden goose, yet somehow the farmer in charge chose to have it for dinner, thats what we are dealing with here. What were they thinking? were they thinking at all? we will never know.

nemamiah7832: I've been playing largely NOTHING but Black Mage for all my time in FFXIV. I have to be honest, the current iteration of Black Mage is largely just brainless. But I have no other job to switch to, because, well, Black Mage was the only job I genuinely enjoyed. Heck, 7.0 wasn't even that bad, because there were "funny" ways to play it without much damage loss, until they've buffed Flare Star so much it became a MUST. You don't cast Flare Star? You just lose. Straight up massive DPS loss. Also, changes to Paradox. God, I miss when Paradox gave full Umbral Ice/Astral Fire. It led to some hilarious movement if you needed to get going and was all out of Triple Casts.

I'm kind of just dabbling into Dancer at this point for the novelty of "a lot of buttons to press", but eh.

It's still beyond me why every job should be for everyone. The main reason BLM is popular now - it's braindead easy and it does A LOT OF DAMAGE. Nerf BLM into the ground, buff Summoner and all those "I want BLM to be easy!" people will flock to Summoner. Heck, you've seen how many Pictos were around? Before the rework? Picto was easy. And did a lot of damage. Now BLM is also easy. And does more damage!

Taldemarr: Like some others already mentioned, I find it wild that the MP ticks were crucial

shirazan6314: I was one of those long-time BLM players that had been playing it since HW up until the 7.2 changes. What really drew me to it was the min-max element it brought to both casual and high-end fights. How long can I stand here? Can I place these leylines in a certain way so I don't have to leave them for 30s? Who can reliably AM to avoid getting clipped by this aoe? Can I save this polyglot for burst, or do I need to use it for movement? You can easily screw up and tank your damage, but pulling it off successfully felt amazing!

Some of those min-max elements are still there, but with the enochian timer removed, cast times reduced, leyline duration reduced, rng reduced, etc, there's no real easy way to screw up beyond getting KO'd or missing a few casts.

Old BLM used to feel like high-stakes mountain biking in the foothills. Current BLM feels like biking on the sidewalk with training wheels.

stevencollins8348: I really prefer BLM now. Ping or mobs dying during casts and pretty much resetting the whole rotation is nice

SunChaoJun: I wish the devs would stop changing jobs to appeal to players who don't play the job

I hate playing monk and ninja, but I'm not asking SE to neuter those jobs just to appeal to me

dimondsi: I only miss the need to cast more ice spells. I know its about the fire dps but I like the maintenance angle

thevictorguildford6344: What happened:

Pictomancer happened.

armorparade: everytime you make a black mage video i check the comments and laugh

ppl who dislike blm changes: lengthy but heartfelt recount of everything they liked about enw blm's specificities and how satisfying it felt to get right, going over how bad it feels to lose the things they liked about their favorite job

ppl who like blm changes: psychoanalyzing old blm players and insisting that the only reason to want to play a hard job is to be able to lord that over other people, misunderstanding how enw blm worked and insisting that there is no meaningful difference between current and old blm outside of nebulous "difficulty"

aniviafreja8939: If nothing else, they should really do something about HB2/HF2

zaigan3332: I'll admit I was pissed at the changes at first. I dropped black mage after the first raid I played. After I returned to it I started to love it but purely because the challenge shifted to the content and mechanics. I'm actually having fun which is all I actually want from it

GameBoyHeart1: I never thought it was hard. Just tedious. I genuinely believe the bulk of the challenge should come from the encounter, not the job. I understand some people really want a job they can theory craft into oblivion, but once you memorize those rotations and master the fight, what are you really gaining that other jobs couldn't offer for a fraction of the effort? lol

Qkochan3: it made my wife quit and i personally think the changes suck. if you don't want to learn a complex job, just don't play it. why does everyone else have to suffer because someone else finds it too hard and will go back to their jobs they usually play anyways even after the rework??? i dont like the way reaper plays at all but i'm not going to beg square to change it to favor me, i just dont play it LOL. but i also dont think everything in the world has to cater to me so idk

Mir_Teiwaz: I love black mage. I started as THM back during the ShB patches and leveled as it all the way through to the Endwalker waiting room, but I always had a hard time keeping up Enochian consistently, so I played other classes for what was left of ShB and even into EW. When I tried black mage again about a year ago I fell in love with it all over again. The predictability of how it plays makes it easier for me to focus on positioning and what the boss is doing.

So, for me at least, I like where Black Mage is. Honestly the next expansion could just give us upgrades to our current spells (Yoshi P please I need High Fire/Blizzard I need bigger explosions) and I'd be content.

nordiclania: I liked Black mage before DT changes, and I still like it now. I don't think the changes made was a disservice to the job.

gwenfranklin8242: So they basically brought the hammer down and enforced their intended playstylw

SirZero14: I can only speak aa a new player who picked up Black Mage rather recently for the new Savage but I really enjoy it as it is. It a job I feel like I have a good handle on yet and can always spot little moments where I can further optimize my play in a fight and push for higher nunbers which I find really fun.

