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

foreign Mr Happy here and welcome back to another Final Fantasy 14 job retrospect video for a realm reborn's 10th anniversary we've been looking back at all the iterations of the existing jobs at least the ones that have been around for the majority of that last decade this video we're going to be taking a look at thematured and black magin honestly it's one of the jobs I'm most curious to look back at because when I think of Black Mage I think of a job that's just kind of had a Natural Evolution from expansion to expansion and so kind of remembering how I guess natural that was I just wonder how long the video will even be but there are a lot of little things that have happened potency changes and even just core game mechanics that have been fine-tuned to make the job The Kind of Perfect Caster that it is today at least in my eyes so without further Ado I say we get started alright so here we go the turge around we're born Wiki page we use something called the way back machine in order to take a look at these older archived web pages and thankful the console Gamer's Wiki does have these old pages on hand but I don't know it's just kind of nostalgic you know it has that kind of early Final Fantasy 14 Vibe even like you know more classic MMO Vibe looking kind of Wiki but before we can even talk about Black Mage we do need to start with Thomas because you needed level 30 thermaturge in order to get Black Mage they still technically need that today but we also needed level 15 Archer very weird thing to need but fortunately Archer's cross-class skills made that a pretty good secondary choice they could have gone a couple other directions with it but I'm kind of glad I went with archer back in the day now one of my favorite things about thamaturg even to this day is the fact that within the first two spells you learn you are introduced to the I'd say the primary game mechanic for the job yeah we kind of take it for granted nowadays because it's just kind of a thing that happens and gets managed but they are still core and they've just been around for such a long time they've just been refined in tune now with blizzard and fire you can see they deal ice damage or fire damage with a potency of 150. the blizzard having the heavy effect is something I remember being very popular it's one of the reasons why ice Mages were really popular for Overworld leveling because people would use that heavy effect in order to make sure they didn't get hit by monsters but not a good thing you didn't want to be an ice Mage but that definitely didn't help when people got really used to Casting blizzard one in the Overworld however the big thing is umbral ice and astral fire these are two phases that you basically swap between as a black mage with astral fire being your big damage phase and I'm realized being your MP recovery phase basically during astral fire your fire spells they deal more damage they cost more MP and your MP regeneration completely halts so once you lock in fire phase you have to spend all of your MP before you leave it now by casting an ice spell you would leave astral fire and then go into umbral ice and umbral Ice was just about regenerating MP very very quickly it would also reduce the cast time and the MP cost of fire spell so it was really quick to go back into fire but that's the idea dump a ton of damage and Fire fire go over to Blizzard get some MP back you know cast the Thunder spell which was another thing they have to manage or is another thing they have to manage um and that was just kind of the the Simplicity of it you didn't want to drop astral fire you didn't want to drop on real ice and that's just kind of what you focused around now at the early levels you only have one stack of Astral Fire and umbral Ice so you don't really cast a lot of uh spells in order to generate more stacks of them at later levels you get more stacks and that is very very important to the way that the job plays but another thing that had a lot of people miss playing vomitage at the early levels is those two spells and then transpose so transpose at level four just lets you swap between astral Fire and umbral Ice but only getting a single stack of the opposite one so this is how players early on the class get used to using their or interacting with their fire and ice spells because when you cast blizzard it gets rid of Fire doesn't just send you into umbral ice you would need to cast another one so instead people would spend all their MP transpose you know regenerate MP wall casting blizzard transpose and that's just how the early game would go but when we get into the level 30 range that's where it's supposed to change on a lot of players didn't pick that up now Thunder's a DOT that you just have to manage you want it on the enemy at all times because at the later levels it will proc a certain effect that is pretty important towards more damage now sure cast and sleep nice two skills funny thing with sleep it's actually supposed to be used for one of their class quests in order to make it a lot easier um because you're going to be up against multiple enemies at one and black mage doesn't really have great options for that tomaturge does because you can still take conjurer skills and that's definitely what I did way back when but you can like put one target to sleep while you kill the other Target I used to actually just sleep all the targets and run to the end I think I still do that when I occasionally do the lower level quests nowadays but sure cast's next spell is cast without interruption it was pretty useless in the early days because yeah it was nice when you were out soloing and you were leveling and you didn't want to get interrupted but it's still just it wasn't that good compared to well just not being the Target and just casting then you get blizzard to your first AOE spell at level 12 and one of the lowest level AOE abilities you could get and still I think I'd have to look at the current jobs and remember them all like side by side but I still think it is that we do have pretty early level uh AOE on black mange even now I will see by the end of this video what their lowest level AOE is but I think it's still around this point it's just an AOE ice effect around the player and man going into Dungeons and just seeing people stand in the middle the pack and spam blizzard too I mean it was what it was and honestly that was a little bit too good for quite some time even going into the later expansions and I say good it was really more so the only option people would tolerate for quite some time it also did a bind effect on all the enemies nearby and that was something that was pretty nice again for the Overworld people would do that with kiting they'd like blizzard until something was up in their face then they'd blizzard too then they'd back off and blizzard again people just really wanted to be ice Mages man Blitzer 2 also not requiring a target with something fairly interesting we had a situation in turn five where the boss didn't load like somebody was just like it came back from a phase and the boss wasn't there so the the black man just stood in the middle of the room and spam blizzard too to still do TPS not something you were supposed to use it for but hey it worked in that particular situation then you have scathe it honestly it it seems like a tool that's supposed to be like oh I need to move and I don't want to not cast a spell but even back then scathe was kind of a meme it's just an instant thin cast ability it doesn't interact with astral fire or umbral ice in any way thus if you had to use it it wasn't considered a good thing and to this day it's still kind of in that exact same spot I mean they changed the effect and they changed the value of the potency but it's still to this day like if you have to use skate something has gone horribly wrong back then you didn't have nearly as many tools so you saw it a little bit more but it had to be done like so specifically otherwise it was just a disaster through and through then you have fire two which was a targeted AOE and this of course was supposed to be your higher damage AOE at the early levels with astral fire too you burn through your MP so quick that a lot of the times people were just annoyed to use it because they do a couple of fire twos and then have to swap and then in order to use blizzard too they'd have to make sure they were standing in range of all the enemies so most people just opted to spamming blizzard too I mean they're both 100 potency so people just decided they didn't care about the astral fire damage increase in them well just blizzard too and again a lot of these early thermometer skills just build kind of bad habits for players I think now Thunder one would become Thunder two at this level funny thing though about thunder too and I actually have to make sure that that's an actual upgrade I remember in the beta tests for a realm or born Thunder 1 and Thunder 2 were actually two different spells are two different effects so you could actually stack them both which meant in theory you could have done the same with thunder 3 which meant you could have just managed all three Thunder spells on top of fire and it was it wouldn't have been good if it had made it to that point but a fairly certain Thunder one becomes Thunder two in fact we can scroll down here and double check in fact it does not so maybe what I'm remembering wasn't actually something that waited until maybe I think maybe you just decided you know what I think they might have made it so that it overwrites it because