Re: BLM changes, is Apocastatise going to be useful now (it now reduces all magic damge, right)? H
I think it's a pretty significant change. Pretty much no one used it before, but I think people might start putting it back on their hotbars now. Previously, it raised resistance by 30% to three elements only: fire, ice and lightning. Elemental resistance is a bit of a lame stat to begin with, but being limited to only those three elements really ruined it. Off the top of my head, the things that you could currently reasonably use it for are:
- Packs of ice sprites in Stone Vigil
- Liquid Hell in T5
- Fireballs in T7
It's not a big list. I can't even think of anything in the current content that's lightning-aspected that you could use it for, unless you were fighting Lightning Sprites as a party.
The spell now decreases "magic vulnerability", which seems a lot more generally useful to me, particularly for helping tanks take big magical hits if you've got a Scholar or Summoner in the party to pair it with a Supervirus, but it's not a gamechanger, I don't think. There are a host of better ways to mitigate that kind of damage, so this is just gravy. Maybe it'll be more useful in future content.
Additionally, the cooldown is now even longer than it was before (3 minutes instead of 2), and they didn't saying anything about Ekpyrosis, which is the debuff that it applies once it wears off, that stops it from being applied again for a short while. So, in my opinion, it's gone from 'can be safely forgotten about' to 'mediocre and highly situational'. Which is alright, really - that's still better than mostly useless. And besides, BLM is supposed to be a pure DPS class, so I think this spell was always going to be a token party member buff.