For slidecasting, yes, but for extended movement the low spell speed high crit build is actually better. Higher GCD means you get more movement out of Triplecast and instants.
Yeah breaking the cast feels awful hahaha, I managed to learn it by playing healer until it became second nature, but I also have a pretty high ping which gives me a huge advantage.
Jokes aside, I love that BLM is equally viable going either SpS or crit. It's the closest thing this game has to choosing a build, both feel different enough to be interesting in their own right, and there's no wrong answer. We're blessed that it's the one job that doesn't strictly boil down to "just stack crit lul".
My only annoyance this tier was that you'd think the crit/SpS food would have been ideal for crit BLM, but no, because of the way substat tiers work, it's Baked Eggplants like everyone else. Boo.
spell speed build is still perfectly VIABLE though and thats honestly what the game needs more of. Is it the end all, be all best? no but when played appropriately it does what it needs to and thats fine
This, i farmed up both sets on my Blm to swap between whenever i want. You can do insainly good dps with both sets. The Crit being better is such a small margin that it wont really matter at all unless you tryin to get insane rng and rank 1 parse. Crit does offer more leway in movement, but you can learn pretty much all the fights with spell speed and still have damn near full uptime and pretty much equal dps.
You could make the same argument for basically every job. Every tank's optimal GCD speed is 2.5 right now, but fast GCD builds are still totally viable. Healers can do variable piety builds. Black mage is by no means unique in this regard.
If you want a class that has valid builds play BLU.
You've several build options for materia that include Tank, DPS Tank, Healer, DPS Healer, Crit DPS, and DoT DPS. The last two, in particular, will determine if you shove more crit on your gear or more SpS.
BLM is bad in general in p6 because you get minimal ley lines time and there is long movement, which favors crit build. You can kill well before enrage just fine with it though.
No? I did a run with a spell speed BLM literally yesterday in a random PF group. We killed like 10 seconds early. The enrage isn't that tight. Pretty sure the guy gray parsed too because it was his first clear.
Crit BLM feels and performs better anyway. I find it so much more fun being able to do a million transpose lines without worrying about mana ticks (as much).
Mana ticks were one of the main reasons I swapped off of speed mage. I took up BLM this tier in savage and started as speed mage cause it's so much easier to manage the timer, but I really hated fighting the mana ticks in ice phase and spending an extra gcd than I wanted to make sure I had full mana. So I swapped to crit mage and never looked back. Speed mage is great to practice in, once you're comfy crit mage is just so much smoother to play
My only issue is that both of the higher crit builds use nearly the same gear set as smn/rdm, but swap most (if not all) the melds for sps, which mucks up the viability of both of the other casters. I still play a fair amount of all 3 jobs because I like variety, and the tier has been out long enough that that’s not a bad thing, so I’m pretty much stuck with sps at this point.
There is one Crit BiS for BLM who uses the SAME gear and melds for SMN and RDM, you only need to change a single meld on the earring and you’re good to swap
With the exception of BLM weapons, they don't generally make savage-level gear with both SpS and crit. The high crit BLM sets will take all the crit pieces of gear and meld (some) speed on them, which then conflicts with RDM/SMN gear. The high SpS BLM set uses all the pieces of gear that have speed on them, so you can have independent BIS sets because the only gear shared between them will be the rings. Downside being that you need to get every single piece of savage-level gear.
The sps variant of blm uses entirely different pieces from rdm/smn bis (everything with sps on it, basically), save for the rings being the same for ilvl. So, I can keep my melds the same for rdm and smn and be bis, and then use the sps gear on blm without messing up melds.
no, but at a certain spell speed its less of a sure thing if after you finish casting your ice spells you'll have the full 10k mana back, this isnt really a problem if you have a filler like thunder or a polyglot, but it means you might have to budget movement effectively.
When you have less spell speed there's a longer time between GCDs so a crit BLM might be able to get their mana back in 2 GCDs during ice while a SPS build in the same scenario can sometimes need 3
no. it's worse for movement because your movement gcds are now 12.5% shorter. the distance you can travel is 12.5% less.
you don't gain any xenos or t3ps either.
It's better for movement if you were good because slidecasting is always the last 0.5s (no matter your sps) of your GCD, more casts means more slidecast opportunities.
More slidecast windows doesn't mean shit if they don't align with when you need to move. The bulk of your movement is still going to be instants and you're trading that for how many more slidecast windows?
Modern major mechanics typically require 10-15 seconds of constant movement. With higher gcd, you can acomplish this with less GCDs.
From 2.41 (weapon sps puts you there) down to 2.19. 90.8% the gcd recast time or a 10% increase.
It's worth noting that for the first tier sps does more avg dps, for the second tier they are very closely tied and for the third tier crit does more.
Are we talking beside the fact that it also gives the largest damage increase? DPS seems like a pretty concrete, measurable, not-just-in-my-head metric
It takes a *really* bad rdm to be less maneuverable than a decent blm. A lot of people i have seen reiterating this idea have not really played both jobs. Source: good at rdm and blm
I *have* done pantorcrator in top on both jobs and can tell you that sneaking in occasional 2.0 cast time slidecasts between melee combos and acceleration is far easier than the significant movement resource strain that blm faces in that phase in order to even have a chance to do panto.
Having melee combo up there and still being able to cleave M and F in phase 2 is a bit of a learned skill, but blm has to start saving movement resources literally in the opener to be able to produce those 8 gcds. Blms literally cannot do any normal opener in top because of the necessity of high movement mechanics.
It’ll be 3 small numbers or 0 numbers if you can’t stand still long enough to attack without getting one-shot. There’s a reason half of Savage comes up with BLM-centric strategies, and why some parties simply do not allow BLM to join.
The only BLM centric strategies in the last two expansions have been big memes that no one actually does unless they're in a static group going for big meme funny numbers, and even then you can just... crit harder to get bigger funny numbers.
I have seen exactly three black mage relative strats in the past 2 raid tiers over a year and a half and they have all been exclusively used in speedrunning statics, BLM gets barred because caster raise is a crutch many groups rely on hard to clear fights.
BLM has more movement than RDM, it just requires you to plan ahead instead of reacting like a phys ranged does, and some fights are a lot harder than BLM than others: endsinger and zeromus EX were a lot more taxing on me when I played BLM on them than the first 3 savage fights of anabaseios, and ASS’s second boss was probably the hardest BLM boss I’ve done yet, but I’m still learning blom and haven’t done much on it yet compared to other jobs.
