Blizzard II, Scathe, Freeze, and Sleep, do they have a purpose anymore

So does anyone know what these skills actually are supposed to do because they seem like the most useless of the entire kit right now. Every other skill has a definitive use and can be used quite often as needed. But these four make no sense.

Blizzard II is supposed to mimic Fire II, as the AoE Blizzard. But, besides being at a low level AoE Blizzard isn't really a thing.

Scathe is the instant cast skill but its only 100 potency with a chance to be doubled but besides that rare instance of me using there is no reason to use it, and depending on how i have to move i either use Aetherial Manipulation or am to focused on avoiding an AoE to use the skill.

Freeze is probably the "most" useful of the skills, for 2 reasons. If you are at higher levels, once it is available, using Freeze over Blizzard to maintain Umbral Ice is preferred if you have multiple enemies. not to mention slightly MP efficient; but Umbral Ice infinite MP, lol. But why can't it do more, to make it something that feels nice to use. Oh and the other thing is we can still use it out of battle so there's that too, XD

and Sleep... well I don't think I need to mention that one so much, most people are still baffled by it still being in the game, along with Repose.

Limited use, but I used Repose as a WHM during combat quests when it got annoying to deal with more than one thing at a time. Focus one down while the others are sleeping and it gets much easier. But since all the important bosses we'd want to use status effects like Sleep and Repose on are immune to them, it's kind of lame to have once you're done those quests. (Notice no one has a paralysis skill too- only stuns and silences, of which only the former is genuinely useful in most content!) It's a minor case of dead skills resulting from old design philosophy I think. They aren't totally useless but the cases in which you'd WANT to use them are limited or, past a certain point for some of them, non-existent.

I'm honestly more curious on why they passed the pruning pass

I use repose as a WHM while I level and sometimes when an add jumps in while we are in a fight in a dungeon ill knock it into the other enemies or use sleep to keep it from raping my bung hole.

WHM Repose and BLM Sleep can go die in a fire since the devs don't make them useful for anything but low level solo questing. I'd rather see them removed altogether.

Freeze has been useless in PvE for a very long time; no idea why it hasn't been reworked. With the way Umbral Hearts and Flares work, Freeze isn't even good for mass AoE anymore; after casting B4 and T4, it's back to Astral again.

Scathe is so situational and ideally so infrequently used that it's not something I can be bothered to hotkey. It would be nice if it felt a little less punishing to use (movement or no, blowing a GCD on a 100 base potency, non-aspected single-target attack makes for sad BLM).

I use scathe for moving, but mainly out of habit since it basically doesn't do any dmg. The rest I don't haven't had on my skillbar for ages.
I heard Freeze is good in pvp though.

Blizzard II: Good to use to accidentally lock you out of Enochian.

Freeze: Good to use if diversion / lucid are somehow down on an add phase or trash pack and you're feeling exceptionally generous by limiting your DPS.

Scathe: Good to use when you've already used swift / triple / aetherial / between the lines and they're all on cooldown and your teammates in the 24-man raid keep dying and thus more mechanics keep targeting you instead of them as you prolong an inevitable wipe.

Sleep: Good to use in the 1% of situations in the game where CC is applicable which also happen to be the content so easy that it doesn't matter, even in Brayflox.

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Originally Posted by Lelila38

I use scathe for moving, but mainly out of habit since it basically doesn't do any dmg. The rest I don't haven't had on my skillbar for ages.
I heard Freeze is good in pvp though.

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Freeze in pvp shares the same skill slot as polyglot and flare and they do basically the same thing, so ye they could do something for PVE too

Their idea by deleting useless skills in Stormblood was to have approximatively the same number as before and get new ones.
The thing is, blm never had a lot a buttons (like scholar for example).
So... even if they would delete those... it doesn't mean they would add new spells.

In other words, some might be extremely situational, other completely useless, but as long as blm will have some place on his toolkit.. they'll always be here.

Honestly, I felt Sleep and Repose were perfect candidates for Cross Role skills and was shocked when they weren't put into that list and removed from WHM and BLM

Freeze would be perfectly salvageable with some kind of tweak to give it a legitimate place in a BLM AoE Rotation. Even if it simply gave Umbral Hearts under Enochian and effectively replaced B4 in AoE, that would give it some purpose.

Sleep is going to remain useless for virtually all content unless SE reworks hard CC, so...yeah, it's going to stay useless except in some solo leveling, which is probably a fraction of an average player's experience in the game.

Scathe wouldn't be such a disappointment if it had a bit of potency to it, but I would prefer to see it reworked in a way that made it a legitimate tool rather than an absolute last resort "literally-better-than-nothing" option for extended movement. As others have suggested, it could be as simple as extending UI/AF timers by a few seconds so that stacks aren't lost as with Transpose (not a fix that would be likely to improve things much at the highest levels of play, but almost any change to Scathe would be an improvement of some kind).

Freeze has its use in trash mobs. The last time I remember Sleep being useful in PvE was for doing the Alexandrite Maps solo.

