Unless they're going to change it again, Thunderhead also procs when switching from unaspected to UI/AF.
Oh? Sweet. I only was reading from the tooltips, which don't explain that unaspected -> aspected counts. So that's a relief, and flare star is just the odd stickout.
I think what gives BLM its reputation is that it simply isn't fun to play while leveling and most people never got it past HW levels.
I can wholly agree with this. I bought a skip on mine precisely because it was such dogshit (and because I don't really enjoy doing leveling content where I can't be tank or healer and speed up otherwise fucking slow single-pulling mouth-breathers). Pre-50, the class barely functions and can barely be said to have a rotation.
Dying to mechanics they could avoid by moving
This is a part of "I heard the meme, and I decided that it must apply to me." There are certain AoEs that you can just put up the shield and eat to keep up your uptime, especially during Leyline. If you have a pocket healer you can rely on not to be retarded, having one (sometimes even two) vuln stacks isn't a big deal on certain encounters.
But all of these are things you need to know ahead of time. Otherwise, you are much better served by cancelling your cast, pressing triplecast, and just blasting while repositioning.
If there are tools for mobility that the majority of players do not or cannot master, how useful are those tools?
Well, if the majority of people don't know how to repair their cars, should we take away the ability of people who learn how to do that?
It's one thing when they're really arcane or bizarre, but BLM's mobility tools are really simple. Swiftcast and triplecast are a simple button press, whereas the teleport-to-someone involves selecting your focus target (or using the function keys to target someone) and then a button-press, with the teleport-to-leyline ability also being a button press. Xenoglossy, Thunderhead, Firestarter, and the soon-to-die Ice-Paradox are all instant-casts that let you move around while you use them. Slidecasting is the only complicated portion of mobility, but for the vast majority of people you really don't need to know how to do it.
Granted, some of the terrible 80% of BLM players I see don't die, they are just awful DPS.
Which is the same reason as it is for other classes: people just freestyling and pushing random buttons because they're actually watching netflix.
So the person who was spamming their 'donate to the Trevor Project!' message has stopped doing it, so I'd say that it is successful.
Here I was hoping you'd have a precedent to use in order to start asking people to donate to some other countervailingly stupid political movement.
It's annoying because I find this kind of trope prevelant in more and more stories and I'm really baffled as to where it's coming from.
It's just a sign of bad writing, which tends to get far in write-by-committee. FF14 (very obviously) has a rotating cast of creatives, and there are sections - like Bozja - where emphasis is taken away from "stupid magical crystal dust" and instead put onto more grounded political machinations. But so soon as that arrives, hand-waving nonsense must come in to explain why X-Y-Z nonsensical thing that conveniently closes a plothole has occurred.
It's a crutch you keep around because if you stay consistently mediocre, people won't really care when your output continues to be mediocre.