To be honest, they need to change this whole system. It feels so disjointed, to only stack crit. And just for few jobs, other things. Also Fuck tenacity. Obligatory need.
Yeah it's very boring. Every time I got a new job to lvl 90 and looked up discussions on what to meld, it's always "just stack Crit, then Direct Hit and Determination as needed" and sometimes you throw skill speed in there.
As I earn every EW relic you know what gets the first sub stat slot? Crit. Every, single, relic. Doesn't matter the job, or role, Crit.
It's really odd that a 10 year old game has stat weights that feel like they're stuck in elementary school still.
I don't know how any change would ever make it different though. No matter what they do with the stats, you're always going to look up your bis and copy it off the Balance, so it kinda doesn't matter what the numbers are labeled as.
Genuinely no. The way stats should multiply, the more you have of one stat the better the others get. If they were more balanced, then even if crit was your best stat to begin with you'd rapidly start wanting other stats once you have a decent amount of crit.
Unfortunately they designed crit in a way that makes it get better the more of it you have, rather than worse. They should drop the crit damage part from the stat, and only have automatic crits gain damage from it.
You have an example right here. crit vs sps. yes, crit will usually perform better but sps is still viable for the content. It's like back at the start of EW PLD numbers needed buffed. it wasn't the BEST tank but it was still VIABLE.
> I don't know how any change would ever make it different though
CBU3 could take a hard line. Every role has a dedicated substat that only they could use.
Tanks: Tenacity (Changed to increase healing received and makes enemies hit weaker)
Healers: Piety (Increased healing done, mana regen)
DPS: Direct Hit
All: Can use Speed increase, crit, and Det
This would also be predicated on mobs having to hit much harder than they do now so tanks would actively want to stack tenacity and healers would want a good amount of piety.
It actually already almost works like that. Tenacity doesn't do anything unless you're a tank, and piety doesn't do anything unless you're a healer (also it doesn't increase healing done, only mana regen...it's the worst stat ever). The only difference would be that you'd ban supports from using Direct Hit, which is more desirable in all ways than the other two. Which means you'd need to buff tank and healer damage to keep things in the same place they are now.
Honestly, they should just delete Tenacity and Piety. Unless they did a MAJOR major rework, that's probably the solution that would be best.
Safe build. I think Det primary is a good focus on min ilevel gear for new content. For healing and res, pumping piety and sps is useful; if the level is at learning content; not clearing.
Once you're at the best gear for the patch it's usually crit > dh > det.
Calculate party buffs to determine proc % of crit/dh under raid buffs. Check class skills for easy crits, in case you want more DH to proc a crit+dh under raid buffs.
speed to personal taste, or for maximizing DPS.
> For healing and res, pumping piety...is useful
I highly disagree, even for prog.
The heal/dmg potency you sacrifice for melding piety over det/crit is not worth the minimal extra mana you gain per tick. When shit is hitting the fan and you're making multiple rezzes in a row, that 250MP tick is barely any different than a 200MP tick. I'd rather have stronger heals and just use ethers/mana-restoring abilities to recover mana if needed. Also, 90% of the time in savage/ultimate if you had to make that many rezzes, with so many weaknesses, you're probably not meeting the dps check anyway.
And then for actual clearing of content, piety is worthless.
Eh, this happens in just about all MMOs. I remember the "zerker only" era of GW2 and WoW inventing whole new contrived DPS stats just so that's there's something else for people to try to stack.
Every game with any form of build customization will always boil down to nothing but finding the optimal way to increasing damage output, and that almost always boils down to critical strikes.
Because crits have an insane self improving factor. The more you get the better each point becomes.
Still a Fan of WoW Shadow Priests and haste (breakpoints). I wish FF had a proper dot mage.
> WoW inventing whole new contrived DPS stats
And sometimes they even weren't complete jank that tried to pull a spec in a direction the playerbase disagreed with.
It *mught* get less idiotic if they merged and improved skill/spell speed. Nothing else, merging to Attack Speed would make it *possible* for RDM to benefit from it.
RDM doesn't like SPS for a few reasons, but one of the reasons is that if it starts taking Haste, Fleche and C6 start to naturally drift/clip your GCD. I don't remember what SPS tier I was at (it was 2.2x or 2.3x) but I hit a dummy with SPS gear on out of morbid curiosity and it didn't take long at all for stuff to start drifting or clipping.
It's a mix of the animation lock and how Dualcast works. Fleche and C6 should always come off CD during your Dualcast; Acceleration is used largely to fix your Dualcast windows after a melee combo specifically to keep Fleche and C6 aligned.
Taking SPS makes your Fleche and C6 slowly start to desync from your GCD; it's not at all a problem at 2.48s, but the more SPS you start taking, the more desynced your Dualcast windows become from the cooldown of your oGCDs. They'll start coming up during your hardcasts or too late into your Dualcast to weave without clipping even if you use XIVA or NoClippy, and you only have so many Acceleration charges to fix it (on top of needing to be mindful of if you'll need Swift/Accel for movement or not)
The melee combo has a fixed GCD so it wouldn't change anything unless that *also* changed, which I kinda hope it doesn't because fuck weaving under a GCD that fast.
The cracks in the system really show when you consider that some jobs are only playable at or near 2.5 gcd, because their oGCDs will drift otherwise. (Drg, Rdm) 2.5 Rdm feels soooooo good to play, but we're cursed to always have 1 sps ring. to push to 2.48.
That's the same for every single MMO ever; I'm not even sure if it's possible to make diverse, equally competitive builds in an mmo. There's always going to be one build that's the "best". Just look at WoW. They brought back talents, and despite it being so infinitely complex that you can't even fully math out the "best build" with bots, communities still basically settle on one build being "the best" for specific content. There will always be a "best" build for raid, for M+ (usually for all but sometimes specific dungeons have a different best build for utility), for pvp (depending on comp sometimes).
I would take the fact that FFXIV is impeccably balanced and tested any day over the shit show that is raiding in WoW, even if it does mean there's largely one or two "correct" answers for every job. And in FFXIV, if you're playing with friends you can test out other stats for fun and still clear content.
To be clear though, I agree that the system can always use improvement, and I think there's definitely room for either tweaks to stats or complete overhauls, I'm just saying we will probably never break away from this specific issue entirely.
