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I would like to build a blaster DPS character that focuses on Fire, Electric and Ice damage. I thought the kineticist would be a nice way to do it, potentially.
Air looks like it has some electric damage, fire is fire, and with versatile blasts and water there's some ice damage attacks.
I also don't mean only Final Fantasy 14, but like all the games, including one's not specifically named like Lulu from FFX was a "black mage" in all but name.
Just the concept you know?
Edit: The game I am in does not allow RARE options at all (no rare races, no rare feats, no rare archetypes, nothing with rare tag)
Take fire/water at level 1 and expand to Air at 5, I suppose? I don't think there are any particular synergies to exploit between the three elements, the composites available are decidedly air and water not electricity and ice. Oscillating Wave Psychic is an alternative idea but you'd be missing out on electricity stuff.
Yes, Kineticist would be the core of it for the elemental blasting spells used all day.
You might grab either Wizard/Witch, or Sorcerer archetype to get some Arcane spellcasting too. The toolbox utility spells would round out the character's spellcasting options - adding things like Slow, Haste, Confusion, or Frog.
Take fire/water at level 1 and expand to Air at 5, I suppose? I don't think there are any particular synergies to exploit between the three elements, the composites available are decidedly air and water not electricity and ice. Oscillating Wave Psychic is an alternative idea but you'd be missing out on electricity stuff.
Seconding the kineticist suggestions, also adding to take the AoE Cold, Fire, and Electricity impulses.
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Okay so I came up with something like this?
If not on PC and/or Android then I guess highlights are:
Level 1 Dual Gate Air [Electric Blast]/Fire
Level 1 Versatile Blasts [Cold on Fire]
Level 1 Four Winds and Scorching Column
Level 2 Kinetic Activation (To hopefully make an electricity staff? Maybe?)
Free Archetype I went with Beastmaster because I didn't know what else to do but I like the Sorcerer idea to grab haste and slow and stuff
Level 4 Thermal Nimbus
Level 5 Expand the Portal: Fire Impulse Junction
Level 5 Lightning Dash
Level 6: Blazing Wave
Level 8: Storm Spiral
Level 9: Expand the Gate: Fire Junction Fire Aura
Level 9: Solar Detonation
Level 10: Aura Shaping
Level 12: Architect of Flame
Level 13: Fork the Path - Water
Level 13: Winter's Clutch
Level 14: Glacial Prison
Level 16: Imperious Aura
Level 17: Expand the Portal - Fire Gate Skill Junction
level 17: Barrier of Boreal Frost
Level 18: All Shall End in Flame
Level 20: Kinetic Pinnacle
So, fire is an obvious starting place. The question is how much lightning and cold damage there is out there.
- There are a few sources of lightning comign out of Metal as well... but every one of them also involves chunks of actual metal, so it's not what you're looking for.
Lightning:
- Air Blast (versatile)
- Lightning Dash (4): move as a lightning bolt
- Storm Spiral (8): Throws around some area effects, including lightnign damage
- Ghosts in the Storm (12): Aura stance. Hands out buffs to your friends, including shock rune
- Crowned in Tempest's Fury (18): Aura stance. Deals lightning damage to enemies, makes your air-based blasts mroe effective
Cold:
- Water Blast. Also Fire Blast (versatile)
- Winter's Clutch (1): basic small-to-moderate area effect damage, plus leaves difficult terrain.
- Winter Sleet (4): Aura stance. Makes life more trippy for the foes near you
- Glacial Prison (12): temporarily freeze your enemy in a block of ice.
- Barrier of Boreal Frost (14): Ice Wall
/**********/
So if by "black mage" you mean "does stuff with fire, ice, and lightning", then you have some stuff to work with here. You'll probably want to focus on fire, but it could work. If you want to have them be a focused damage-dealer, though... that doesn't work quite as well. Ice doesn't have any actual damaging impulses after level 1, for one thing. For another, out of 8 available non-blast ice and lightning effects, 3 are auras, and would thus conflict. They'd also conflict with the rather nice aura over on the fire side. Oh, and the closest thing there is to a lightning bolt outside of the simple blast is a mobility power.
Basically, you're going to wind up with a number of decisions along the way of "stay fire" vs "branch out to include lightning/cold also", and every time you pick the latter, your abilities as a dedicated damage-dealer are going to go down. If you don't accept that from the outset and build your idea of the character around it one way or the other, I expect that that will be an ongoing source of frustration.
Ah! Air comes with electricity blast built-in. Check. I had misremembered. Yeah, there's no need to take versatile.
From experience, a FF14 Black mage is better done with an Oscillating Wave Psychic with electric arc. I refuse to believe that it wasn't at least one of many inspirations for the mechanical implementation of the subclass.
As for a traditional fire, lightning and ice black mage, kineticist could do the trick, but it would be a little lackluster until very high levels most likely. At baseline you need level 5 to even get all those 3 damage tipes through normal impulses (you can start as a fire/air kineticist and pick versatile blast for cold damage, but you would only get the cold blast and nothing else for that element til lvl 5).
If you really want to go full DPS mode, spreading this thin is not the best of ideas. Fire is a very selfish element that wants a lot of investment, Air damage-wise needs the air/earth stance to reach good numbers and water is more of a support element.
