FFXIV - Black Mage Endwalker Guide - Openers, Rotation, Optimization, and Frequently Asked Questions

[Music] so you want to get better at black mage this video is aimed to show you not only the basics but delve into a couple of higher end optimization techniques that you can employ during your gameplay my name is exuplosion i am a black mage main who primarily does end game content like raiding and speedrunning [Music] i have to make a disclaimer here that this video will contain spoilers for the end walker expansion content including the two extreme trials that came out with the expansion release also this video is current as of the time of upload but if there are any significant balance changes throughout the expansion that will drastically change how black mage is played then i will post an updated video afterwards also this video will primarily cover black mage at level 90. now that that's over with i'll be splitting this video into several sections to make it easier to navigate in case you are only interested in a specific portion first let's discuss some miscellaneous questions people have with regards to black mage firstly what do you meld on black mage black mage loves all sub steps and there are no real bad sub stats for black mage your first priority is to meld spell speed until you have a comfort value you're probably saying to me what the heck is a comfort value well it's a value that you feel comfortable using me personally i find that playing black mage with a gcd of 2.36 or less to be ideal i've tried playing slower than this and i didn't really have a good time i would typically recommend that you start out with spell speed values of around 1 300 which would put you around 2.34 or 2.33 gcd this is usually where people start off after that it depends on what type of gear you have if your gear has a lot of crit then you should meld more crit critical hit as a stat scales a lot more when you have a lot of it in contrast to determination and direct hit which are linear scaling stats crit scales non-linearly so it compounds more when you have a lot more of it that is why people tend to say that crit has less value at the start of an expansion this is because the gear simply doesn't have a lot of sub stats on it compared to the gear that will have when the expansion is near its end blackmage typically has two types of best and slot gear sets during savage patches one of them will bias more towards critical chance and have a moderate spell speed amount somewhere around 2.30 gcd another one will bias a lot more towards spell speed determination and direct hit and not prioritize crit it's actually not very common to have a highest critical chance and also have high spell speed this is because the other casters in the game do not benefit as much as black mage from spell speed so there needs to be other gearing options for them if you're curious what the best in slot gear is for black mage check out the balanced discord server where the sets always get updated when new content comes out another question people ask a lot how do you know if you're doing enough damage at a certain item level or stats what damage should i be doing if i have this gear also on the balance server and linked in the description is something called the black mage relative damage calculation spreadsheet you can make a copy of this spreadsheet and use it to estimate your dps the spreadsheet also gets updated every patch with new best-in-slot gear all you have to do is put in your stats with food and it will output an average dps number that you should be able to hit you'll also be able to see how your gear compares to the current best and slot pieces in the spreadsheet you should try hitting a striking dummy for an extended period of time and see if you can get within the range that the spreadsheet predicts for your gear if you're drastically lower chances are that you're making rotational errors which will impact your dps next we'll discuss openers your opener is what you do at the start of a raid or trial so content where there is typically a countdown timer prior to pulling the boss it's meant to do a couple of things first synchronize buffs with teammates for increased damage output second use your long cooldown abilities like leylines manifont and amplifier to start the recast timer and also to set you up rotationally for the fight there are a lot of openers out there the most basic general use one that you should know for this expansion is the fire 3 start opener i have it here pictured on the screen there are two variations listed the first one is slightly stronger in terms of damage output since it uses both triple cast charges to get your spells off quicker however the second one is safer to use when doing a fight for the first time or when there is a mechanic in the first minute of the fight that having the second triple cast charge would be good for why do we start with fire 3 in the opener you may ask shouldn't we start with blizzard 3 and do a blizzard 4 so we can get paradox in the beginning of our opener well sure you could do that but with the way openers work you are effectively back loading a lot of your damage output so if you do a blizzard 3 start opener you are contributing less raid dps than if you are doing a fire 3 start opener that doesn't mean a blizzard 3 start opener is bad just that a fire 3 start opener will be better in most situations so here is the basic opener you'll want to use sharpcast before the pull starts if you get a 20 second countdown which is the most common countdown number i've seen you can pop shark cast anywhere between 20 and 12 seconds left on the timer you do have quite a bit of leeway but i recommend doing it whenever you see the countdown start we start with fire 3 precast at -3 seconds this means that it will hit the boss at 0 seconds on the timer immediately you start casting thunder so you will start getting your damage over time effect on the boss