Pack of trash mobs is all below 20%, you've just used Flare > Transpose. You can cast F3 > F2, but there's a decent chance your target will die before the spell finishes. Pop a couple Freezes instead and do more damage, without interruption worry.

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Originally Posted by StouterTaru

Freeze has its use in trash mobs. The last time I remember Sleep being useful in PvE was for doing the Alexandrite Maps solo.

Pack of trash mobs is all below 20%, you've just used Flare > Transpose. You can cast F3 > F2, but there's a decent chance your target will die before the spell finishes. Pop a couple Freezes instead and do more damage, without interruption worry.

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True, but it still feels like a shame that that’s about the nicest thing to be said for it. Would rather that Freeze be a more useful skill in its own right and not just very niche filler.

CC wouldn't be an issue so much if the CC effects stayed. With Freeze for instance, and Blizzard II, but mainly Freeze, it grants a binding effect, that disappears the second you hit them. If the bind lasted, then it would allow for my recuperation between the party. Plus as Someone said, maybe make Freeze grant something. Or maybe they can make it similar to the new swap skill thing they are doing, Freeze and Flare share the same slot, and swap depending on which mode you are in. Truthfully I don't wanna see the skill removed I wanna see it reworked, And I want Burst, T.T, anyone else upset Foul isn't Burst.

Freeze is probably the only way to have your AoE continue during Umbral Ice, but they'd probably need to buff it and make it easier to target.

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Originally Posted by EllieShadeflare

Freeze is probably the only way to have your AoE continue during Umbral Ice, but they'd probably need to buff it and make it easier to target.

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Thunder II or IV is the best way. Freeze should only be used if you need a refresh on UI timer, which realistically only happens on dungeons when you're preparing stacks and hearts mid pull before the whole big pack is brought together.

Blizzard II is really bad and a victim of power creep, it used to be 100 potency but it was better than spamming Fire II, so I doubt it will get any buff. As long Freeze doesn't provide Hearts or more sacks of Umbral it won't be ever useful on an actual rotation. Scathe suffers more on BLM's MP issues than being an actual underpowered Spell, outside of that it's pretty good and useful for boss jumps. Sleep still has uses for MSQ if you're doing solo so no reason changing it really.

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Originally Posted by zuzu-bq

Blizzard II is really bad and a victim of power creep, it used to be 100 potency but it was better than spamming Fire II, so I doubt it will get any buff.

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B2 was never better than spamming F2 and the only reason it was ever used was to do the B2 B2 Flare Flare rotation, which was fixed in 2.1 that also made B2 a cross class skill. The potency nerf was very much only to prevent healers and Summoner having a too strong spammable AoE. Don't think it even had a root in 2.0.

Sorry, I didn't complete my sentence. It was better to spam B2 by early levels and it was really strong on early dungeons, just like scatter spam is. They probably also nerfed because of SMN and SCH's access to the spell. Right now it has no reason to be so weak.

Sleep was so OP in PvP they had to nerf it twice. . . and that still wasn't enough. Before 4.0 Repose made WHMs huge threat, and the favored healer in the Feast (along with a now-gone skill that was basically a regen pool and 40% damage mitigation in one).

A lot of skills deemed "useless" in PvE were some of the best in PvP. Rather than get rid of them, they should've just moved them right over and made them PvP-only.

Freeze should inflict Deep Freeze status. AoE stun oh wow. But that'll never happen. So meh.

Most of the skills find great use in PvP.

The legitimate answer to your question(s) is that they are useful at low level/while leveling.

Blizzard II is more potency than Blizzard I on four targets after you've used Transpose and are waiting to Transpose back into Astral. After you learn Fire III, it becomes mostly useless (particularly now that Thunder II is aoe). It also has a really fast cast, so if you're in a situation like fate grinding where mobs die really fast and you can't get fire casts off, spamming Blizzard II is a legitimate strategy.
Sleep can be very useful low level for recovery, if your tank dies you can sleep the mobs etc. Freeze is the same way. These become mostly useless after the 2.x level 50 dungeons where most mobs resist most status disorders like this.
Scathe is marginally useful for movement, but I also use it as an "execute" when the last mob has low enough HP that another full cast will not complete on it.

If it were up to me, Scathe would be buffed to become useful but the other skills can pretty much just stay the way they are. Not all skills need to be useful at max level, in my opinion.

What I might do is have Blizzard II upgrade to Freeze and have Freeze be some kind of off GCD spell that hits every target that has Thunder applied to it for some amount of potency in ice, sorta like Fester/Painflare.

Sleep is really useful while progressing on MSQ. There is no reason to change the Spell. Either keep how it it or delete entirely. They won't get it to be used rotationally or in raids even because all the CC we can provide that one day might be useful in raid scenario (Bind and Heavy) can be provided by other spells or by the Physical Ranged DPS (they can also provide those debuffs in better ways too).