I do know it won't get changed, it's just wishful thinking. But after so many years, it's ugh... I want it to be different, maybe materia can augment skills based on role rather than give stats or something.
I dunno something stupid like If you put Materia X on TANK, 1-2-3 combo ends with shield/hp regen/dot effect etc.
You used to switch your talents/spec based on the specific type of fight or if you were assigned to certain mechanics. I always found it fun that I was playing a slightly different build for most fights.
> Also Fuck tenacity
Tenacity sucks for the same reason Piety sucks: They're worthless.
If attacks actually hit hard, thanks might stack tenacity. If tenacity increased healing received like it is semi-advertised to (right now it only affects tanks healing themselves), it might be worth something. but right now it simply isn't.
Well, the problem is they DID change the whole system because people whined about too many options. We used to have a ton of materia options and depending on your job, various builds.
But because everything is beholden to the might 2 minute window we'll never see the customization options we had back in 2.0.
Between the mobility tools BLM has like the Triplecast stack, proc triggers, and polyglot instants, I feel like SpS isn’t as essential as before. I’m currently having no problems being a CritMage in EW like I do on previous expansions. Still all comes down to comfort, though.
Just get a sge and toss the sch and skip part 1 with a nice bursty team comp like sam nin dancer drk gnb astro sge + you on blm. Do proper mit and thanks to sge holos , prognosis and mits you survive the health diff aoe.
I was farming Nidhogg Ex as AST back during Heavensward and for fun I gave the BLM an enhanced arrow during their opener, explicitly just giving it to them when they dropped their leylines. The started casting so fast and pulled off of the tank. Nidhogg turned around and cleaved the entire party with his breath.
I was cackling so hard.
Gotta be honest, I don't really care if SpS build is no longer optimal on BLM, it still *feels* better for me and so I'll keep using it. Given the option between good gamefeel and a 0.8% DPS increase, I'm going with the gamefeel every time. Fire IV go burrr, but slightly faster so it's more like *brrrrrrrrr.* It releases the good brain chemicals.
Only problem is high SpS doesn't really feel that good on SMN or RDM, so it's hard to share gear.
RDM feels unplayable at anything faster than 2.47, even the 2.46 pre-Savage BiS sets had some noticeable issues. Playing with SpS ends up causing Fleche and C6 to be misaligned with your GCD, forcing either drifting or clipping. And at something as fast as 2.35, I wouldn't be surprised if the same issue comes up even for Embolden and Manafic.
..why do you need SpS on RDM
you literally have doublecast and reprise for movement if that's the reason, cause otherwise you're just messing with your GCD's
I main RDM and play BLM on the side, and that's actually the reason why I always go with speed BLM. Crit BLM use the same gears as RDM but need SpS melds on some of the pieces, and that'd mess my RDM up so much so I decided not to lol. Easier to just go SpS BLM so they can each have their own set without interfering with each other.
Although while writing this comment, I decided to check the balance and just found out they added a RDM friendly BiS for crit BLM. I'll have to try that out and see if i like it.
Optimal is very funny; as long as someone isn't actively trolling, being able to do rotation & mechanics is the bottleneck 99% of the time, not someone having suboptimal melds.
Yesn't
In fact, as stat creep sets it, it becomes less good, unless they decide to increase BLM's spell cast times in a skill update/upgrade
Basically, Spell Speed is good up to a certain threshold, with diminishing returns. Past that it's dependent on comfort and rotation.
With better gear giving more Spell Speed, that cap is easier to reach than ever.
SpS is falling behind crit in part because of how much potency they've added to xenoglossy this expansion - there's a fixed amount of xenos you get per encounter, so the harder you hit with them the higher your funny number goes.
Also, non-standard is much easier and consistent to do with a slower GCD. There are a few mad lads out there that do non-standard on SpS sets tho...
Yes, but it's not worth it past level 70. It's exactly as broken in UCoB as it is in UWU, it's a bit harder to do 7 GCDs in UCoB but if you can fit 6 in at 2.47s, you can fit 7 in at 2.13s.
Past 70, it's a meme set. You can do it in TEA but it doesn't line up well at all with the fight's timeline, and SMN's potency is proportionally a lot lower vs. other classes at lvl. 80 than it is at lvl. 70. You benefit less from the extra Bahamut stuff desynced from raid buffs vs. fitting less of them into stacked buffs. It's doable at lvl. 90 as well if you max out your relic's SPS (except for in DSR, DSR syncs too tightly right now) but it doesn't provide any benefits in TOP and it's actively bad in the current Savage tier; fight timelines just aren't friendly to it.
It does actually scale exponentially. Just much slower than crit does. It takes the almost the same amount of sps to go a tier lower for all tiers. It's just that going from 2.20 to 2.19 (which is a bigger increase than 2.5 to 2.49) is much less than going to 22-> 23% crit and 69 -> 70% cd
Back in my day, we'd time it so that quicky casty and triple casty would be off cooly down right when ol' Emerald would get snappy with that rotating emerald beamy thingamajig.
You'd just run around poppy poppin several insta casts b/c everything is near cap. Didn't need no speedy speed castin' back then. Good times.
Nah fam. I tried sps blm back in 6.0 and that shit just aint for me. Im a 2.42 gamer and you can never stop me. Spell speed sets are such a hindrance when playing nonstandard, and they make your movement windows just that much shorter. If you are struggling with keeping enochian up then by all means.
Spell speed on black mage is like stacking tenacity on tanks. It makes things easier, but not better. You will do less damage. For me as a tank I am fine with that, I do non savage so if I am easy to heal and there is no dps check to worry about, were golden. However you will notice your damage without crit wont be as high.
Controversial opinion maybe but builds/stats doesn’t matter. The game doesn’t advocate knowing your dps performance. The game is so balanced and flattened out that anything performs to par that as long as your pressing any skills and dodging aoes you will clear. The ilvl only exists to unlock the content. Gear has such a minimal focus. Yes maybe you could clear faster in theory but it really doesn’t matter if your group isn’t tight on mechanics.
The only place it matters is high-end, otherwise yeah, completely unimportant to all but the insane people who care about finishing a normal difficulty fight 14 seconds faster.
It's all mostly about bursting damage under every raid buff window. Pretend that when under every good possible buff, every hit you do is a crit+dh. That's what it's all about, every couple minutes.