since we have no inherent places to weave in the opener you need to clip triple cast right after the thunder while this clip is technically reducing the effectiveness of the triple cast you do need to do this in order to get a lot of your spells off in time this also provides weaving windows for you to use your off global cooldown abilities like amplifier ley lines swift cast your second triple cast charge your intelligence potion and manifont once you finish the astral fire phase after the manifond you'll want to transition into your umbralized phase to start regenerating mana in the opener pictured we use xenoglossy followed by paradox and then blizzard 4 then the thunder proc that we received from the starting thundercast why do we do it in this order firstly the xenoglossy will fall into early 22nd raid buff such as a reaper's arcane circle and the paradox will fall into other 20 second raid buffs like dancer's technical finish the thunder 3 proc is last so as to allow the initial cast of your thunder to tick longer it will also catch long buffs like a summoner's searing light the xenoglossy in this opener can also be removed if it would be needed for movement later in the fight openers are flexible and can be adjusted based on the encounter ley lines in the opener is typically used around 10 seconds in but occasionally a fight may prefer a pre-pull ley lines this is when you use ley lines at 4 seconds in the countdown before you precast fire 3. when might you do this if a fight makes you leave ley lines earlier such as an e10s shadow keeper then you would tend to pre-pull or imagine a fight that phase changes at 2 minutes and 30 seconds if you used your ley lines at 10 seconds in the fight your next usage would be at 2 minutes and 10 seconds and so you would lose 10 seconds out of that second ley lines but if you had pre-pulled delay lines you would get two full usages there are also many other openers for example a 10f4 single transpose opener that i made a video about as well as a double transpose opener you shouldn't pick an opener because it does more damage but because it sets you up for success in a fight for example the 10f4 single transpose opener requires you to hard cast spells from approximately 26 seconds into the fight to 40 seconds into the fight if i tried to pull this opener off in a fight like e11s where there are mechanics like knockbacks happening then this opener is completely useless because i won't be able to weave my surecast but with the fire3 opener or maybe a different transpose opener you might have the freedom to react to mechanics in that time window another issue with the transpose openers is that you do need an mp-tick trigger or plug-in to make them 100 reliable if you don't use an np-tick trigger or plug-in there is a chance that you do not get the proper mp ticks which makes it not a great option for players who do not want to use add-ons or players who are on console and cannot use add-ons you might be wondering how the heck do these transpose openers even work i'll cover non-standard gameplay later in the video but a short explanation on how these openers even work is that when using transpose from astral fire 3 to umbrella ice 1 you gain a paradox marker by using paradox in umbralize 1 you go to umbralize 2. combine it with lucid dreaming which gives 550 mana every 3 seconds while you're in number lice you can reach close to maximum mana just by doing this either by casting a fire 3 from umbralize 2 which is a slow cast or by using several fillers like xenoglossy and thunder 3 proc to transpose a second time into astral fire 1 taking into account the amount of mana that you get every three seconds while you are in umbralize 1 or umbralize 2. but if you get a bad mp tick trying these transpose openers you'll get much less benefit that's why it's not recommended unless you can make them 100 reliable with an mp-tick plugin now that we've discussed the black mage opener let's discuss the black mage rotation so what exactly is a rotation it's the bread and butter sequence of spells that cycles you from umbral ice to astral fire to umbralise and so on and it is loopable it is not the same as your opener so don't get them confused the most basic black mage rotation out there is known as the standard rotation the standard rotation is pictured here assuming that we start in astral fire 3 you use blizzard 3 to swap elements then you use blizzard 4 to obtain umbral hearts refresh your dot with thunder 3 and use your umbralized paradox following this you swap to astral fire with fire three and then use three fire fours one paradox three fire fours and a despair it's important to note that with the 15 second duration of astral fire you do need paradox to refresh the timer in this rotation you do have the time to perform one extra cast on either side of the paradox for example if you found that you needed to move while you were executing the standard rotation you could insert a xenoglossy in the middle as pictured here and you still have time to use paradox before dropping astral fire even though the image displayed uses thunder in umbral ice it does occur sometimes that you have to refresh your thunder during your fire phase if you needed to reapply your thunder proc and astral fire you might opt for something like this to be able to sharp cast it in this scenario you front load the first half of your astral fire phase with four fire fours which allows you to use both azino glossy and a thunder 3 proc in the latter half of your astral fire phase without dropping a fire 4. now let's take a look at some of the common questions that people have while playing black mage in executing this rotation firstly where does triple cast go in this rotation a good spot for triple cast is after the fast fire 3 that takes you into astral fire or after using something like a xenoglossy in your fire phase you may opt to use triple cast on fire force and a despair or if