I'm noticing that the potency is actually the same the is this the is the dot poke actually you know the dot potency is the same on all of them so it's just the base potency that seems to be going up with each of them 30 to 50 to 6 60 and obviously when we get to talking about one of their other passives That Base potency does in fact play a role but man I remember that being a possibility that we had considered for for Black Mage that they could just be a thunder mage man that would have been uh interesting to say the least Swift's still one of the most important abilities to this day used to come from Thomas if other classes wanted to use it they needed to make sure they had thomature just one of their subclasses and then they would need it at level 26. next Wells cast immediately three minute cooldown back then yikes it's only a minute now but uh you know it didn't make it any less useful just meant that uh you were using it uh it was it was costly Man Award also an interesting one so it creates a barrier that nullifies magic damage totaling up to 30 percent of Maximum HP for 20 seconds now that definitely gets changed before the end of A Realm Reborn because I remember oh no no wait there's men award and Mana wall see I'm forgetting some things I'm starting to remember them now yeah just an HP barrier I mean that's not unfamiliar to Black Mages nowadays it's you know it's very useful to have a Max HP shield and people appreciated it on Black Mage back then uh then you get to fire three now level 34 is where the disasters began for your average llama turges and black Mages because Fire 3 is unique from fire one in a couple of ways one it does a lot more potency and two it costs a lot more MP so what would happen is players would get fire three and be like Oh I'll just use salsa spam Fire 3 and then when I'm out of MP I'll transpose and I'll cast blizzard and blah blah blah because that's what they had been doing all those levels but fire three was actually not meant for that it grants you astral Fire 3 immediately so now you have all three stacks of Astral Fire and umbral Ice so the idea was you would only use Fire 3 and a few levels later blizzard 3 to swap phases between astral Fire and umbral Ice foregoing the transpose unless absolutely necessary to cover an emergency situation but players didn't realize that it wasn't intuitive and when I say it wasn't I mean like it still kind of happens to this day I'm pretty sure I haven't leveled with like a low level Black Mage in quite some time but I'd have to assume that stuff like this still happens to this day but I gotta maybe remember I haven't played Black Mage as much as I did at the end of shadowbringer so like the end Walker Changers are still kind of a little shaky so this will be a good reminder for me but the number of times I would go into like Cutters cry and see a black mage spam fire three fire three transpose blizzard one or then eventually you know blizzard three blizzard three transpose fire three five and it was just a disaster and a lot of the times you try to help people that were doing that and they just they would just shrug you off be like you don't know what you're talking about or I didn't ask for help oh man I've tried to help so many black Mages in that level range and I'd say about 80 to 90 percent of them would fight me on the hey you know just you know not trying to be rude I just you know wanted to let you know this and be like I didn't ask leave me alone but I was just so common I just I can't help but think about it lethargy I forgot about this just literally slow and heavy for 12 seconds now the slow is interesting because on some enemies that's you know obviously going to reduce the amount of damage that they deal the heavy being for kiting but even still it just that slow didn't really work on a lot of enemies I think it probably worked on Ifrit hard mode maybe it worked on like Garuda or something but you didn't see that effect very often because most bosses were immune to that kind of stuff and then Thunder three just the highest level Thunder dot that you would get and ethereal manipulation an ability that's still around to this day one that's uh not as important but mastering the use of this skill was always something that had to be considered basically it just rushes you to a Target side so it doesn't instantly teleport you you kind of like just like fly in their Direction like chest out and everything um however nowadays it's got a really short cooldown I think it's like 10 seconds nowadays it was a three minute cooldown the magic material manipulation was still three minutes oh my goodness I mean we have so much movement now on Black Mage that it doesn't really matter that much but that's that's painful to think about and yes amateurs just yeah a lot of this stuff is still familiar to this day maybe a little less Mimi and some of it definitely has some different effects especially looking at the AOE but overall a lot of it's still familiar I'm looking over at the traits uh grants a 15 chance that upon you sure cast will have no recast time which means you can sure cast twice in a row so the ability that's already barely useful 15 of the time you get to use it a second time fantastic there's the second stack of Astral fire umbrella ice at level 20 and then at level 30 uh where where is it level 30 level 40. there's level level 40. there it is a level 40. and get the third stack of Astral fire and umbrella so you even have fire three and blizzard three like levels before you could even get the third stack so so weird the enhanced scathe 20 chance it deals double damage oh boy sure do love going for that gamble however there are some traits here that were and still are very important to the jobs function at level 28 you have Thundercloud so every time a thunder dot ticks there's a five percent chance that it procs Thundercloud and that allows you to instantly cast your next Thunder spell deal all the damage that it would do over time up front as initial damage it would cost no MP and then of course it would reapply the dots so the Hope was that you would get enough Thundercloud procs to never have to hard cast Thunder again it doesn't work out that way with a 1 in 20 proc chance but um very very important ability very strong burst just very powerful in general and something that uh you know you would celebrate when you got a lot of them and be mad when you barely got any of them Firestarter also something fairly fairly similar because when you use Fire 3 to get into fire phase but that meant that in the fire phase you were still spamming fire one however if you got a fire starter proc then you could replace a fire one with fire three because it would make fire three require no MP have no cast time so it's just a flat gain and on top of that then you could stay in fire for longer you could use the instant cast for movement a lot of value in that individual skill um the only problem being that you know if you didn't get any again it didn't feel good and you know when you did get it you had to make sure you used it well but either way there was just kind of the thing oh you know it was a really really bad thing about early fire starter and I think Firestarter remained this way for quite some time but it didn't matter as much in Heaven's horn is that so your proxin in Final Fantasy 14 and a realm are born they were kind of tied to the animation of your skill a lot more so fire one has a travel time between when it leaves the Black Mage and hits the opponent and all of its effects would not trigger until that moment when it actually hits and the Damage number pops up that included the application of Astral fire which could mean mean that even though you had like a second left and you finished the cast that the travel time would make it so that it would wear off but it would also mean that you couldn't realistically do a fire one into an into a fire three even if you got a fire starter proc because you should already be casting the next fire one by the time the fire one lands on the opponent so what could happen is you get a fire starter proc but you're already mid-cassing another fire and you're going to want to finish that you don't want to just interrupt it to use the fire starter but then what if that one gives you a fire starter but you then you've just spent the fire three and the fire three didn't go off before you got the fire starter so now you're just you're you just basically lose a stack for for nothing because of the travel time applying to the applications this was a problem with a lot of jobs with black mage getting the double Fire Starter proc and losing one was a super super just annoying thing to have happen something they eventually rectified but yeah definitely a super annoying thing enhanced Man Award just makes it more of your max HP that makes it the 30 that we read earlier and then you know know sleep if it goes from single Target to five yard radius and an AOE whoop D2 now looking over at Black Mage we have a few pretty important skills first we have convert sacrifices HP to MP this is only here because of Final Fantasy 11 red Mages had convert in Final Fantasy 14 but it wasn't uncommon to go Black Mage sub Red Mage it wasn't until later levels when the level cap was increased that you could really convert as another job because of the level that Red Mage learned it but that's the reason that it's here in the first place so yeah imagine just being in a raid raid wide AOE is about to come out and your black mage hits convert I saw so many black Mages kill themselves with convert and keep in mind restoring