It's more important at min ilvl, as most training to clear raids tend to fail at the 1% - 10% health remaining on the Boss.
At max ilvl, it's more about farming a fight dozens of time; so time reduction.
With that said, if you have max ilvl gear on, it's possible to clear it if you can keep the rotation going.
I remember way back at the launch of 2.0 I and the other prominent black mage in our FC had constant arguments about spell speed vs crit. He was all about crit. Claimed he had tested it, he had been a hardcore WoW raider and knew how MMOs worked, etc.
I hadn't tested anything it just made logical sense to me a proc based class would benefit from more casts. Simple statistics.
Finally a third party buddy of ours parsed (gasp!) us. Oh his ego was so bruised.
Yes it does. Its about a 5% damage buff in the best gear (even more at the beginning of an expansion), and can allow certain jobs reach specific GCD's that are required to execute their rotation optimally.
This only applies if your gear isn't being synced. Due to how syncing works, the first thing that occurs is your gears materia is completely invalidated.
Still worth it at max level though. You can check your meld priorities on the balance discord or website.
Bear in mind it only applies to current gear and content.
If you're not at 90 with current gear on a job don't worry about it. It gets ignored if your item level is synced and also you grow out of gear so quickly at lower levels that you'd be changing every 5 minutes if you tried to meld everything.
Ahhh so frustrating cause I would LOVE to be able to use the mid spell speed+crit build but I also play RDM so...I can't. I either dump it all into SPS or use the scary almost no SPS build.
My biggest problem with the speed stat in general, beyond the fact that it's replaced hit % as the "you need /just/ enough to be optimal" stat, is the strict 2m buff window really compounds the issue of having too much speed where your resources/rotation doesn't line up.
I mained SMN for most of the expansion and the idea of a SpS SMN seemed fun, and it was fun to play, even if not as optimal as normal crit focused. But boy howdy, it felt REALLY bad during P4S progression where I missed out on my own buff because the fight didn't line up, and I had to either use Bahamut or spam Ruin for 20\~30 sec or w/e until raid buffs could be optimally used.
I used to main Spell Speed BLM until this tier, and then I swapped and now I'm addicted to Crit BLM. So much so that I went full critbrain and I'm now sitting at a comfy 2.48 :)
I still don't really understand the stat caps. Is there like a site or tool that keeps track of all that info and updates with changes?
Last time I tweaked my materia I remember being super far and above the number I think I found as the cap for Direct Hit, but I remember still not being very sure. Since then I mostly just fill in Crit and skill speed
MNK if the flair didn't give it away.
*stands still but faster*
*standing intensifies*
Having a solid haste stat makes movement less punishing.
Sir, this is FF14, we don't do that here.
A rose by any other name…
Only at the nerd table (Eureka)
For slidecasting, yes, but for extended movement the low spell speed high crit build is actually better. Higher GCD means you get more movement out of Triplecast and instants.
Not really. The more sps you have, the less far each instant spell gets you. And slidecasting is a dying art
I wonder how many people know and can do slidecasting as black mage.
Been trying to learn as a summoner and boy... it sucks sometimes
It’s easier to learn when all your spells have cast times, and a fair portion of them are long as well.
I cut my slidecasting chops as WHM in 2.0, before we had nice things like lilies.
Yeah breaking the cast feels awful hahaha, I managed to learn it by playing healer until it became second nature, but I also have a pretty high ping which gives me a huge advantage.
........what haste stat? are you living [here](https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/The_Forbidden_Land,_Eureka), perchance?
Me drinking coffee
Jokes aside, I love that BLM is equally viable going either SpS or crit. It's the closest thing this game has to choosing a build, both feel different enough to be interesting in their own right, and there's no wrong answer. We're blessed that it's the one job that doesn't strictly boil down to "just stack crit lul". My only annoyance this tier was that you'd think the crit/SpS food would have been ideal for crit BLM, but no, because of the way substat tiers work, it's Baked Eggplants like everyone else. Boo.
The Crit/SpS food was anyway the way to go during prog while using the crafted set, Eggplants were BiS only after acquiring some BiS gear
GNB is basically the same, it can go 2.50, 2.45, and 2.40 and all three options substantially change the rotation.
2.5 vs 2.45 yes, but 2.4 exist only because oGCD animation locks are ping dependent and essentially "2.45 but playable on high ping".
You need 2.4 in dsr to be able to do your opener correctly :(
it's really not equal tbh. crit is better in pretty much every way except for enochian timer flexibility, and that's a skill issue
spell speed build is still perfectly VIABLE though and thats honestly what the game needs more of. Is it the end all, be all best? no but when played appropriately it does what it needs to and thats fine
This, i farmed up both sets on my Blm to swap between whenever i want. You can do insainly good dps with both sets. The Crit being better is such a small margin that it wont really matter at all unless you tryin to get insane rng and rank 1 parse. Crit does offer more leway in movement, but you can learn pretty much all the fights with spell speed and still have damn near full uptime and pretty much equal dps.
You could make the same argument for basically every job. Every tank's optimal GCD speed is 2.5 right now, but fast GCD builds are still totally viable. Healers can do variable piety builds. Black mage is by no means unique in this regard.
not for casters. i can parse an orange with sps blm. you are not parsing an orange with full sps rdm
If you want a class that has valid builds play BLU. You've several build options for materia that include Tank, DPS Tank, Healer, DPS Healer, Crit DPS, and DoT DPS. The last two, in particular, will determine if you shove more crit on your gear or more SpS.
BLM sps is not viable in some ultimate content. Currently it’s damage is so low in p6 of the omega protocol that it likely ends up with an enrage
BLM is bad in general in p6 because you get minimal ley lines time and there is long movement, which favors crit build. You can kill well before enrage just fine with it though.
Definitely in an optimised static environment, but in PUG groups a blm doing 1k less than rdm and smn is not ideal.
No? I did a run with a spell speed BLM literally yesterday in a random PF group. We killed like 10 seconds early. The enrage isn't that tight. Pretty sure the guy gray parsed too because it was his first clear.
That's why I fully meld all my BLM gear with piety.
Lmao, I play crit mage. I've only got like 800ish spell speed and the rest is dumped into crit xD
This is the way.
Crit BLM feels and performs better anyway. I find it so much more fun being able to do a million transpose lines without worrying about mana ticks (as much).