I've never got to experience older Black Mage,I've only read about the ways it used to work and picked up on what you said it was like earlier so it's hard to say if the changes were necessary for it to thrive in the Dawntrial's high movement environment. Dedicated players will always find ways to make things work afterall. That being said it probably would've also been heavily unfavorable compared to Pictomancer, which in my opinion is the job most comparable to it, had it not receiveed any changes which may have been among the many reasons they could've decided to rework it but that's just my opinion.

Cafinebiased: I played summoner as my main job all the way from A Realm Reborn launch to the start of Dawntrail. Trust me when I say, things could be worse.

GoToZayo: @Caetsu Chaiji Ch.

thank you for your content!!

asymmetrikon: As someone who much preferred Endwalker BLM to any of the Dawntrail iterations, I think one of my biggest peeves is that they could've made the job more approachable and lowered the skill floor without making the drastic changes they did. One of the things that CB3 does that I personally hate is that often, instead of trying to adjust something that isn't working, they just remove it all together (see timers, Noxious Gnash, aggro management, stances, TP, etc.) But there were so many things they could've done instead; make Scathe less punishing to cast so that the rotation could remain more immobile and there would be an easy button to hit if you needed to move; make any GCD in UI give MP to replicate MP regen without worrying about server ticks; make the UI/AF timers stack based (each GCD consuming a stack) so if you just stopped casting they'd be paused. Instead of this, these things are just gone, and I don't think it had to be this way.

Besides that, I think an unstated reason that 7.2 changes specifically were received so poorly by diehard BLMs is that 7.1 temporarily reintroduced a (reduced) nonstandard with quadruple transpose, as well as having a completely instant cast complete rotation that was only a small damage loss if you wanted to cosplay a phys ranged. 7.2 came around and killed those, so now nonstandard is pretty much relegated to AoE and ending fire phases early with Flares to rush a Flare Star before downtime (which I do think is actually a neat thing that the 7.x BLM has going for it.) I personally think the 7.0 changes were much worse, and that 7.0 was the worst BLM has played in many years (having a higher skill floor than 6.x and a much lower skill ceiling.)

More than the changes themselves, I think the worst part has been the discussion around them ever since the 7.0 previews came out (crescendoing with the 7.2 BLM leaks.) BLM mains did not handle them well, but I've never seen so many people come out of the woodworks to gloat about job elitists getting their comeuppance. The way that it's mythologized, 6.x BLM was an esoteric, unapproachable garbage fire that only people who needed to feel superior to others played, and the changes have finally forced them out of the game. I'm glad this video and community don't do this, but it's frustrating to me that that was the level of discourse that happens.

Momoqa_Moqa: everyone talking about level 100, which i also very much hate what they've done overall, but i want to talk for a second about level 70 because its still super relevant due to ultimates.

played some blackmage in UCoB the otherday.... the entire job at that level now fire IV 7 times, flare, blizzard III, blizard IV, fire III, repeat with occasional thunder and foul. no management, no procs to worry about. cast times are so short you hardly have to worry about where you are standing either now too.

with the changes, after you get fire IV until you get paradox you never have another firestarter proc again because you will never be pressing fire I

thisismypasswordlol: Seeing a lot of pro changes comments here and figured I’d break my years long streak of not commenting on videos to offer a different opinion.

I’ve been playing off and on since late Heavensward, and finally decided to pick up black mage full time in Dawntrail due to wanting a more complex job (I had played and leveled it before in Stormblood but never committed hard to playing full time) and found myself greatly enjoying it, but only in content below max level. The addition of flare star turned a job that was punishing but flexible, into a job that was punishing and incredibly stiff. The timer makes sense at lower levels where you can end a fire state early with a slap on the wrist, but the job overly centers around obtaining flare star at level 100, so ending a state early is dps suicide.

The timer removal in 7.2 fixed this for level 100, but made the job feel aimless and dull at lower levels where the timer management is basically what every single button you get centers around. I swapped what I was playing through the msq on an alt because of this and have a sprout friend who did the same (changing to white mage of all things, because it’s more interesting.) Hitting level 60 is particularly bad since you get fire IV there and then basically just hit it seven times in a row mindlessly for your fire phase (flare is only a damage gain sometimes.) Now I basically never play black mage in any roulette that has a chance of getting me content below max level because of this. I would be much much happier with the removal of the timer if it was a trait gained at level 100, or even somewhere in the 90s.

It’s deeply frustrating to see this game continuously simplify jobs until now even black mage of all jobs feels dull and repetitive.

Jan 10 2026

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