MP is super useful because it keeps you in fire phase longer I mean that was the primary use of it then and it's not called convert anymore but that's still kind of the primary purpose of that return MP that you can have now on top of that it had a three minute cool down cooldowns were so long and a realm were born some of them still are but it's there was a lot of really long cooldowns back then you had freeze covers a designated area in ice it was a placed ground AOE for quite some expansions with a potency of 20. realistically freeze was only there as a ranged ice AOE that bind or bound enemies it did 20 potency that's nothing you never wanted to cast freeze it was considered a waste of a button and you avoided it at all costs especially with the three and a half second cast time that it actually has now apocostasis or apocal stasis or if I don't know that's what we're going with um this was actually a super useful skill they had for quite some time increases a party members fire ice and lightning resist by 30 percent for 12 seconds cannot be reused on an individual for 60 seconds when the effect was off yeah they were doing that back then to be a double black major couldn't double apoc them now the big thing is a lot of damage was fire ice or lightning back then but there was an aspect of damage So eventually apoc would see a change just I believe reducing magic damage taken and it became really useful over time I mean if you knew when to use it no matter what just reducing that kind of damage was nice it's just here it was a little too Niche and when they stopped using exactly those elements you know they needed to update apoc to go along with it two minute cooldown also not the worst given that it's a defense that's probably what it would have nowadays you know given if we had it still but yeah either way then manual manual was busted creates a barrier that nullifies two physical attacks for 60 seconds there was a lot more physical attacks in the game back then and Mana wall if you use it on on a physical attack and made it do zero damage most of the time it would eliminate the effect overall Titans landslides or physical damage so you would not too and often see a black mage use Mana wall to avoid a set of landslides just so they could keep casting I remember on turn 13 the Earth shakers those are physical damage black Mages would use Mana wall so they would take zero damage from two of them and then with a two minute cooldown I mean as long as you didn't get targeted by two in a row I mean you were one of the best targets to get targeted by that for the sake of the healers so uh very very powerful skill just because nullifying an attack usually meant to limit donating its effect way back when and then Flair their go-to AOE a four second cast time now this is and you know or was and still is a very very powerful AOE ability the big thing was combining Flair with stuff like convert and also using uh MP ticks to very creatively try to get an extra flare out so there's a lot of like little tricks that you could do with it but much like freeze a lot of people didn't like using Flair they they acknowledged that it was good but it was really like if you had Swift cast you wanted to use it because nobody wanted to sit through that four second cast time even if it was one of your stronger AOE options so um the the black main skills themselves weren't really the important bit of Black Mage in A Realm Reborn it really was all the vomitered skills that defined the job which is very different from the way most of the other jobs worked even way back when Now cross-class actions they had raging strikes which I think was just oh no hawkside was just dexterity yeah raging strike was damage dealt so of course you wanted that Hawk's eye was accuracy and dexterity now he should have had enough accuracy and raid so that that portion shouldn't have mattered unless there was a boss that had some sort of evasion buff in which case that accuracy would actually come in handy um but yeah raging strike's important quelling strikes reducing your enmity given how much damage Black Mage does uh that was very important but then ruin physic you ignored those virus you definitely took even though it was the weak version of virus because you weren't on an Arcanist class job it's still something that black Mages definitely took an eye for night you know putting that defensive cooldown on somebody else or even I don't think you could actually put it on yourself pretty sure that it was only an ally but yeah having those extra couple of tools just gave Thomas and black mage a little bit extra of an edge now by the end of A Realm Reborn there were some changes to thamaturg and Black Mage and also to the overall style of this page because it looks a lot nicer now in fact it doesn't work with my cropping because it's done like a proper Page look at this now we get to do some some editing in the middle the video but either way you know they did go out of their way to I believe change potencies and maybe some MP costs at the time um you can see for example this is 170 instead of 150 so they bumped that up uh Thunder looks to be the same looks like thunder only has a duration of 12 seconds and then Thunder two as a duration uh of 15 seconds and then Thunder three is a duration of 18 seconds because I think they were I think they did that to increase the value of Thundercloud on Thunder three if I recall people might have actually Thunder clouded stuff other than thunder three way back when I'm I'm starting to remember that being a thing of potentially thunderclouding Thunders one or two and I think they wanted to Define Thunder free as yeah you should be thunderclouding thunder three at this point because they weren't just upgrading skills back then you actually had the multiple tiers of Thunders available and it was just it was just a little strange to say the least uh looking at some of the other skills there's probably some other small changes in here if we were to look at like cast times and stuff I'm sure some of that goes a little bit differently I'm seeing you know two seconds three seconds for fire three which you know wasn't exactly the greatest thing but it is what it is uh yeah we can see the cooldown 2.5 three seconds three seconds on really uh Thunder two is three seconds and thunder three was three and a half seconds you know what I hadn't even noticed that yet three seconds three and a half half seconds yeah so to match the cast times being longer they made sure that the durations also changed when they got oh no it's actually 15 seconds here too is it 12 seconds oh okay so I was blocked I actually missed that in the earlier portion so yeah they that wasn't a change they had made I do recall that being a thing though but I think that was just about the amount of MP you had available or something whenever you uh were trying to hardcast it at any given point in the rotation if it was going to fall off try to remember all those little tiny details those things that like career black Mages and the matures just really really remembered but hey you know other than that not much really changed across the rest of the job I mean you can see fire 3 looks like is that a little bit of a potency bump yeah another 20 potency on blizzard 3 and fire three and they did this a lot with black mage Black Mage would regularly just get 10 or 20 potency on some of their spells and that was kind of just considered their adjustment outside of some functional changes in Heaven's word and storm blood so not that surprising to see that be the thing this still being three minutes by the end of the expansion blows my mind though it's just insulting it's still three minutes on ethereal manipulation and then going here convert it's still three minutes you know freeze was a hundred potency instead of 20. yeah much needed people still didn't like using it again that cast time was something that really kept people away but it's all a little more use than with it being a hundred potency instead and here's apoc now being uh reduces a party member's magic vulnerability by 20 reduces magic damage taken by 20 so much much more useful however it was also raised to a three minute cooldown it would appear and uh that's toxic because it definitely shouldn't be that and then flare it looks like that's the same potency same cast time everything is all the same there and then this is just done a little bit differently so yeah Realm Reborn black mage kind of just stayed the same the whole time and while you did see a decent number of black Mages even way back in a realm were born the job was considered the you really need to be a masochist to want to play this in hardcore content because you know especially here they they didn't have a lot of movement tools you know that that whole skate thing was a lot more reasonable back then because if if there was ever a lot of movement you needed you had one swift cast and did that cooldown go down okay Swift gas went down to 60 seconds fortunately but for the end of A Realm Reborn because that that would have been awful if that didn't change um but either way I mean one you know instant cast guaranteed instant cast a minute you basically the no movement was coming and try to stock up on a thundercloud stock up on a fire starter even if it meant overwriting it because you really wanted to avoid using scathe at any cost necessary and uh yeah it was just something you you only saw from players who really knew it and really wanted to play it otherwise Summoner was a lot more popular a lot more played just because even though it was very