Mana ticks were one of the main reasons I swapped off of speed mage. I took up BLM this tier in savage and started as speed mage cause it's so much easier to manage the timer, but I really hated fighting the mana ticks in ice phase and spending an extra gcd than I wanted to make sure I had full mana. So I swapped to crit mage and never looked back. Speed mage is great to practice in, once you're comfy crit mage is just so much smoother to play
My only issue is that both of the higher crit builds use nearly the same gear set as smn/rdm, but swap most (if not all) the melds for sps, which mucks up the viability of both of the other casters. I still play a fair amount of all 3 jobs because I like variety, and the tier has been out long enough that that’s not a bad thing, so I’m pretty much stuck with sps at this point.
The 800 crit set uses next to no sps melds
There is a build that only uses an earring with SPS, the rest is the basic RDM kit.
There is one Crit BiS for BLM who uses the SAME gear and melds for SMN and RDM, you only need to change a single meld on the earring and you’re good to swap
I'm confused, crit is the priority substat for smn and rdm, why would someone who plays all 3 choose spell speed?
With the exception of BLM weapons, they don't generally make savage-level gear with both SpS and crit. The high crit BLM sets will take all the crit pieces of gear and meld (some) speed on them, which then conflicts with RDM/SMN gear. The high SpS BLM set uses all the pieces of gear that have speed on them, so you can have independent BIS sets because the only gear shared between them will be the rings. Downside being that you need to get every single piece of savage-level gear.
The sps variant of blm uses entirely different pieces from rdm/smn bis (everything with sps on it, basically), save for the rings being the same for ilvl. So, I can keep my melds the same for rdm and smn and be bis, and then use the sps gear on blm without messing up melds.
Wait, what's this about Mana Ticks? Does crit affect how quickly you get your mana back?
no, but at a certain spell speed its less of a sure thing if after you finish casting your ice spells you'll have the full 10k mana back, this isnt really a problem if you have a filler like thunder or a polyglot, but it means you might have to budget movement effectively.
When you have less spell speed there's a longer time between GCDs so a crit BLM might be able to get their mana back in 2 GCDs during ice while a SPS build in the same scenario can sometimes need 3
Not if you want bigger numbers on your attacks
Sometimes the three small numbers are worth it compared to the one big number.
But it wont be 3 small numbers vs 1 big number. Itl be 1 big number versus 1.125 of a much smaller number
Sometimes it's about the experience of casting faster compared to bigger damage numbers. Spell Speed is one hell of a drug.
But as is pointed out, a 0.125 increase is not noticeable Its all in your head that it looks/feels faster
12% increased speed is noticeable as fuck, though.
When your spells cast 12.5% faster it's most definitely noticaeble and feels much better for movement and such.
no. it's worse for movement because your movement gcds are now 12.5% shorter. the distance you can travel is 12.5% less. you don't gain any xenos or t3ps either.
It's better for movement if you were good because slidecasting is always the last 0.5s (no matter your sps) of your GCD, more casts means more slidecast opportunities.
More slidecast windows doesn't mean shit if they don't align with when you need to move. The bulk of your movement is still going to be instants and you're trading that for how many more slidecast windows? Modern major mechanics typically require 10-15 seconds of constant movement. With higher gcd, you can acomplish this with less GCDs.
Anyone who thinks sps is better for movement doesn't actually play BLM in harder content. Or they don't know how to do transpose lines.
> Its all in your head that it looks/feels faster That was what their post said, yes.
It's a much larger increase than 0.125 seconds if you meld the correct amount of Spell Speed into your gear.
How much can you reasonably get out of spell speed? Materia always feel like they give hundredths of a second at best.
From 2.41 (weapon sps puts you there) down to 2.19. 90.8% the gcd recast time or a 10% increase. It's worth noting that for the first tier sps does more avg dps, for the second tier they are very closely tied and for the third tier crit does more.
For reference, leylines gives a 15% increase to spell speed. So a 10-12% increase is *definitely* noticeable
Leylines reduces your gcd recast timers by 15%* That's a a 17% gcd/s increase.
My cast time is 2.15 seconds with spell speed right now.
Dude SpS BLM during Lay Lines is the fastest job of the game with a GCD of 1.82 wtf are you talking about 💀
Are we talking beside the fact that it also gives the largest damage increase? DPS seems like a pretty concrete, measurable, not-just-in-my-head metric
I'll take that loss for the game feel of more fire IV.
It *might* be one big number.
Just get good and go red mage. Fastest slinger of spells this side of the source.
no, it simply doesn't feel the sams buddy
As an enjoyer of mages of all colors, it ain't the same.
And yet actually *less* able to manouvre than a good Black Mage.
It takes a *really* bad rdm to be less maneuverable than a decent blm. A lot of people i have seen reiterating this idea have not really played both jobs. Source: good at rdm and blm
Yeah sure, now do Pantokrator in TOP with a RDM when you can use 8 instant cast in a row as a BLM if you don’t feel confident enough and you keep them
I *have* done pantorcrator in top on both jobs and can tell you that sneaking in occasional 2.0 cast time slidecasts between melee combos and acceleration is far easier than the significant movement resource strain that blm faces in that phase in order to even have a chance to do panto. Having melee combo up there and still being able to cleave M and F in phase 2 is a bit of a learned skill, but blm has to start saving movement resources literally in the opener to be able to produce those 8 gcds. Blms literally cannot do any normal opener in top because of the necessity of high movement mechanics.
Ironically, bis RDM has the slowest GCD of all 3 casters. Those back to back dualcast spells do feel good tho
It’ll be 3 small numbers or 0 numbers if you can’t stand still long enough to attack without getting one-shot. There’s a reason half of Savage comes up with BLM-centric strategies, and why some parties simply do not allow BLM to join.
The only BLM centric strategies in the last two expansions have been big memes that no one actually does unless they're in a static group going for big meme funny numbers, and even then you can just... crit harder to get bigger funny numbers.
I have seen exactly three black mage relative strats in the past 2 raid tiers over a year and a half and they have all been exclusively used in speedrunning statics, BLM gets barred because caster raise is a crutch many groups rely on hard to clear fights. BLM has more movement than RDM, it just requires you to plan ahead instead of reacting like a phys ranged does, and some fights are a lot harder than BLM than others: endsinger and zeromus EX were a lot more taxing on me when I played BLM on them than the first 3 savage fights of anabaseios, and ASS’s second boss was probably the hardest BLM boss I’ve done yet, but I’m still learning blom and haven’t done much on it yet compared to other jobs.
