The Black Sacrament -- A Guide To Black Mage

Yes it is, your the one without understanding of whats happening game wise. SC's and MB's are interlinked property wise and the chaining of them relies on those properties matching.

But hey it's about time to start insulting people anyway so mind as well get that started.

He's talking about adding another new mechanic, that uses a similar system but modified, and separate. You wouldn't need to change existing SC MB system, you'd be adding another. Not saying they'd ever bother, but what he's talking about isn't impossible outside of dev/game resource constraints.

Personally, I think you can forego the MB aspect altogether, and make the additional debuff simply apply more SDT- or something similar to it, which skillchains already apply, as a separate debuff with its own duration. Something along those lines coupled with general magic damage boosts would probably help.

Would give melees a reason to delay ws just a little bit to make SCs, without necessarily having to worry about MB timing. Nukers can hit 1 big MB on every other SC, and dish out fast, powered up mid tier free nukes in between. A little tp overflow is good for most of the WS's we use, and nukers can increase their sustained DPS by tracking with the melees. I think it would be cool, but a pipe dream.

They should just delete black mage then you won't have to worry about it anymore.

Jokes aside.... total inability to bring any semblance of balance is exacerbated by the amount of jobs. They really would be better off dropping half.

Rdm geo and sch do everything a blm does. Give strats helix and weather to rdm and drop sch too.

Give pld Alexander's perfect defense and improve impact then you can drop smn too. (Nothing should replace conduit) make plague not terrible to replace mew.

You have trusts, you no longer need the rest of us to play for your enjoyment.

Off topic for a second: This is what happens when you too many jobs and the amount of effort to "balance" them is almost zero. If anything they added to many jobs that don't really have a point of existing.

If they would hire an unpaid FFXIAH user to work on the game they could probably get more results done in a year than SE.

This is true no MMO game really needs 22 jobs. We could probably function with 10 at the most.

Roughly at what distance/storm combination does Sash beat out Obi?

Never, Unless it's like firesday with no scholar and you have to nuke ice. You also have to stand on top of the mob.

Flare II → Ancient Magic Magic Attack Bonus
Freeze II → Ancient Magic Magic Burst Damage
Tornado II → Elemental Magic Magic Accuracy
Quake II → Elemental Magic Debuff Duration*
Burst II → Elemental Magic Debuff Effect*
Flood II → Aspir Absorption Amount

I've been asking for adjustments to ele magic debuffs for a long time >_<

Whenever you guys get the chance, can you list the values for the new merit abilities give each?

Ehhhhhhhhhh Debuff is +2 per merit.

Macc is +5

I guess that's still the best, underwhelming, not unexpected though.

I mean.... REALLY Burn -2 INT and + 1DoT per merit

Is black mage viable now?

You have to remember that job merits are ment to adjust a lv75 job not 119, hence the weak effects for current ilvl.

On a scale of "delete the job" to "basically rema bard" I'd give it a solid "never unpacked from the previous house moving"

Untrue. If you're standing on the mob, Orpheus wins whenever you have only single weather on.

any word on what the augment adds to debuff spells, guessing +1 stat debuff/tic per merit

BLM will never(*) stand on the mob. so, yeah, true.

Elemental Debuff base @150INT is -13
Merits would bring it to -23 (seems to be -2 per merit)

https://www.bg-wiki.com/bg/Arch._Sabots_%2B3

Those add another -30.
So really -43 vs -53.

Is Black Mage great yet ?

I am going 5/5 potency on debuffs, bringing targets INT down as low as possible is always going to pay dividends for a BLM. Sadly I almost never see a BLM casting burn on anything on Asura at least.


AM2 still seems to fit inbetween tier 4 and tier 5 nukes, shrug, maybe if you do 5/5 which would ad 15% mb dmg it would be better than tier5 on bursting?

for now sticking my other 5 in elemental acc

I was kind of hoping they would at least reduce the amount of categories to choose from instead of forcing you to pick between six options with only ten points but I guess not. There's no reason they couldn't have just bundled the acc/potency stuff and the MAB/MBD stuff together.

I think the black mage update may have just overtaken the ranger update for the category of "most underwheming". This doesn't change anything at all.

Ill go out on a limb and say any blm bursting and not using impact and burn is crippling their dmg. Quad bursting on kei i do more overall dmg than a decked out rank 15 gast rng, tf and sc dmg combined (i already was using relic +3 gloves so update just made it to where getting resists are going to be lower for sure). Blm is situtionally used...early wave 3 dyn clears included blm burn strats. Depending on how overzealous melees are....tripple bursting on 1 sc isnt out of the questiom either
.am2s might be tad viable to toss in there...but only if burst % on new merit crap goes outside cap or its own category.

If I’m understanding this right, they’re scing and then letting you nuke. By sitting around waiting for you to burst, of course their damage will go down lol.


Impact and Burn isn’t anywhere near enough to make up the DPS difference between a BLM and melee jobs in any situation where melee are the preferred method.

Exactly that. If you hamstring the DD by forcing them to afk for 10 seconds OFC their dps will be inferior. That's the entire problem.

it's just where the game is right now.

Pretty sure the statement "blm is situationally used" covers all that.

It's not even "situational" it's more... "if you're so god damn terrible at literally every other option, I guess you can get on BLM since all you have to do is cast 2 spells every 30 seconds... you can do that right?"

2? That'd be pretty lazy for sure, should be 4 at min, maybe 5 just on bursting alone. If can spam 2s and 3s cool too. But hey, however you want to see or play the game. It's your call on how you want to go about things. There's literally more than 1 way to go about pratically all things in the game. So whatever floats the boat :)

I'm ok with 2 per merit, what I would love is Elemental Debuffs INT scaling going higher then 150. Seriously once you have 150 INT they don't get any stronger which is ***, should keep scaling to 300 or more.