you know dot heavy there's a lot of little intricacies to it it was still considered something easier to play you could still do stuff on the Move Your Pet was always dealing damage even if it could die because it could actually be hit by aoes back then um and it just it was always an uphill battle getting people to play Blackman check I'd say it's still an uphill battle to the this day now that being said aroma-born Black Mage set the foundation but it's heavensward Black Mage that I would say really pushed it in the direction that we see it now astral fire umbrella that's cool and all but do you know about enokian let's learn all right here we are into the heavensward thematured page now for the most part we have the same stuff here you know still need Archer still Fama turge we see a few more potency changes you can see these are up to 180 at this point at their base potency now I don't recall if astral fire or umbral ice had their percentage increases changed to compensate for this or if this is on top of those because that's the thing a lot of the like little thermometers and black mage changes they aren't immediately obvious when you're just looking at the skills because there are points in time where they just make changes to the jobs and they're just they're not they're not documented super well I know for example in the middle of Heaven's word I think I researched it to be like patch 3.2 they made it so that whole finickiness with you know fire one and how it travels before it'll actually give you the proc that was fixed I think in 3.2 and uh that's not going to be reflected anywhere here it's not going to say that under the the abilities description that's just like an under the hood change that they made and is only documented in the patch notes that being said you know you do have some base potency upgrades here you still have thunder you even have of course them listing now the thunder cloud potency the thunder struck potency if you will call it that uh as you can see this goes you know potency of 40 for 18 seconds so now we're seeing 18 21 and 24 seconds for Thunders one two and three uh that was in an attempt to make it so you didn't have to manage them as intensely and that's very important given the actual changes that they made to Black Mage across well the rest of the expansion sure cast still sure cast sleep still sleep blizzard two still blizzard two Ponzi brought back down again whoopty do mine for eight seconds now though we skate still skate fire two still fire two Thunder two still Thunder two Swift cast still a minute Still Still Swift Gas Man Award still Man Award fire three still fire three blizzard three lethargy Thunder three ethereal manipulation down to 30 seconds much needed change because again it should have never been as long as it was but I mean look at this look at how unchanged pretty much all of this is I mean I'm sure if we look at the trachea Thundercloud is now a 10 chance instead of a five percent chance and uh Fire Starter still the same however so you know like even this like really didn't change at all because it was just what was what was there to change you know it wasn't like there was anything fundamentally wrong people are just intimidated by the job but if you thought you were intimidated by the job in a realm or born where yeah you know it could be kind of tough you were not mentally prepared for Black Mage I think Heaven's word Black Mage really scarred the community in terms of ever recommending somebody pick up Black Mage as a job especially for Prague because it is the heavensward skills that scared a lot of people away from the job for years and years to come now we still have convert uh still three minute cooldown freeze still pretty much here you know has the potency has the bind uh apoc still the magic Vault Mana wall uh now a barrier that nullifies physical damage so because of all those cheese moments like with uh you know in mitigating damage outright in in certain situations and then taking Zero from physical damage just removing effects overall instead they made it something that only nullifies physical damage now if I go back to Mana Ward this nullifies magic damage but did I actually I might have skipped past it didn't it nullify only magic damage back then too I think it did I'm pretty sure Man Award yeah nullify's magic damage totaling so yeah I mean that's a lot of the aoes in the game but even still it was so weird that they gave them one skill for physical damage one skill for magic damage that's the kind of button bloat we had back then it's like you could just make one that does one effect and not have two different ones for two different effects so that was really really weird but either way I mean it made you very very defensive so still Mana wall here still Flare still four seconds still 260 potency now they started having the damage fall off though 10 less damage after each Target hit up to 50 percent reduced that was not popular when it first happened for any of the jobs that had happened for but that's not the thing anyone really focused on for Black Mage it's their next several skills that you'll definitely recognize even to this day so Leia lines was a little you know it was it still is Ley lines you just put down like a little sigil on the ground that that rotates and when you're standing in it you get a buff now back then it was 15 spell speed it says attack speed but I mean you're casting spells so realistically that's what it was and I don't remember what the number is now but that was once every 90 seconds and it lasts tested 30 seconds very important to maximize the amount of time you spend in Ley lines it still is to this day and please remember to tell your teammates the Ley lines is only for me because there's nothing a black mage hated more back then than putting a Ley lines off to the side in hopes of not getting targeted for an attack and then somebody else walking an attack over to them and dropping it right on the lay line that was uh people didn't like that and it definitely happened a lot but 30 seconds is a lot of time to get all that extra speed especially given the other spells that they had now sharpcast would ensure the next fire or thunder spell would trigger additional effects it could also do escape to trigger the double damage but I hope that sharp Cascade is not something that people regularly considered you would basically use it either as a damage tool to guarantee you know the Thundercloud or the fire but more frequently you would use it to guarantee a fire starter or Thundercloud for movement related stuff especially for Thunder because getting that instant Thundercloud was something that was really really popular to do you'd get the Thundercloud hold it maybe know you could use it for an ad coming up or just to make sure that no matter what you had a thundercloud ready to go but most people would use this for movement nowadays it's used for technically you can use it for movement but nowadays it's used a little bit more uh in intentionally in order to increase damage in your regular rotation however the big thing would be enochian increases Magic damaged by five percent and allows the casting of Blizzard 4 and fire 4. now it says its duration is 30 seconds but what it doesn't tell you is the diminishing returns effect that enokian had now it has a 60 second cooldown but what would happen is every time you casted blizzard 4 it would refresh in Nokian so on the surface that sounds great you know it sounds like you could keep it up indefinitely but every time you cast it it would reduce the duration by I think five seconds so your first one used would be 30 then it would go down to 25 then it would go down to 20 15 and it just became like a Tighter and Tighter window in order to manage it with blizzard 4. because realistically while blizzard4 did that you didn't want to sit there spamming blizzard four you wanted to be making use of a Nokian to cast fire four which had this massive potency of 280 but it also had all the Buffs from astral fire so the idea was to try to get as many fire fours you still needed to use fire ones in order to refresh astral fire because otherwise it would just wear off and with only 10cm seconds on astral fire I believe yeah I think it still said that astral fire and umbrella are only 10 seconds at this point yeah um it was a very very tight window to make sure you got fire fours and fire ones if you had even the slightest delay in cast you were doomed but if a Nokian fell off and you had this just giant time window where a you didn't have a five percent magic damage now and B you didn't have access to these two skills you were dead in the water you were completely worthless damage wise in regards to end game rating so it was essential that you master how to do a fight and keep enokian up the entire time and that just scared so many people away why would why would people opt in to such a strict rotation and decision-making process that's fight to fight to fight to fight dependent when they could just not do that and play something else that may have its own intricacies but not that and that's kind of how people still think of Black Mage today people still think of it as the immobile I don't want to move I just need to keep a Nokian up job when it's not like that at all anymore and it's it's just it was born from this version of a Nokian and it just hasn't escaped it since now for cross-class actions still largely the same these have had some minor changes since then but it functionally still mostly the same and then we go to the end of Heaven's Ward where again we can