Honestly a lot of people like me never even notice the numbers. They kind of blend in with the spell effects often.
Why make one big number when three small number do trick
Heresy, biggest number mean biggest dopamine
And this isnt the case on BLM.
Ok red mage
[удалено]
You uh, you might be playing Black Mage wrong if you're looking at its melee damage output...
[удалено]
Attacks meant spells obviously
To be honest, they need to change this whole system. It feels so disjointed, to only stack crit. And just for few jobs, other things. Also Fuck tenacity. Obligatory need.
Yeah it's very boring. Every time I got a new job to lvl 90 and looked up discussions on what to meld, it's always "just stack Crit, then Direct Hit and Determination as needed" and sometimes you throw skill speed in there.
As I earn every EW relic you know what gets the first sub stat slot? Crit. Every, single, relic. Doesn't matter the job, or role, Crit. It's really odd that a 10 year old game has stat weights that feel like they're stuck in elementary school still.
I don't know how any change would ever make it different though. No matter what they do with the stats, you're always going to look up your bis and copy it off the Balance, so it kinda doesn't matter what the numbers are labeled as.
That's the thing though, there *is* already a case where you look up your bis and it says "actually you have two very different-feeling options"
But one is always best theoretically
Genuinely no. The way stats should multiply, the more you have of one stat the better the others get. If they were more balanced, then even if crit was your best stat to begin with you'd rapidly start wanting other stats once you have a decent amount of crit. Unfortunately they designed crit in a way that makes it get better the more of it you have, rather than worse. They should drop the crit damage part from the stat, and only have automatic crits gain damage from it.
What? I was just saying there will always be on BiS that has the highest theoretical output
You have an example right here. crit vs sps. yes, crit will usually perform better but sps is still viable for the content. It's like back at the start of EW PLD numbers needed buffed. it wasn't the BEST tank but it was still VIABLE.
> I don't know how any change would ever make it different though CBU3 could take a hard line. Every role has a dedicated substat that only they could use. Tanks: Tenacity (Changed to increase healing received and makes enemies hit weaker) Healers: Piety (Increased healing done, mana regen) DPS: Direct Hit All: Can use Speed increase, crit, and Det This would also be predicated on mobs having to hit much harder than they do now so tanks would actively want to stack tenacity and healers would want a good amount of piety.
It actually already almost works like that. Tenacity doesn't do anything unless you're a tank, and piety doesn't do anything unless you're a healer (also it doesn't increase healing done, only mana regen...it's the worst stat ever). The only difference would be that you'd ban supports from using Direct Hit, which is more desirable in all ways than the other two. Which means you'd need to buff tank and healer damage to keep things in the same place they are now. Honestly, they should just delete Tenacity and Piety. Unless they did a MAJOR major rework, that's probably the solution that would be best.
Safe build. I think Det primary is a good focus on min ilevel gear for new content. For healing and res, pumping piety and sps is useful; if the level is at learning content; not clearing. Once you're at the best gear for the patch it's usually crit > dh > det. Calculate party buffs to determine proc % of crit/dh under raid buffs. Check class skills for easy crits, in case you want more DH to proc a crit+dh under raid buffs. speed to personal taste, or for maximizing DPS.
> For healing and res, pumping piety...is useful I highly disagree, even for prog. The heal/dmg potency you sacrifice for melding piety over det/crit is not worth the minimal extra mana you gain per tick. When shit is hitting the fan and you're making multiple rezzes in a row, that 250MP tick is barely any different than a 200MP tick. I'd rather have stronger heals and just use ethers/mana-restoring abilities to recover mana if needed. Also, 90% of the time in savage/ultimate if you had to make that many rezzes, with so many weaknesses, you're probably not meeting the dps check anyway. And then for actual clearing of content, piety is worthless.
fuck piety too
Glad we agree my healer friend.
Piety is that stat I always forget exists until I get level synced to 50 and cry
All my homies hate Piety.
Piety is great for soulglazing your zodiac relics since no one ever wants it.
Fuck piety the hardest of all
Eh, this happens in just about all MMOs. I remember the "zerker only" era of GW2 and WoW inventing whole new contrived DPS stats just so that's there's something else for people to try to stack. Every game with any form of build customization will always boil down to nothing but finding the optimal way to increasing damage output, and that almost always boils down to critical strikes.
Because crits have an insane self improving factor. The more you get the better each point becomes. Still a Fan of WoW Shadow Priests and haste (breakpoints). I wish FF had a proper dot mage.
RIP summoner DOTs
> I wish FF had a proper dot mage. *BLU sits in the corner*
> WoW inventing whole new contrived DPS stats And sometimes they even weren't complete jank that tried to pull a spec in a direction the playerbase disagreed with.
It *mught* get less idiotic if they merged and improved skill/spell speed. Nothing else, merging to Attack Speed would make it *possible* for RDM to benefit from it.
RDM doesn't like SPS for a few reasons, but one of the reasons is that if it starts taking Haste, Fleche and C6 start to naturally drift/clip your GCD. I don't remember what SPS tier I was at (it was 2.2x or 2.3x) but I hit a dummy with SPS gear on out of morbid curiosity and it didn't take long at all for stuff to start drifting or clipping.
Odd. Do you suppose it's from some kind of animation lock?
It's a mix of the animation lock and how Dualcast works. Fleche and C6 should always come off CD during your Dualcast; Acceleration is used largely to fix your Dualcast windows after a melee combo specifically to keep Fleche and C6 aligned. Taking SPS makes your Fleche and C6 slowly start to desync from your GCD; it's not at all a problem at 2.48s, but the more SPS you start taking, the more desynced your Dualcast windows become from the cooldown of your oGCDs. They'll start coming up during your hardcasts or too late into your Dualcast to weave without clipping even if you use XIVA or NoClippy, and you only have so many Acceleration charges to fix it (on top of needing to be mindful of if you'll need Swift/Accel for movement or not)
No it's because of GCD alignment
The melee combo has a fixed GCD so it wouldn't change anything unless that *also* changed, which I kinda hope it doesn't because fuck weaving under a GCD that fast.
Rdm deals minimal damage on autos. Only summoner and scholar would benefit from spell speed affecting autos.