you've got triple cast and manifont up you may opt to use it on a despair and then a mana font and then another fire 4 in despair this is usually the highest value for triple casts that you can get so if you can do it without sacrificing uptime elsewhere i do recommend it another question you may ask is when do i use ley lines or when do i use amplifier in the rotation for amplifier generally want to use it as soon as you're able to weave it effectively and not overcap on a polyglot stack for ley lines generally you will be able to use it as an ogcd weave during your triple cast windows as those would typically come up every minute how about mana font where does mana font go in this rotation your first use for mana font would be after a hard casted despair use any instance such as a fire 3 proc a xeno or a thunder 3 proc to weave manifonds and then cast one more fire four and one more to spare or if you can instant cast the despair instead from swiftcast or triplecast you can skip using other instant casts and just weave the mana font off the instance despair how about sharpcast and where do we use sharpcast in this rotation sharpcast is another ogcd that we need to weave you need to weave sharpcast with an instant cast spell such as a fire 3 proc a thunder 3 proc xena glossy an umbralized paradox or a spell made instant via triple cast or swift cast or you can weave it after a fast cast fast casts are those that you use to swap elements from maximum stacks for example a blizzard 3 casts an astral fire 3 has a very low cast time and you're actually able to weave one ogcd ability in that time it's the same thing with casting a fire 3 to swap from umbralyze 3 to astral fire 3. generally speaking using sharpcast on thunder in order to maintain procs is going to be higher value than using sharpcast on paradox and astral fire to get a firestarter proc since the thunderproc is 40 seconds long and sharpcast is 30 seconds you could technically sharpcast all thunder procs and never have to refresh thunder via a hard cast however all fights are different and you may choose to do one over the other based on the fight timeline for example if a boss is dying soon or becoming untargetable for an extended period of time for a mechanic you might not need the extra thundercloud refresh so you might opt to do sharpcast on paradox so you can do something with that firestarter proc let's take a short aside to talk about weaving because this is a big black mage question that a lot of people have what exactly is weaving and why do we need to do it if you've ever used an off global cooldown ability such as triple cast sharpcast manifont ley lines addle man award etc you probably know that there is an animation that your character does when this ability is cast this animation has an associated animation lock so while your character is doing this animation you are physically unable to cast any spells like fire 4 paradox blizzard 4 etc if you've ever tried to use an off global cooldown ability like triple cast right after hard casting a fire 4 for example you'll notice that your character will do the whole triple cast animation and only after the animation resolves are you able to execute the next spell this little bit of delay is called clipping and you should minimize it as much as possible ideally the only place you should clip is right at the beginning of the fight when you have to clip triple cast in your opener i see a lot of beginner and intermediate black mage players making this mistake often with abilities like sharpcast when you clip you are effectively not doing anything for around 0.7 seconds and this adds up a lot during the course of a whole fight this can lead to dropping several casts which of course will result in you doing less damage than someone who is weaving the ability so how exactly do you weave like i mentioned earlier in the sharpcast section when you use an instant cast spell you have time while your gcd is spinning to use that ability even though your character is doing the animation you are physically unable to cast a spell as your global cooldown is still rolling that means that you are not penalized by the animation lock you are normally able to weave two off global cooldown abilities within one instant cast spell so for example in the opener the amplifier and ley lines are used in a double weave after an instant fire4 however depending on your ping to the server the higher your ping is you may find it harder to perform double weaves and if you try to fit three abilities within that window you will tend to clip a little bit another question that i've heard a lot of people ask is is it true that you want to make your ice phase as short as possible and the answer is no this is a common misconception and it could not be further from the truth your first goal in ice phase is to get max mana but besides that there are other things that you need to prioritize before you enter your fire phase for example if you ended up in a situation where you were on two polyglot stacks close to over capping on the third one and you also had to use amplifier and you had to refresh thunder it is perfectly acceptable to have an ice phase like this this is normal and it shouldn't be something you are afraid of during your gameplay another thing you may ask is what do you do with the firestarter procs that you get from an astral fire paradox as a priority they should first and foremost be used for uptime purposes so if you need to move somewhere and you have nothing else to cast use your fire three proc or you can use it as an instant cast spell to weave an ogcd such as ley lines manifonds amplifier manaward addle etc another use for firestarter procs is for non-standard transpose lines which we'll cover now have you ever wondered why there are so many top black mage players on fflogs who frequently deviate from the standard rotation that i've just described the common element in their gameplay is