Sleep is useful when you get a bad group in a low level roulette, and need the CC to make the run suck a little less.
Bliz2 is useful when you're just too lazy to target things to hit and you don't really feel like working yourself back up to another Flare.
Scathe is only really worth using when you get too frustrated with mobs dying before anything else gets cast. Bliz2 can also be used in that situation.

Freeze is totally a dud, though, unless I finally go to the trouble of making a macro, so I don't have to bother with the ground targeting. It's basically only useful when all the other DRKs and DRGs and whatever are being annoying with their no-target skill spam in town.

DRG lost their spam in town though

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Originally Posted by Remedi

DRG lost their spam in town though

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These are the real issues. Bring back pole dancing!

In all seriousness, the only thing I found Sleep useful for last expansion was soloing FATE bosses during the time that 1) you couldn't queue with your chocobo summoned and 2) you still had Physick and could heal back up after sleeping the target. Also useful on said FATE bosses was lethargy because that actually worked on them. That's less a "these skills were useful" thing and more a "FATEs are dead" thing in all honesty.

It’d be cool to have a Sleep/Lethargy merge. Which is to say, an OGCD that sleeps+slows+heavies mobs in a radius around a target, so that monsters that can’t be put to sleep or get woken up still have their damage defrayed a bit.

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Originally Posted by Ferrinus

It’d be cool to have a Sleep/Lethargy merge. Which is to say, an OGCD that sleeps+slows+heavies mobs in a radius around a target, so that monsters that can’t be put to sleep or get woken up still have their damage defrayed a bit.

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I second this. Could be Sleep, Heavy, and Slow. Could call it Tri-Disast- oh, wait a minute...

They stopped having a purpose mid-ARR

I have found Freeze to be useful with a caveat. The process of targeting it onto an area is too awkward. Macroing this spell to go off on an individual target improves it immensely. It hits hard and I use it a lot in my PotD runs.

Sleep is one of those spells which are useful in low level dungeons and questing. However, it's basically useless later on because SE seems to have decided crowd control is unimportant in later dungeons and in raiding. That is a shame because making CC important would add an interesting facet to dungeons and raids beyond just keeping to your rotations.

Scathe really needs to hit harder to justify its use. Otherwise, the whole process of moving remains too punishing to the BLM job.

Blizzard II has always been a strange spell. It forces the BLM to run into the midst of a group of mobs to use it. That's not where a caster wants to be. Meanwhile, its movement hindering effect is too short to be of much use. As I said, an odd spell.

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Originally Posted by Kacho_Nacho

I have found Freeze to be useful

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Unfortunately Freeze is only useful for its binding ability; the potency of Fire II is stronger on even one mob, so to use Freeze instead of getting back into Astral asap is a loss.

This is further complicated at 70 when Flares and Thunder IV become even stronger than Fire II, so as long as Transpose is off cooldown, it is best to forego your entire Astral MP pool using Flare (or reapplying Thunder IV if it's about to fall off and the stuff has a while to live).

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Originally Posted by Llugen

Unfortunately Freeze is only useful for its binding ability; the potency of Fire II is stronger on even one mob, so to use Freeze instead of getting back into Astral asap is a loss.

This is further complicated at 70 when Flares and Thunder IV become even stronger than Fire II, so as long as Transpose is off cooldown, it is best to forego your entire Astral MP pool using Flare (or reapplying Thunder IV if it's about to fall off and the stuff has a while to live).

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Kinda wish I could like this quote more than once and use every time a friend of mine insist of using freeze for w/e reason even though I told him many times it is a dps loss

I can recall a few times we would probably recover from a tank death in dungeons if mobs weren't immune to sleep.

But for some reason, all mobs are immune to it since late Heavensward.

You could skip all or most of all trash mobs in some dungeons by using sleep/bind before the gates to a boss fight would close.

To counter that they made everything immune to sleep and put walls in dungeons, you could say that current dungeons structure is a reaction to community passive feedbacks.

The walls were more due to "Pull everything and die to a corner next to boss" thing.

Well yes you are right

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Originally Posted by Remedi

You could skip all or most of all trash mobs in some dungeons by using sleep/bind before the gates to a boss fight would close.

To counter that they made everything immune to sleep and put walls in dungeons, you could say that current dungeons structure is a reaction to community passive feedbacks.

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I think mobs can cross invisible walls, and putting them to sleep makes them aggro you, thus they would join you to the boss once the sleep effect would wear off.

Nothing can enter a boss arena once it closes and to be more specific any aggroed mobs instantly resets once it hit the boss barrier

It is true that you used to be able to use freeze to lock mobs out of boss arenas and they would then reset when they couldn't get to you. The solution to this, though, isn't to make freeze useless by making it so mobs cant be bound, but rather by making bosses not spawn until all the preceding enemies are dead/mechanics are dealt with, at least in my opinion.

Some bosses do spawns only after you clear trashes in dungeons now in fact. To be specific I was answering to why mobs became immune to most CCs, I personally enjoyed to some extent that practice it made for a clever use of game mechanics.