just kind of take a quick peek to see if there are any major changes that we uh that we noticed you know I'm seeing sure cast uh you know 30 seconds sleep is still there blizzard 2 is still there fire two Thunder two swiftcast still a minute you know Man Award uh 15 magic damage I wonder if that's just not reflecting the trait yeah now and this page is just not reflecting the trait for that right now you know fire three still fire three blizzard three still blizzard three and this this is just how it would go man this is how Black Mage would go you'd maybe see some changes or be really difficult to recognize any changes that happen and again all I know for certain is that somewhere in the middle of three point x and again I think it's 3.2 they just made it so that your astral Fire and umbral Ice oh actually there is a major change 12 seconds yeah an extra few seconds on National Fire and umbral Ice I don't know which patch that was in but that was you know before the end of heavensward they had increased the amount of time for that and then they had also done that fix with a travel time of fire wasn't uh something that would grief you in regards to refreshing astral fire so it made refreshing and managing it that much easier to do uh then on top of that with blackmail to see if there's anything else they'll convert still freeze still apoc still oh my God yeah oh no no it was still three minutes I I'd forgotten my bad my bad uh Flare still flare Ley lines uh still you know 15 seconds still a Nokian still 30 everything else is still exactly the same this is what happened man this is why I was like how long is this video even gonna be because after I explained the job that's what it's gonna do and I guess there's not much else for me to say except now we're going into storm blood and there are some significant changes there but Black Mage is still gonna be Black Mage so let me show you what I mean all right and here we go into storm blood we get to use the job guide page now which you know nothing against console Gamers but I definitely prefer the layout of the job guide page unfortunately it also gives us our adjustments from the 4.0 versions of these skills so it makes it a lot easier for the sake of the video um blizzard there's the heavy effects going away it was indeed storm blood and not shadowbringers but you know had to go away at some point it also got an extra second on astral fire and Umbra lice that's going to be be reflected on pretty much all the fire and ice spells going forward so keep an eye out for that MP gloss on fire one being reduced not that big of a deal because you really were casting fire fours most of the time at the higher levels you know that was kind of the whole point of a no can but it didn't hurt it made those fire four phases where you have to stop and cast a fire one it just made them a little smoother I think it made it easier to have enough MP to cast blizzard three because that's something I kind of skirted over is that if you went into fire phase with not enough MP and you did the same amount of spells but you didn't actually like pay attention to how much MP you were going to have at the end of it you could run into a situation where you didn't have enough MP for blizzard 3 and then you had to transpose and people would just not even realize and just wonder what's wrong and then everything would fall apart so yeah MP ticks were and still are kind of an annoying thing about Black Mage because they're on a set timer and it's just it's the game's internal tick system so every single time you interact with it it's a little bit different but uh it's it's come a long way from the way it was but it is still something that uh it can be an annoyance for a lot of people anyway there's the 13 second timers Thunder one transpose sleep all unchanged blizzard 2 just exclusive to vomiturgeon Black Mage because cross class was gone fire two at its potency reduced I don't remember if that's because they equalize so at one point physical physical abilities and and magical spells had different scaling against enemies so like a hundred magic potency was worth more than a hundred physical potency just because of the way the calculations worked this might have stormline might have been when they fixed that now so there might be a few other uh potency reductions across the rest of this page um but I don't remember for certain I'd have to go out of my way and look it up but that's that's very likely what was happening another big change Thunder 2 now instead of being just a better Thunder one it's an AOE Thunder ability so now for AOE packs you have thunder 2 and eventually thunder four and for single Target you had Thunder 1 which would eventually upgrade to thunder 3. they also changed the level of it but other than that it was just if you were in an AOE pack you would Thunder you would do an AOE Thunder instead of a single Target one nothing too fancy and a lower chance to proc the Thundercloud buffer the thunder struck buff or whatever you want to call it but uh yeah I mean other than that just a pretty simple implementation now Mana wall was removed in storm blood so they made Man Award just 30 percent of your max HP for 20 seconds uh and with a two minute cooldown no surprises there I mean like I said before it was super redundant way back when and I knew they made this change eventually just not when convert still here still in change I Really they really didn't change that until shadowbringers did they wow that is toxic as far as I'm concerned um fire three all that change astral fire uh Freeze umbral Ice change blizzard 3 was just moved into being a West reward but other than that it didn't functionally change at all Thunder three now an upgrade of Thunder one now a quest reward um they also reduced its cast time because it was an upgrade from Thunder one there was no reason for it to have that super long cast time anymore so uh yeah that was uh that's just it now it's just a higher level version of Thunder one and that's perfectly fine ethereal manipulation just made it so it was less clunky after you did the little zoom in then you know you uh you just weren't locked down for as long now Flair was a lot more usable but they also decided to make the damage fall off like super severe because of how much more usable it was it was pretty dang annoying I'm not gonna lie it's a lot of people were not happy about all these like damage reductions that were going on across you know Flair and a bunch of other skills for the other jobs as well um Ley lines still the same wow scrolled really far on that one uh sharp cast duration being longer just made it a little bit more usable in more situations I think that helped the opener if I'm not mistaken um a little bit more I think you could actually ensure that you had it for the fire one cast um or did you use that I don't remember much about the stormblood opener for Black Mage but um yeah that might have been what they did for Sharp cast all the same the the duration increase just kept improving usability for it overall enokian probably the biggest change no longer this dance about like balancing the duration of it and having the blizzard for to refresh it instead it was just you pressed it and as long as you didn't lose astral fire or lose Umbra lice then you were good that was it you didn't have to worry about anything at all people were still intimidated though that didn't really change people's I guess interpretation of the difficulty of Black Mage even though you didn't really have to manage it nearly as much just don't lose those Buffs and you're okay it also has the polyglot effect but that won't matter until we talk about their level 70 ability blizzard four um reduce the cast time of Blizzard 4 and fire four they just didn't serve exactly the same purposes so to make them again more usable they brought that cast time down even if they did also bring the potency down along with it but the big thing was the introduction of the umbral hearts effect for blizzard 4 which would nullify the MP cost increase effect of Astral fire it wouldn't make them zero MP wouldn't make your fire skill 0mp just reduces the actual increase in the cost that comes from being an astral fire but more importantly it reduced the MP cost of flare by one-third so now that was way more usable as well in AOE situations still again the falloff damage wasn't popular but Flair being more usable made doing AOE packs after you got it after you got blizzard four I'm just a lot better so people like that fire for uh not much to say here again I'm not sure how much of this potency changes because of them reducing the cast time or because they were doing that Equalization that uh I I feel like that happened in shadowbringers I don't think it happened in storm blood but again I can't remember for certain then we get into the new abilities between the lines move instantly to the center of your Leia lines if they are down um great great skill so not only great in case you need to move out of your Ley lines but you could deliberately use your Ley lines as sort of a beacon for mechanics like if you know you're gonna have to dodge away from where you lay your Ley lines down but then you can go back to that spot whether or not you have to go back to that spot or you just can choose to it's just so nice to have this instant zip around the map so you don't have to worry too much about interrupting your cast and running around and trying to manage swiftcasts and the triple cast skill that's a few further down big big win and uh still a skill that I love to this day thunder four just an