Make BLM more useful.

[Alhanelem]

Cataclysm would open up a whole new role for the job as a supertanking crowd clearer

BLM has had a clear purpose across the entire Final Fantasy series, and this.... well, this ain't it. The difference with BLU is it is actually designed to be on the front line. BLM is not. I'm not sure how an AoE WS suddenly makes BLM a supertanker (feel free to clarify), but from where I stand, BLM has little to facilitate this.

BLM doesn't really need new roles (Disclaimer: Obviously I engage in a lot of non-meta stuff myself and I absolutely encourage people to thin outside the box and find new ways to use stuff. You'll find me on SMN/SAM all the time doing solo skillchains with avatar magic bursts), at least not in a meta sense. There are some adjustments they should look at, but I have to agree with Spicy that BLM is a perfectly useable job already, even if it isn't in the spotlight.

[Zenion]

I'm not sure how an AoE WS suddenly makes BLM a supertanker (feel free to clarify)

Oh, no, the weaponskill isn't what makes black mage supertank. It's just what lets it fulfill its role as the job that makes people fall down. Mana Wall is where the tanking side of it comes in. But the job lacks tools to do anything with a crowd of monsters once they've been gathered up - sleepga or breakga will quiet them down for a minute if you're lucky, but it's a race against the five minute timer and all they have to do is survive 301 seconds to win. As the job with all those -ga and -ja spells, this sounds like it's right up the black mage's alley... but those are effectively useless in a big crowd, multiple target penalty. Which I guess would be okay, if that were simply the way the game operates, but then you get blue mage that can do arbitrary size groups, and area weaponskills that aren't penalized... so. An area magic-based staff weaponskill, for the staff-toting area magic wielding job? Nah, nah, crazy talk.

BLM doesn't really need new roles

Well, no, it kind of does. Bard has pretty much taken mass crowd control from it, with lullaby being just as good as sleepga in most situations, with the added benefit of, well, everything a bard does. For single-target magic damage, magical weaponskills are a faster solution that keep a melee option in the party for when magic isn't the play. Aeolian edge makes any dagger job a better area clearer than a black mage. Magic bursts are nice, but spamming savage blade is just so much easier and just as effective if not more so. Everything a black mage does is either done better by something else, entirely redundant, or requires the party to shift its playstyle to accommodate - which they aren't going to want to do unless there is literally no other way to do things.

For black mage to be viable as more than a niche job you keep in the closet just in case, it needs to be able to do something that can just drop into a party and be useful with no setup, no support. It just doesn't have that.

I mean, the alternative would be, like, making magic bursts great again, raise the damage cap above 99999 or make monsters with much lower HP totals that take massively reduced physical damage and full magic burst damage so that huge spike damage is impressive again. Completely upend the last five years of design philosophy. Somehow, though, I just can't really see that happening either.