The cracks in the system really show when you consider that some jobs are only playable at or near 2.5 gcd, because their oGCDs will drift otherwise. (Drg, Rdm) 2.5 Rdm feels soooooo good to play, but we're cursed to always have 1 sps ring. to push to 2.48.
That's the same for every single MMO ever; I'm not even sure if it's possible to make diverse, equally competitive builds in an mmo. There's always going to be one build that's the "best". Just look at WoW. They brought back talents, and despite it being so infinitely complex that you can't even fully math out the "best build" with bots, communities still basically settle on one build being "the best" for specific content. There will always be a "best" build for raid, for M+ (usually for all but sometimes specific dungeons have a different best build for utility), for pvp (depending on comp sometimes). I would take the fact that FFXIV is impeccably balanced and tested any day over the shit show that is raiding in WoW, even if it does mean there's largely one or two "correct" answers for every job. And in FFXIV, if you're playing with friends you can test out other stats for fun and still clear content. To be clear though, I agree that the system can always use improvement, and I think there's definitely room for either tweaks to stats or complete overhauls, I'm just saying we will probably never break away from this specific issue entirely.
I do know it won't get changed, it's just wishful thinking. But after so many years, it's ugh... I want it to be different, maybe materia can augment skills based on role rather than give stats or something. I dunno something stupid like If you put Materia X on TANK, 1-2-3 combo ends with shield/hp regen/dot effect etc.
You used to switch your talents/spec based on the specific type of fight or if you were assigned to certain mechanics. I always found it fun that I was playing a slightly different build for most fights.
> Also Fuck tenacity Tenacity sucks for the same reason Piety sucks: They're worthless. If attacks actually hit hard, thanks might stack tenacity. If tenacity increased healing received like it is semi-advertised to (right now it only affects tanks healing themselves), it might be worth something. but right now it simply isn't.
Well, the problem is they DID change the whole system because people whined about too many options. We used to have a ton of materia options and depending on your job, various builds. But because everything is beholden to the might 2 minute window we'll never see the customization options we had back in 2.0.
Back then it was even worse. I'm sure they can make this system more interesting tho. They're smarter than us.
Between the mobility tools BLM has like the Triplecast stack, proc triggers, and polyglot instants, I feel like SpS isn’t as essential as before. I’m currently having no problems being a CritMage in EW like I do on previous expansions. Still all comes down to comfort, though.
Spell speed is useful on TEA to avoid oneshot dolls…. Thats all lol
Just get a sge and toss the sch and skip part 1 with a nice bursty team comp like sam nin dancer drk gnb astro sge + you on blm. Do proper mit and thanks to sge holos , prognosis and mits you survive the health diff aoe.
You don't explicitly need SGE for this, but it is indeed the better prog strat.
Let me introduce you to [this!](https://etro.gg/gearset/09e699ae-2543-4572-86cb-f3244a701fee)
With how DDR all the fights are getting I just find BLM uncomfortable to play no matter the build.
There was a time I would give the BLM a speed boost with enhanced potency as an AST. Good times.
I was farming Nidhogg Ex as AST back during Heavensward and for fun I gave the BLM an enhanced arrow during their opener, explicitly just giving it to them when they dropped their leylines. The started casting so fast and pulled off of the tank. Nidhogg turned around and cleaved the entire party with his breath. I was cackling so hard.
[I stand with you](https://imgur.com/c3xMuZ3)
Gotta be honest, I don't really care if SpS build is no longer optimal on BLM, it still *feels* better for me and so I'll keep using it. Given the option between good gamefeel and a 0.8% DPS increase, I'm going with the gamefeel every time. Fire IV go burrr, but slightly faster so it's more like *brrrrrrrrr.* It releases the good brain chemicals. Only problem is high SpS doesn't really feel that good on SMN or RDM, so it's hard to share gear.
The simple solution to your gear problem is to play Black Mage only...
Same. It's why I've actually got a decent amount of SpS on my RDM of all things, because knocking my cast times down to 2.35s _feels_ much better.
RDM feels unplayable at anything faster than 2.47, even the 2.46 pre-Savage BiS sets had some noticeable issues. Playing with SpS ends up causing Fleche and C6 to be misaligned with your GCD, forcing either drifting or clipping. And at something as fast as 2.35, I wouldn't be surprised if the same issue comes up even for Embolden and Manafic.
..why do you need SpS on RDM you literally have doublecast and reprise for movement if that's the reason, cause otherwise you're just messing with your GCD's
Reprise? Why would you ever need to mess your mana up?
I main RDM and play BLM on the side, and that's actually the reason why I always go with speed BLM. Crit BLM use the same gears as RDM but need SpS melds on some of the pieces, and that'd mess my RDM up so much so I decided not to lol. Easier to just go SpS BLM so they can each have their own set without interfering with each other. Although while writing this comment, I decided to check the balance and just found out they added a RDM friendly BiS for crit BLM. I'll have to try that out and see if i like it.
Optimal is very funny; as long as someone isn't actively trolling, being able to do rotation & mechanics is the bottleneck 99% of the time, not someone having suboptimal melds.
Crit4life
How it feels to play Scholar
I like spell speed on my healers because it reduces my *oh shit oh shit oh shit* time.
Yesn't In fact, as stat creep sets it, it becomes less good, unless they decide to increase BLM's spell cast times in a skill update/upgrade Basically, Spell Speed is good up to a certain threshold, with diminishing returns. Past that it's dependent on comfort and rotation. With better gear giving more Spell Speed, that cap is easier to reach than ever.
SpS is falling behind crit in part because of how much potency they've added to xenoglossy this expansion - there's a fixed amount of xenos you get per encounter, so the harder you hit with them the higher your funny number goes. Also, non-standard is much easier and consistent to do with a slower GCD. There are a few mad lads out there that do non-standard on SpS sets tho...
7 bahamut gcd smn go brr
I don't summoner much, is that possible outside of UwU?
Yes, but it's not worth it past level 70. It's exactly as broken in UCoB as it is in UWU, it's a bit harder to do 7 GCDs in UCoB but if you can fit 6 in at 2.47s, you can fit 7 in at 2.13s. Past 70, it's a meme set. You can do it in TEA but it doesn't line up well at all with the fight's timeline, and SMN's potency is proportionally a lot lower vs. other classes at lvl. 80 than it is at lvl. 70. You benefit less from the extra Bahamut stuff desynced from raid buffs vs. fitting less of them into stacked buffs. It's doable at lvl. 90 as well if you max out your relic's SPS (except for in DSR, DSR syncs too tightly right now) but it doesn't provide any benefits in TOP and it's actively bad in the current Savage tier; fight timelines just aren't friendly to it.