upgraded Thunder two nothing fancy to say about that triple cast next three spells instant cast now what's interesting about triple cast is that because of the cast I'm a fire for being a little bit longer than the gcd triple cast is a DPS increase to just use it even if you don't need it for movement so what has always kind of happened since it's incorporation is people will use it because they like Google the rotation you know oh here's the Black Mage open or whatever whatever and they wouldn't learn the fight and learn to hold triple cast for certain mechanics and that's where you would really see a big skill gap between a black mage who is trying to learn it or just didn't understand it entirely and an experienced Black Mage so it was a very big defining Factor being able to just not press triple cast whenever it was available just for your fire force for more damage and then foul this was the mechanic that uses the polyglot so basically every 30 seconds you're in enokian you generate a polyglot and that lets you use foul and it's just massive AOE damage you know and so you would use it it has a cast time you know 2.5 seconds but it's a lot of damage not to mention you could do fun stuff like you know get a polyglot stack and then spend the foul right before you you get another one so you could you know double stacked fouls like two of them back to back with like a really well timed cast and you could just pump a ton of damage into a specific damage frame into it into a certain DPS window and yeah it's just something that uh something else that you could do something you could still do to this day we just have more polyglot Stacks now and uh more uses for it but it was a very well liked final skill looks really cool deal Delta ton of damage even if it didn't benefit from astral fire and I think that might have been a balance problem at some point comparing the fully astral-fired fire 4 to a foul cast but I don't remember I remember exactly how it went and of course they've removed surecast swiftcast apoc lethargy and it doesn't even call it Mana wall they just called it wall I didn't remember them doing that uh yeah apoc being gone was probably the biggest disappointment I think it's because it's added to the roll actions just below I know sure cast and swiftcast are certainly down there and I think lethargy is down there in some capacity as well yeah because break is kind of like it but you know not really you know you have adult instead of virus drain which is not very good at all diversion for enmity generation lucid dreaming for enmity because the refresh was I think there was there's like really particular like way you could use lucid dreaming to like get an extra MP3 I don't remember what it was but I remember there being some like really big brain like Black Mage tech for lucid dreaming that barely resulted in a game but I remember some people talking about swiftcast still there now funny thing Mana shift you could transfer 20 of your own Mana to a Target party member um on paper black mate sounds like the best Target for the best user of that right because they have infinite Mana you know they don't actually run out of Mana as in like the way other jobs do if they are at zero Mana they'll just bring themselves up to 10 000 Mana but blackmail just never wanted to use it because they're like um that's going to slow down my fire phase and I really don't want to do that so uh yeah I'm not gonna give you the message and uh you know what I can't really blame them for that apoc was made into a roll action and sure cast is here as well nullify's knockback end draw in effect and that is very very important because um at this point surecast would make it so that uh if you actually casted a spell it would cancel surecast effect so if you wanted to nullify a knockback or drawn you also had to not be casting a spell during the time that it happened um but however nowadays you know we have the fully functioning sure cast and uh this is just the precursor to it it's just funny to remember that that's how it worked and then erase remove a damage over time effect from an ally or the restore their potency restore their health for 200 bones it was awful almost nobody used it even if they could have used it most people just chose not to use it um and then for their traits being upgraded you know Thundercloud thunder four is affected by it enhanced intelligence you know there's more intelligence and then uh now also lesser is stacking of a third National fire umbral ice which reduces the cast time for spells of the opposite element by half very important because it makes switching between the phases much much faster so that was very important to have fire starter there's a just a couple levels earlier Thunder Mastery the upgrade you know that's all the new traits are just upgrades upgrades upgrades enhanced umbral Hearts this is what gave the flare effect to umbral Hearts it doesn't start with that when you first get blizzard 4 doesn't happen until Level 68 and then Hanson Nokian is the polyglot effect and also makes a nokian's magic damage increase 10 which just a free five percent extra damage when you hit level 70 ain't nobody gonna say it no to that now very briefly we can look at the end of stormblood as well uh for some reason this page was having like issues loading when I was doing it before and I don't recall there being almost any changes to Black major cross all of storm blood um actually I did write a few down the increased thunder clouds duration and reduced ethereal manipulations uh recast so here ethereal manipulation if we go down to level 50 it's still 30 seconds by the end of the expansion if there real manipulation was 10 seconds and that's how people know it for nowadays um they also reduce the delay of ethereal manipulation that like lock they reduce that again in 4.3 and they constantly kept buffing up fire 4 in order to well increase their the damage they were dealing because they weren't dealing enough damage so they brought it from 280 down to 260 and then brought it back up to 280 in a patch and then up to 300 before the end of the expansion and then also again you have thunder clouds duration was another thing like I said that went up it now lasted 18 seconds here and again I don't know why all the thumbnails aren't working but way back machine sometimes just does stuff like that whereas at the start of the expansion it only lasted 12 seconds and that's pretty much is all the changes that they made they just kept pumping up damage onto fire four I don't think they made any other major changes between the two like I don't think foul for example and its damage reduction change their flare had its its damage fall off changed across the entire expansion they could just check those things real quick because those would be the big things yeah still 70 less here so I mean Black Mage just didn't get much changes throughout stormblood and people still struggled with it I mean it's just weird because Black Mage was always doing well when a good player was playing it but most people were afraid to play it so it just kind of sat in the spot where almost nobody played it and if you did play it you were just a God and there was just no there was no other if ands or buts about it so uh that's just how the chop turned out at this point either way uh it was it's a job that's always had commanded a lot of respect and that would continue into shadowbringers where the respect would reach a new level because shadowbringers would take the already now becoming more mobile Black Mage give it that one last extra push that it needed and push it into something that heck even I started taking it into ultimates and Savages and learning it because I just job was just so fun and I'd waited so long to not not feel intimidated by it and you know what that's what shadowbringer's Black Range encapsulates so let's get to it and here we are it's like we're on the same page again right it's like it's like we never even left so here we go uh we have all the revisions that were made fortunately again but we are looking at the 5.0 version unfortunately the revisions don't appear to be working I can try to reload the page real quick and you guys can just you can sit here for that hopefully it doesn't break because the Wayback machine again is a little bit uh finicky at times and I'm getting a little worried looking at this page right now it also forced me all the way to the bottom of the page to weirdly enough ah there we go yeah it just wasn't even showing me the hover over right here uh here's the big change yeah astral Fire and umbral Ice up to 15 seconds at this point again just trying to improve usability they also really needed to make room because they were adding more spells that you could use you'll see which ones later on but they needed to give it that increase to make sure you had enough time to do other things but this also opened up the ability to do the no fire one rotations where with enough spell speed you could just Spam fire force then go back to ice spam fire force go back to ice and then just make sure that you were refreshing your Thunders whenever you were in ice and that was just what your your ultimate goal would be um transpose recast time reduce the five seconds now I've kind of been ignoring transpose this whole time because like I said it was kind of an early level player bait where people learn to swap phases with it and then fire three and and blizzard 3 were supposed to kind of replace it but transpose does have a lot of specific Tech that you can use and it's actually gained more techniques that you