If you still want to go for it, I would probably go for something like:
Dual gate Air/Fire
lvl 1 Flying Flame
lvl 1 Versatile Blast (It can be retrained after lvl 5)
lvl 1 Four Winds (I guess? There is no lightning damage until way later)
lvl 2 Kinetic activation
lvl 4 Thermal Nimbus
Fork the path (Water)
lvl 5 Winter's Clutch
lvl 6 Lightning Dash
lvl 8 Ciclonic Ascent
Expand the portal (fire aura junction or base junction)
lvl 9 Storm Spiral
lvl 10 Aura Shaping
lvl 12 Effortless Impulse (can pick Glacial Prison first and then retrain after)
Expand the portal (Fire Resistances)
lvl 13 Glacial Prison (look, this one is kinda bad, but there are little sources of ice magic in water for some reason)
lvl 14 Barrier of Boreal Frost
lvl 16 Clear as Air
Expand the portal (Air resistances)
lvl 17 Architect of Flame
lvl 18 Ignite the sun
lvl 20 Kinetic Pinnacle
With this, both Fire and Ice would have a stance playstile, while lightning would go for blast and overflow. Nothing remarkable damage-wise, but looks functional and fun to me. I'd probably try to sneak Furnace form in if possible too.
If you want more damage you should go for both the base and aura fire junctions by level 13, but that would probably lean more on fire than it is desired. I can think of some variants that would forgo Thermal Nimbus and go for Steam Knight and/or Ash Strider too, but that would also lean even more on fire damage.
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I think that Winter's Clutch works out okay if you're trying to maintain an aura off-turn due to being non-overflow. I'd probably mainly use Lightning Dash and blasts for electric damage. Winter Sleet is a good debuff aura but Thermal Nimbus covers both cold and fire damage (yes, everyone wants to use it for fire because of how it stacks with the aura junction, but it has a cold mode) and doesn't need Safe Elements to function.
I'd probably start fire/water with Winter's Clutch and Flying Flame. (If I wasn't keeping to the theme I'd do Ocean's Balm for the utility) For the class feat slot, you don't need versatile blasts because water gives you cold already and fire/cold/bludgeoning covers basically anything that isn't resist all anyways. Weapon Infusion would let you pick up range, or you can take another level 1 impulse (you're not hurting for options here).
Level 2 is a wild card, level 4 you take Thermal Nimbus and level 5 you fork the path to Air and take Lightning Dash, which lets you reposition pretty easily at the cost of overflow (but you're probably doing Dash>Channel+Nimbus/Blast).
After that you pick up new impulses as desired to add utility and such. Depending on the exact game, black magic has included Water and Aero, so you can justify some other pickups that are useful (even if your character's name is obviously XIV)
https://pathbuilder2e.com/launch.html?build=505317
Based on your feedback I have done the following.
Does the rest of the build look okay? I really don't know what to do with the free archetype but it's just part of the setting I am playing in. Are my stats okay? Skills?
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From experience, a FF14 Black mage is better done with an Oscillating Wave Psychic with electric arc. I refuse to believe that it wasn't at least one of many inspirations for the mechanical implementation of the subclass.
As for a traditional fire, lightning and ice black mage, kineticist could do the trick, but it would be a little lackluster until very high levels most likely. At baseline you need level 5 to even get all those 3 damage tipes through normal impulses (you can start as a fire/air kineticist and pick versatile blast for cold damage, but you would only get the cold blast and nothing else for that element til lvl 5).
If you really want to go full DPS mode, spreading this thin is not the best of ideas. Fire is a very selfish element that wants a lot of investment, Air damage-wise needs the air/earth stance to reach good numbers and water is more of a support element.
If you still want to go for it, I would probably go for something like:
Dual gate Air/Fire
lvl 1 Flying Flame
lvl 1 Versatile Blast (It can be retrained after lvl 5)
lvl 1 Four Winds (I guess? There is no lightning damage until way later)
lvl 2 Kinetic activation
lvl 4 Thermal Nimbus
Fork the path (Water)
lvl 5 Winter's Clutch
lvl 6 Lightning Dash
lvl 8 Ciclonic Ascent
Expand the portal (fire aura junction or base junction)
lvl 9 Storm Spiral
lvl 10 Aura Shaping
lvl 12 Effortless Impulse (can pick Glacial Prison first and then retrain after)
Expand the portal (Fire Resistances)
lvl 13 Glacial Prison (look, this one is kinda bad, but there are little sources of ice magic in water for some reason)
lvl 14 Barrier of Boreal Frost
lvl 16 Clear as Air
Expand the portal (Air resistances)
lvl 17 Architect of Flame
lvl 18 Ignite the sun
lvl 20 Kinetic PinnacleWith this, both Fire and Ice would have a stance playstile, while lightning would go for blast and overflow. Nothing remarkable damage-wise, but looks functional and fun to me. I'd probably try to sneak Furnace form in if possible too.
If you want...
Honestly that sounds really fun and versatile. Against monster who resist Fire? Cold aura playstyle or lightning builder spender playstyle. Against stuff resistant to cold? Fire Aura playstyle or builder spender electric. Etc. I think having multiple toolkits, and versatility and the ability to debuff with the ice and slow enemies, or just do raw damage, or move around a lot as air is really good. I've found versatility in real life play is king over white room DPR optimization.
Imagine going all in on a fighter two-handed weapon build completely only to face a single flying enemy without a way to close the distance meaningfully. I'd rather have a bit of ranged, melee, and mobility or something.
I just have come to truly value having more than 1 playstyle on a character. This is especially true as alternating things to do in combat makes it more fun than doing the same 1 thing over and over. This build sounds really good to me.