they typically use transpose instead of blizzard 3 to swap from astral fire to umbralise now why do they do such a thing it all has to do with potency per second in minimizing the casts of weak spells for example a blizzard 3 cast from astral fire 3 is a fairly weak spell its potency is 240 base but it's multiplied by the 0.7 x damage multiplier of ice spells in astral fire 3 which makes it only 168 potency it's also the same situation when you use fire 3 from umbralize 3. what if we could skip these cats and do something better probably the simplest but not the best transpose line that you can do is something like this you use transpose after despair either by using an instant cast ability like xenoglossy t3p or f3p to weave it or you could use an instant cast to spare then as soon as you transpose you use paradox and umbralise this is an instant cast ability that takes you from umbralize 1 to armor ice 2 in this scenario then while you're in umbralize 2 you cast fire 3 which is a slow cast this slow cast should be enough time for you to get one more mana tick after this fire three casts you'd cast four fire fours in a despair now is this sequence of spells really that good well in terms of potency per second this sequence of spells that i've just described has a potency per second of 166 whereas the standard black mage rotation has a potency per second of 165.52 that's a whole one potency per second increase or around point six percent which isn't much consider that you have to be relatively stationary during this non-standard line and if you do it at the wrong time and have to end it early with the despair or refresh with the fire 1 since you have no paradox you'd be looking at closer to a two to three percent loss instead the advantages of the standard rotation is that you have more freedom of movement and potential at generating a fire three proc which can be used for much stronger transpose lines than the slow fire 3 into 4 fire 4 despair line an easy to use transpose line that you can apply while still doing the standard rotation is pictured here i've covered this one during the media tour overview video but all you have to do is if you have an existing firestarter proc use transpose after your umbralized paradox and use the firestarter proc instead now why is this good shouldn't we use the fire 3 proc while we're in astral fire 3 for more damage well it's because the alternative is using the fire 3 proc in astral fire 3 and then also using a fast fire 3 to switch from umbralize 3 to astral fire 3 in your next fire phase versus just using the fire 3 proc once in astral fire 1 which accomplishes both things in one spell this is efficient potency per second wise if you do this line you are looking at closer to a 1.1 percent gain over the standard rotation this is why most logs will have some standard rotation lines included as the fire 3 proc potential is quite large [Music] there are other transpose lines you can do as well for example a common one with a fire 3 proc is to do a double transpose line as pictured here this line on its own is quite strong but the disadvantage is you do need to allocate a lot of resources to make it work you need an instant to weave transpose or you need to use an instant despair plus you need three fillers in umbral ice because you need to kill time for that five second transpose cooldown to come back up you're also fairly immobile in the latter half once you cast the fire 3 proc as you have less time to complete your fire phase due to fire 3 proc starting your astral fire timer immediately if you do need to cast a fire 1 in the middle of that phase you would lose a fire 4 unless you have a surplus of mana and the gain from the line would not be as strong [Music] typically avoiding the slow cast fire 3 will give the largest rewards for example we can avoid a double transpose and do something similar with a swift casted fire 3 from umbrella ice 2. this line is about 5 percent better than the slow fire 3 4 fire 4 despair line that i covered at the beginning of this section now there are a lot of transpose lines possible and i can't possibly cover them all in one video i do suggest keeping an eye on the balance black mage resources channel because there is a document getting worked on and released soon with the potency per second of various transpose lines but i hope that this explains some of the common lines that you can do and how you can execute them i'll also include a link in the description for that document when it gets released besides transpose lines there's also the question of non-transpose blizzard 4 skipping lines black mages used to do this a lot in shadow bringers as it was a big dps gain then but with the advent of end walker which brought paradox in a buffed blizzard 4 there's almost no reason to skip casting blizzard 4 if you cast blizzard 3. a 4 fire 4 despair line is almost 2 percent worse than the standard rotation now in a five fire four to spare line which was common to do under ley lines and shadow ringers is now 0.2 percent worse than the standard rotation the only time you should consider skipping blizzard 4 once you've casted blizzard 3 is if you are in a situation where a boss will die before you can execute the full standard rotation now of course the follow-up question a lot of people have when they encounter non-standard transpose optimizations is do i have to do this transpose stuff to get a purple orange pink or gold parse and the answer to this question frankly is no you don't you can get a top 10 parse in the world playing completely standard if that's what you want to do it has been done before and it will be done in the future these are minor optimizations that at most will give you a little boost in damage far and away the biggest contributor to your parse is your uptime you need to always be casting in order to get a good parse now what do i mean by this if you look at your log in xiv analysis a useful tool