know High skill players can use in uh in certain situations to ensure that they don't lose damage or they can improve their mobility and stuff like that and one of the big things is um having a fire starter proc that you got at the end of a fire phase especially prevalent prior to them making it so you got the fire starter proc immediately so it was somewhat feasible to use it immediately as well um it basically you could hold a fire starter proc until your next fire phase ease and then instead of using it for example to turn back into fire you could transpose so you had the astral fire one buff and then use the fire starter proc to go up to fire three so you get your your transition between blizzard to ice was a little bit stronger and then of course you could just use it to maintain uh your actual Buffs between phases you know if there was down time you didn't want to just not have astral fire umbrella especially with a Nokian having the polyglot effect however in shadowbringers it became much less of a thing still a bit of tech involved and still very useful because of the new skill that was added but you you saw less and less of those Niche cases of using it as a part of your rotation now Thunder sleep largely the same blizzard two uh the bind effect was removed at this point and then of course the umbral ice upgrade Fire 2 the astral fire upgrade Mana font finally converts gone it's Mana font now just restores max MP doesn't sacrifice HP three minute cooldown very long cooldown but all the same much more usable skill Fire 3 is just the actual fire upgrade um freeze now the big thing with freeze is um now it wasn't a placed AOE it was just around the target it was basically your uh go-to I think freeze becomes your like blizzard for a quick yeah it became your blizzard 4 equivalent when aoeing and it would even Grant you an humble heart and with the umbral heart you know you would obviously reduce the flare uh the flare cost to buy one third so now essentially you could blizzard uh I think could you blizzard 2 at this point was blizzard 2 upgraded no I don't think it was no yeah so I that's that's on one expansion too far behind you could blizzard three into freeze and then fire three into flare and you could go back and forth with those as opposed to using Fire 2 and blizzard 2 which was really really awkward but then became a point where people were just freeze spamming at the early levels before you got the umbral heart because I think that comes from a trait later on very similar to the umbral hearts in in storm blood so yeah freeze became your like go-to AOE spell for like a really really long time in shadowbringers but it was after basically being unused for several expansions uh kind of a nice thing uh then you know blizzard 3 is still just the cost or just the the umbrella's timing Thunder through the same ethereal manipulation the same flare uh the potency reduction change you know if they just change it's now 40 for all enemies doesn't have all that like different scaling and stuff so much more usable as well leyline's still here sharp cast now recast only 30 seconds so it was used far more basically every fire rotation approximately you could use it maybe a little bit less than that I don't remember the exact length of time but about that you know it may be a little bit different depending on your spell speed and whatnot enokian 15 magic damage now also affects the new Spell despair and umbral soul which is very important and polyglot Stacks increase the two you used it for foul before but there is another skill that you can use it on in shadowbringers now blizzard 4 potency increase to 300 cool nothing wrong with that fire four also 300 so they just brought it up to that all of these other skills that they introduced still exactly the same foul between the lines Thunder 4 triple cast all the stormblood skills unchanged new skills though despair despair is basically like a single Target flare it's supposed to be the last spell that you cast during an astral fire phase and as such uh you wanted to just make sure you know it was three fire fours fire one three fire fours Despair and then you would go over back into ice but however it would bring your MP down to zero much like uh much like what's it called flare wood so what would end up happening is you know on on the surface with the way it's worked up to this point that would screw you but what ends up happening is you get a trade weight that makes it so that you can cast blizzard 3 when you have no MP and this became a huge point of contention between a high level Black Mage and low-level Black Mage we'll talk about that in a sec another very useful useful skill umbral Soul basically your downtime tool when you're in ice you can press this it'll give you another stack of umbral ice and it'll give you an umbral heart so essentially if you went into a downtime phase and fire you would transpose the ice and then spam umbral Soul you would do that between dungeon packs you would do that during boss downtime very very powerful tool that you really wanted to make sure you were pressing super often during those types of phases and xenoblossy instant cast single Target version of foul and uh that was awesome very satisfying skill to use very strong even more Mobility um even more burst as long as you were timing it during the right sections of the boss and no one complained about that black mage was just even better now especially after you know self-roll actions here we have Swift cast lucid dreaming and sure cast and adult being good but when we go down to the traits and we see you know enhanced freeze at 68 now freeze gets the umbral hearts alongside of the enhanced honorable Arts that blizzard 4 was getting at 68 which is again why freeze was basically the only AOE most people used until the higher levels then you have aspect Mastery now level 72 make sure it's swapping with a spell uh we'll consume no MP so fire three to get into astral fire from umbrella ice is your rmp and blizzard 3 to get in to umbrella's from astral fire zero MP the problem was when you got synced below level 72 because it was a horrible experience ever getting synced under level 72 and it just made going back and especially doing stuff like you know ultimates from Storm blood you know the expansion that introduced them that had two of them uh it felt really bad not having aspect Mastery so yeah that definitely wasn't uh loved a lot this is enhanced sure cast this is what brought it from 60 to 30. we went over that before same with a Nokian for the 15 and the second polyglot stack here which just meant even more Mobility even more burst and even more awesomeness and again that really didn't change throughout much of shadowbringers they didn't see much in the way of change I mean I'm sure there's like potency changes and stuff in here but you can see 15 seconds you can see the potency is largely being the same Thunder slate blizzard too it's it's just like what was what was the point in changing any of this stuff it all worked it all made sense it was it was all strong and black mage performed pretty well throughout the entirety of the expansion there's got to be a change in here somewhere but without really looking at every single aspect it's kind of hard to point them out notice them maybe something like uh where is it like Mana font no still three minutes on manifont so yeah definitely not that sharp cast uh 30 seconds 15 second duration yeah 15 seconds polyglot all this stuff I mean it's it's all here it's all the same potency it's all the same costs it's all the same everything everything everything uh between the lines three seconds under four triple cast I think at one point they made it so that triple cast um I think when you first got triple cast it didn't have the the buff that said three two and one to tell you how many instant casts you had left I think they did do that at some point in shadowbringers like really early on but that wouldn't be reflected here so again that's kind of hard to to talk about I mean foul is still here a despair is still here um Russell like oh it's all here and it's all as strong as it was when the expansion started so there's not really much to talk about for shadowbringers other than this is when blackmage was considered complete and once a job feels complete in Final Fantasy 14 a fear sets in what are they going to do next expansion are they going to ruin it how are they even going to add to it it's perfect to play right now what do I do well fortunately with shadowbringers going to end Walker they got it right one more time and now that fear has just extended the 7.0 so let's take a quick look at the end Walker stuff for Black Mage all right and here we go again most of the stuff is exactly the same and also it's you know on the live servers now so it's like you need me to tell you how this stuff works the big difference is Blizzard 2 no longer being a point blank AOE we it is a targeted AOE and their AOE is probably one of the bigger things that changed because now the idea was that you would do blizzard too like blizzard 2 and fire two became the AOE equivalents of uh of Blizzard 3 and fire three so now the idea was to do is to do blizzard to freeze fire two flares you know and to burn through your MP with the flares and that's the idea one thing I kind of skipped over was what was called cold flares where essentially you'd go into ice and then cast flare and then go into ice and then cast flare and you would just do that to make the flares really quick and to just constantly um burn through the MP and go back and go back and forth