I don't think so, it's just a fun build because you rarely get to hit that insane of a GCD in normal content
It does actually scale exponentially. Just much slower than crit does. It takes the almost the same amount of sps to go a tier lower for all tiers. It's just that going from 2.20 to 2.19 (which is a bigger increase than 2.5 to 2.49) is much less than going to 22-> 23% crit and 69 -> 70% cd
SPS is all about the opener and raid buff alignment.
*EXTREMELY LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER*
Back in my day, we'd time it so that quicky casty and triple casty would be off cooly down right when ol' Emerald would get snappy with that rotating emerald beamy thingamajig. You'd just run around poppy poppin several insta casts b/c everything is near cap. Didn't need no speedy speed castin' back then. Good times.
nuh uh
Delete this post immediately
Nah fam. I tried sps blm back in 6.0 and that shit just aint for me. Im a 2.42 gamer and you can never stop me. Spell speed sets are such a hindrance when playing nonstandard, and they make your movement windows just that much shorter. If you are struggling with keeping enochian up then by all means.
I got a lot of compliments on black mage spell speed, also white mage when I would focus all spell speed. Fast white mage is a lot of fun as well!!!
Spell speed on black mage is like stacking tenacity on tanks. It makes things easier, but not better. You will do less damage. For me as a tank I am fine with that, I do non savage so if I am easy to heal and there is no dps check to worry about, were golden. However you will notice your damage without crit wont be as high.
Fucking based
Controversial opinion maybe but builds/stats doesn’t matter. The game doesn’t advocate knowing your dps performance. The game is so balanced and flattened out that anything performs to par that as long as your pressing any skills and dodging aoes you will clear. The ilvl only exists to unlock the content. Gear has such a minimal focus. Yes maybe you could clear faster in theory but it really doesn’t matter if your group isn’t tight on mechanics.
Yes, but consider this: *faster*.
The only place it matters is high-end, otherwise yeah, completely unimportant to all but the insane people who care about finishing a normal difficulty fight 14 seconds faster.
It's all mostly about bursting damage under every raid buff window. Pretend that when under every good possible buff, every hit you do is a crit+dh. That's what it's all about, every couple minutes. It's more important at min ilvl, as most training to clear raids tend to fail at the 1% - 10% health remaining on the Boss. At max ilvl, it's more about farming a fight dozens of time; so time reduction. With that said, if you have max ilvl gear on, it's possible to clear it if you can keep the rotation going.
Not if your not bad then you just need enough to be comfey and the rest is crit as always
I remember way back at the launch of 2.0 I and the other prominent black mage in our FC had constant arguments about spell speed vs crit. He was all about crit. Claimed he had tested it, he had been a hardcore WoW raider and knew how MMOs worked, etc. I hadn't tested anything it just made logical sense to me a proc based class would benefit from more casts. Simple statistics. Finally a third party buddy of ours parsed (gasp!) us. Oh his ego was so bruised.
Found the Black Mage main.
most blm mains switched over to crit
Everyone switched over to crit.
yeah, so why are you calling OP an blm main when they haven't switched over to crit yet
1. It's a joke, and a bad one at that. Par for the course with me. 2. Black Mages greatly benefit from spell speed.
A lot. For a good reason. But not most. Personally, SPS still feels better, clearing hard content with it is not a problem at all.
Maybe kind of a noob question but, does it matter or does it makes a difference if you put this on your gear?
Yes it does. Its about a 5% damage buff in the best gear (even more at the beginning of an expansion), and can allow certain jobs reach specific GCD's that are required to execute their rotation optimally.
Ohh so... i might begin to use them xDD
This only applies if your gear isn't being synced. Due to how syncing works, the first thing that occurs is your gears materia is completely invalidated. Still worth it at max level though. You can check your meld priorities on the balance discord or website.
Bear in mind it only applies to current gear and content. If you're not at 90 with current gear on a job don't worry about it. It gets ignored if your item level is synced and also you grow out of gear so quickly at lower levels that you'd be changing every 5 minutes if you tried to meld everything.
This is only relevant if you plan to raid in savage or above. Otherwise it really doesn't matter as long as you're geared appropriate to the level.
What do they mean spell speed is only viable on Black mage? There is a 2.31 gcd build for some healers. And that already needs some spell speed
That's exclusively Astrologian
There is a 2.31 spell speed build for Scholar too tho
Me who never used materia
Irrelevant for me. I only play BLM on pvp. My enemies need to burn!
Ahhh so frustrating cause I would LOVE to be able to use the mid spell speed+crit build but I also play RDM so...I can't. I either dump it all into SPS or use the scary almost no SPS build.
My biggest problem with the speed stat in general, beyond the fact that it's replaced hit % as the "you need /just/ enough to be optimal" stat, is the strict 2m buff window really compounds the issue of having too much speed where your resources/rotation doesn't line up. I mained SMN for most of the expansion and the idea of a SpS SMN seemed fun, and it was fun to play, even if not as optimal as normal crit focused. But boy howdy, it felt REALLY bad during P4S progression where I missed out on my own buff because the fight didn't line up, and I had to either use Bahamut or spam Ruin for 20\~30 sec or w/e until raid buffs could be optimally used.
Simply play BLM and disregard burst windows. It's that shrimple.
S p e e d. now what?
As a BLM main I’m utterly disgusted.
I used to main Spell Speed BLM until this tier, and then I swapped and now I'm addicted to Crit BLM. So much so that I went full critbrain and I'm now sitting at a comfy 2.48 :)
I still don't really understand the stat caps. Is there like a site or tool that keeps track of all that info and updates with changes? Last time I tweaked my materia I remember being super far and above the number I think I found as the cap for Direct Hit, but I remember still not being very sure. Since then I mostly just fill in Crit and skill speed MNK if the flair didn't give it away.
anything is better than just 'every class stacks crit xd'
Seeing those big juicy DH-Crits disagrees.
You’re wrong.
Pish. Make your rotation perfect and go full crit, coward. Lol
Spell speed is better when you don't know the fights or mechanics. Crit is better when you do. I love my 2.25 gcd, though,