that you can paste fflog's report links into you can see errors that you are doing and places where you can improve the most important metric on the website is the always be casting module it is vital that this metric is as high as possible aim for higher than 95 percent closer to 98 to 99 to be ideal if you have a number that's something like this and you're wondering if non-standard is going to make you better it isn't the hard truth is that you simply need to start working on fundamentals always casting spells and keeping your gcd rolling learning to weave properly and not hard clipping ogcd's like sharp cast triple cast etc always planning ahead and thinking about how you are going to move to resolve a mechanic coming up in the future the worst thing that you can do on black mage is do extended movements while not casting a single spell non-standard gameplay isn't a cure for bad fundamentals it is a tool for optimized players to squeeze as much as they can out of the job's kit another question i get asked often is how do you know when to do a standard rotation or when to use a transpose line the simplest answer i can give you is it depends on the fight and what is happening currently and what will happen in the future for example if i tried doing a slow fire 3 transpose line in heidelin extreme during the subparhylian chakram rotation mechanic i would be in a pretty bad position i would have no weave space to do a triple cast unless i burn a xena glossy or thunderproc potentially overwriting my dot timer however if performing a standard rotation at this time i have much more freedom of movement and weaving making the movement much easier to deal with you should always be thinking what is going to happen in this fight in the next 15 20 seconds or even longer now if you think about a fight like zodiac extreme there is actually no mechanic requiring you to move at all in this fight for the first minute that means that doing transpose lines in the first minute of this fight are more or less free as long as you're still able to move for the first exoterracos mechanic one minute in the fight now everything we've talked about so far has been relating to single target encounters what about aoe scenarios let's cover something first when do you use aoe and when do you use single target generally you should use aoe spells when there are three or more targets however there are some exceptions namely number one you should use highfire 2 on two targets to swap to astral fire as a fast cast as this is higher potency than using fire 3. number 2 use flare unenhanced on two targets instead of despair if you're able to instant cast the flare again this is due to a small potency gain if you have to hard cast the flare then it's not worth doing it on two targets the third is use foul on two targets instead of xenoglossy this one is a pretty free potency gain [Music] now what about when there are three or more targets your standard aoe rotation for black mage starting at level 82 is the following high blizzard 2 then freeze then thunder 4 then high fire 2 2 more high fire twos and then two flares this is also the black mage aoe rotation from level 58 onwards for reference you just have to replace hype laser 2 and high fire 2 with blizzard 2 and fire 2 respectively let's go over this rotation first you cast high blizzard 2 to go into umbral ice next you cast freeze first because it costs no mana and you may not have mp right away after casting high blizzard 2 to cast thunder breeze also gives you the umbral hearts required for your fire phase follow this up with your thunder 4 either a proc or hard cast make sure to use sharp cast on these during dungeon pulls the first high fire 2 is the fast cast that swaps you from umbralized to astral fire this does not consume one of your umbral hearts the next two high fire twos will consume two of the three umbral hearts that you have the first flare will consume the last humble heart that you have and leave you with a little bit of mana left over and you will use this mana to cast the second flare now a common question people have here is why do we need to cast the third high fire 2 can't we just use 1 and astral fire to get the enhanced flare buff and then use 2 flares afterwards and the answer is simply it's because it does more damage if you have three enemies and you use the standard aoe rotation as listed you're looking at around 210 potency per second but if you skip a high fire 2 your aoe rotation would be around 204 potency per second that's around three percent worse it doesn't mean a whole lot in terms of a dungeon but if you care about maximizing your damage then cast the extra high fire too however if the dungeon mobs are dying quickly you can opt to skip one of the high fire 2s so that you can get into your flares quicker also if you have triple cast up you can skip one of the high fire 2's you can weave triple cast after your fast cast high fire 2 and then use the charges on an astral fire 3 high fire 2 and then 2 flares add in mana font and swift cast and you can do a third flare bowel and dungeons can be used pretty much whenever although i recommend using it pretty much solely in your ice phase or use it to weave swift cast or triple cast in your fire phase if you need it to use on flares thanks everyone for watching and be sure to stay tuned for more end walker black mage content if you enjoyed the video please feel free to like comment and subscribe and share with anyone you think would benefit from watching

Channel: Eksu Plosion

Views: 214,346

Keywords: ffxiv eksu plosion, eksu plosion, ffxiv blm guide, ffxiv black mage guide, endwalker black mage, black mage endwalker rotation, blm endwalker rotation, blm endwalker opener, blm endwalker transpose, endwalker black mage guide, ffixv blm guide, blm guide endwalker, blm rotation guide

Id: oitfdOPiqpw

Length: 31min 13sec (1873 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 28 2021