between the two phases um that was really good on really high amounts of targets but now with blizzard 2 and fire tubing AOE equivalents you you really as far as I know you don't really see that much anymore you just see blizzard to freeze fire to flare flare blizzard too and then if you want to use Mana font you know or triple cast obviously that changes things a little bit man remembering way back before people really were committed to the idea of using in stat potions for everything was it uncommon to bring a Mana potion an ether and do an extra flare on AOE packs that wasn't an uncommon thing you would you would use one and then uh you would convert and then you'd do another and then you would ether and then you'd do another that was pretty common back in the days but now it's just super streamlined for the AOE right here it's under two still pretty much the same man of war the same Mana font only two minutes you know two minute meta can't have that being three minutes anymore so uh you know I think everyone's not surprised by that potency being 120 on freeze I do believe that is a small buff from how it was before ethereum manipulation flare you know 40 enhanced Flint right enhanced flare was a thing with enhanced flare wasn't a thing in the previous expansion was it why is it bugging out when I'm trying to check this enhanced foot yeah enhanced player is something they added an end Walker I'd forgotten about enhanced flare that that'll be in a trait later so we'll get to that in a little bit Ley lines now two minutes um now keep in mind I'm looking at the current version of the page uh Ley lines was 90 seconds earlier in the expansion and people were like why and then they eventually just made it two minutes and balanced it around the two minute meta so that's why it is two minutes in the page that we're looking at right now sharpcast duration 30 seconds cooldown 30 seconds two charges it's used a lot in the rotation now you can still use it for instant cast if you really want to but it's used in a far more standard manner now because it's just so available it doesn't really need to be held unless you need to for something very specific then blizzard 4 and fire four small potency Buffs nothing major there or at least the the number is higher the end Walkers calculations are different but all the same you know it's just I'm acknowledging the number is different that is all number four triple cast having two charges an N Walker that sure is Pleasant uh foul you know oh foul being instant cast I believe this is a trait I don't even think that's a is that a level 80 trait I actually wanna I wanna skip ahead and check because I don't think that is something you wait for at 90 yeah yeah enhanced foul is at level 80. so that was something new that they got right at level 80 which was nice um but still level 70 has a cast time boohoo it had that before but now at level 80 it was instant cast uh despair still functionally the same humble Soul still functionally the same Xeno glossy functionally the same high fire two and high blizzard 2 just upgrading fire tune blizzard too you know they were already something that you were gonna you know you were using them for a certain effect but now is here where you get the enhanced effect the enhanced flare uh is canceled if astral fire ends so um yeah this I think you did like I think what you you do now is you do two high fire twos is what you do and then you do two flares and then you go back with blizzard and then I don't know if that's what you actually do if that's optimal but I think that's what was intended at the very least because I think you can have two stacks of enhanced Flair I'll have to double check if it's what it says in the traits but at the very least that might have been during the media tour I really need to get on black major kind because I love Black Mage but I haven't played it that much this expansion amplifier grants a single stock of stack of polyglot on a two minute just to freeze in a glossy during your two minute Buffs and if you have them tucked away that's basically three of them insane and then Paradox which was a very interesting skill when they introduced it so basically it replaces fire and blizzard one uh and you can use it once per astral fire or umbral ice phase um an astral fire it you know it's just a stronger fire there's nothing else that it does um however if you're in umbral ice it's instant cast requires no MP and Refreshers umbrella ice so a fantastic movement ability so much so that if you desperately need movement transpose paradoxes not something that is considered a bad thing to do you want to avoid that if you can but the fact that that's viable I mean that's just another means of skill expression not to mention it would still proc Fire Starter if you did the fire related one and it just made that fire one cast that uh that wee bit stronger than it otherwise would be Paradox is so strong that um at one point there was a meme Paradox rotation where all you did essentially was Paradox if I recall um like you literally would like like Paradox blizzard three Paradox fire three Paradox and I remember it's like not being very good but I think there was like one case where somebody did really well with it and uploaded it to the internet and everyone's like oh man they messed this up so bad and then all the Black Mage players are like I'm not doing that there's not a chance that I'm doing that and uh I don't think anyone can really blame them for that uh sleep you know being a roll action that's here and then aspect Mastery this is the biggest change aspect Mastery being level one it was by and far the most important thing that happened because it's just it was so dumb going down below level 72 and it just being awful so um that was such a such a welcome change to Black Mage and Walker and then they also just doubled it into making you know one stack astral firearm realize two stacks and then eventually Three Stacks um casting fire two or blizzard two this is also the level where that would start working for swapping between National Fire and umbral Ice and then um then the cast times the opposite spell yeah I mean that's this it just worked in a little bit of new stuff a little bit of old stuff and uh made it work A- okay 40 on Firestarter I wonder when it became 40 because um I actually haven't been paying attention to that it was 40 in shadowbringers it was a 40 at the start of Shadow Bringers that's what I want to say where is it it was at the start okay that's because that's a change that I missed and I want to make sure that you know we're going back over the old seals it was 40 at the end of storm blood okay I just wasn't okay so it looks like stormblood is the answer because I'm almost certain that fire starter was not 40 at the end of Heaven's Ward uh going all the way back through everything that we've been through today no it was 40 there too okay hold on wait a minute how did I 30 so it was all the way in Heaven's word I missed that ages ago so you have to been that way for uh for a hot minute I just kind of take fire starter for granted it's not as interactive as it was during a realm or born so my brain didn't quite keep that up to Pace they enhance the no cans the sharp casts going down to 30 percent the magic damage 15 the second polyglot the instant cast foul the high blizzard and high fire too manathon being two minutes is at level 84. that's toxic um enokian magic damage to 21 I don't know why they went 21. it's so weird the second set of Shard casts and then uh Paradox right here uh and then there you go and that's all the black mage skills throughout all the expansions and as you can see it really doesn't change that much like yeah it gets updates it gets new things a few new things get reworked potencies get changed it gets a few more instant casts or things get their their cast times today but you can see that its identity has remained entirely the same and because it's been that way for so long everyone is afraid every expansion now that they're just gonna decide oh you know what we'll rework it because we can't do anything interesting with it anymore and you know what I understand that fear I I thought that was going to happen in 6.0 I'm afraid it's going to happen in 7.0 but I feel like they would already know that and they wouldn't have only told us about Dragoon and Astro getting major 7.0 changes but you never know you just you just never know and I don't think it needs to change I I don't know how they can update it any further but I don't think it needs to change I'm really hoping that it doesn't go through anything major that messes with how people feel about it but anyway that's going to be a wrap for our retro view of all the black mage skills in Final Fantasy 14 across all the expansions it's getting late for me so that's why I've been kind of bringing my voice down a little bit so I'm going to wrap this recording up and get to uh bed I suppose but be sure to like favorite subscribe and share check out all the other retro videos in the playlist if you haven't yet and with that I'll see in the next one until then take care

Channel: Mrhappy1227

Views: 22,258

Keywords: Square, Enix, Mrhappy, Game, Games, Gaming, MMO, RPG, MMORPG, FF, Final, Fantasy, Final Fantasy, FF14, FFXIV, Final Fantasy 14, Final Fantasy XIV, Guide, Tips, Tricks, How To, Lets, Play, Lets Play, BLM, Black Mage, Thaumaturge, Job, Class, Endwalker, ARR, A Realm Reborn, HW, Heavensward, Stormblood, Shadowbringers, Update

Id: HWaBlyLzVm8

Length: 68min 41sec (4121 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 22 2023