Final Fantasy 14 fans have had a lot to be upset about recently, some of it warranted and some a bit unjustified. Job identity is one such topic that gets talked about a lot, with unpopular changes to Dragoon and Viper following the release of the Dawntrail expansion bringing the topic to the forefront once again. To put it briefly, jobs are being made more simple across the board, and fans don’t like it.
Following the most recent live letter for Patch 7.2, it now seems as though Black Mages are next on the chopping block. While we don’t have any confirmed changes just yet, Yoshi-P showed us footage of one of the new Arcadion Raids coming in 7.2, during which he played as a Black Mage and showed us how the job’s rotation is going to be altered.
Black Mage Is Going The Way Of Summoner
First Time, Black Mages?
For those who may be unfamiliar with Black Mage, the whole role revolves around managing the timers of your Fire and Ice phases. If your timer drops without you either reapplying your Fire phase or switching to your Ice phase, you lose both, meaning you need to spend more time getting back into one of those phases before you can start dishing out the damage again.
Alongside the long cast times and general chaos of mechanics in raids, Black Mage was considered one of the trickiest jobs to master, as it required a lot of juggling. As we can see from the gameplay footage in the live letter (at around the 53-minute mark), Yoshi-P casts Fire 3 and enters the Fire phase, yet the timer that usually indicates how long he has left is completely missing.
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Other changes that have been noted by fans are the reduced cast times for Fire 4 and Blizzard 4, the removal of the timers for Thunderhead and Firestarter, the reduction in time for Leylines, and potency reductions and increases for several skills. All of these combined have essentially made Black Mage much less punishing to play, and easier for newcomers to pick up.
Unfortunately for Yoshi-P, these changes have been received about as well as all the other recent job reworks. Most posts on social media about the changes are full of people upset with job homogenization, worried that the game is eventually going to make all jobs feel the same to play. As a Red Mage main, I am sweating profusely right about now.
One Reddit user called Omnirai thinks this is a reaffirmation that Final Fantasy 14 is obsessed with the “removal of personal expression”, while another called Iorveth1271 thinks the changes are pointless, as the changes won’t be enough to convince more people to play Black Mage anyway. Instead, they think all the changes will do is “hurt job identity”.
We won’t know the extent of the rework until the patch notes drop, which will probably happen at the back end of this week, or the start of next week before Patch 7.2 drops on March 25. It’s safe to say the changes will be drastic though, from the gameplay footage we’ve seen, and pretty much everyone is bracing for the worst.
- Released
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August 27, 2013
- ESRB
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T for Teen – Language, Mild Blood, Sexual Themes, Use of Alcohol, Violence