Please allow Freeze to grant an Umbral Heart for usability

Freeze is pretty much a useless spell right now, and almost always with the exception of certain level gaps being used as a brief filler in an aoe rotation (before you obtain Blizzard III). Crowd control is next to useless in this game, so Freeze really has no function at all whatsoever right now.

Now, at level 70 a Black Mage's AoE rotation includes Thunder IV, Fire III, Flare, Blizzard IV, Foul. Sometimes Fire II. I always thought it was awkward to include Blizzard IV in the rotation (necessary for Umbral Hearts for back to back Flare uses), and wondered why not use Freeze to grant an Umbral Heart instead?

Currently my AoE rotation I usually use is: Blizzard III -> Enochian -> Thunder IV -> Blizzard IV -> Fire III -> Triplecast -> Flare -> Flare -> Convert -> Flare -> Transpose -> Foul -> Thunder IV -> Blizzard IV -> Fire III -> Flare -> Swiftcast -> Flare -> Transpose

Of course that repeats and extra Thunder IVs get tossed in there with Thundercloud procs, etc. but I always felt awkward using Blizzard IV. It's necessary for Umbral Hearts unless you want to use the old method of just Fire II x2 -> Flare then you can skip Blizzard IV (or you have tons of mobs where the Fire II spam is more DPS than Flare and Umbral Hearts mean more Fire IIs). I just feel it would be cooler to have Freeze in there instead. Plus it keeps more AoE pressure up instead of having gaps in between AoE casts. So then I would end up doing:

Freeze -> Enochian -> Thunder IV -> Fire III -> Triplecast -> Flare -> Flare -> Convert -> Flare -> Transpose -> Foul -> Thunder IV -> Freeze -> Fire III -> Flare -> Swiftcast -> Flare -> Transpose

To me that would make more sense because I am keeping up an AoE rotation and it would feel and flow better to do so as opposed to stopping AoE to use another single target spell, plus it would actually make use of Freeze. Freeze is only 100 potency, so it's not like it would significantly increase AoE dps (well, only 3+ mobs starting slightly and gaining a bit as you have more enemies), and having it grant an Umbral Heart will still fulfill the purpose of allowing you to use back to back Flares. I say 1 Umbral Heart as opposed to the 3 that Blizzard IV grants because of opportunity cost. If you choose to use Blizzard IV, you should get more Umbral Hearts because you are sacrificing AoE damage for more Umbral Hearts. I would even be ok with nerfing the potency to 80 if dps gain is really a concern, I just feel it should grant an Umbral Heart.

Anyway, please make this change. I want to see Freeze be useful, and I want my AoE rotation to flow better. It would just be a neat quality of life change so I can use Freeze in AoE rotations instead of Blizzard IV, and have a reason to include it on my hotbar. Otherwise you might as well remove the spell from the game because it serves no other purpose. Freeze is an iconic spell. It makes me sad to see it totally useless.

While we're changing Freeze for the better can we also remove the target circle placement and just have it be a circle around our target? I mean.. I have a macro that does that anyway... but I'd rather not have to use a macro if it can be avoided.

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Originally Posted by Ferth

While we're changing Freeze for the better can we also remove the target circle placement and just have it be a circle around our target? I mean.. I have a macro that does that anyway... but I'd rather not have to use a macro if it can be avoided.

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I would be ok with this. I already have the <t> macro for Freeze, Shadow Flare, and Salted Earth anyway. As a gamepad user I find them annoying at times not being able to just click them like a normal off global cooldown ability and some times not have them fire off immediately (having to press the macro more than once to get it to work).

I'm sure there are more Black Mages out there who may agree yes?

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Originally Posted by DJaySaint

level 80

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How are you at level 80?! I call hax.

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Originally Posted by Ferth

While we're changing Freeze for the better can we also remove the target circle placement and just have it be a circle around our target? I mean.. I have a macro that does that anyway... but I'd rather not have to use a macro if it can be avoided.

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How can you macro this?

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Originally Posted by killerVanilla

How can you macro this?

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/ac Freeze <t>

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Originally Posted by VanilleFang

How are you at level 80?! I call hax.

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I'm from the future playing 5.0 and Freeze still sucks :(

They should make it in to OGCD shadow flare. 1min CD 20-30sec duration.

Yes please! No more useless spells.

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Originally Posted by alimdia

Yes please! No more useless spells.

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Something is always gonna be useless at the level cap. That will probably never change. Big maybe on probably, as in I doubt it ever will. Would be nice if spells like Sleep worked in SB instances though... But the fact it doesn't is proof that SE wants early job actions to become unused at late levels due to how useless they become.

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Originally Posted by Joe777

Something is always gonna be useless at the level cap. That will probably never change. Big maybe on probably, as in I doubt it ever will. Would be nice if spells like Sleep worked in SB instances though... But the fact it doesn't is proof that SE wants early job actions to become unused at late levels due to how useless they become.

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The problem with Freeze is that it was always useless.

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Originally Posted by Ferth

The problem with Freeze is that it was always useless.

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It's actually quite strong around 40 or so. Stronger than Fire II in fact, but only just barely, which at that level isn't much of a difference anyway, but at least you can stay in Umbral Ice with it. Compared them in Cutter's Cry myself.

I would like this change yes :D

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Originally Posted by Joe777

Something is always gonna be useless at the level cap. That will probably never change. Big maybe on probably, as in I doubt it ever will. Would be nice if spells like Sleep worked in SB instances though... But the fact it doesn't is proof that SE wants early job actions to become unused at late levels due to how useless they become.

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Sleep was never useful to me, even at low level. They also gave Red Mage an aoe bind in Tether which is also totally useless... and that's a new job. Not sure why with their whole action rework to get rid of unused actions, they would keep useless actions in, and even add one on a brand new job. Crowd control in this game is so pointless because combat is based around face rolling as fast as possible. One thing I really miss about XI was needing to control adds instead of just smashing aoe buttons all day and totally ignoring their usefulness. I miss the days where you used to have to crowd control and come up with strategies for fights, but in XIV unfortunately it's run in and face tank all the things almost all the time. Or dodge some form of circle.

Not to mention almost all of the mobs you actually might want to crowd control are randomly just totally immune to it, making those spells absolutely worthless.

/nostalgia

I completely agree with OP here. It is clunky and awkward to use a single target spell such as Blizzard 4 in an AoE rotation when Freeze should also be able to generate Umbral Hearts. Since the majority of raid encounters are single target, this change does not seem likely to break anything in a progressive tier, and even with a low potency, spreading the damage to all targets is more desirable than focusing it on just one if we were to use Blizzard 4 instead.

Bliz 3 -> Enochian -> Thunder 4 -> Freeze -> Fire 3 -> Flare -> Flare -> Convert -> Flare -> Max-Ether -> Swiftcast -> Flare -> Transpose -> (Thunder 4 -> Freeze -> Foul (if available) -> Fire 3 -> Flare -> Flare -> Transpose ->) looks good to me.

Make freeze great again!

Do you remember doing your lvl 63 blm quest and you had to defeat I forgot what's his name but when he starts casting origin of ice it left a big frozen puddle on the floor.and I said to myself that's what freeze should have been.It could be some kind of magic vul debuff but oh well...Forgot to mention blizzard 2 and sleep are useless skills as well.

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Originally Posted by DJaySaint

Sleep was never useful to me, even at low level. They also gave Red Mage an aoe bind in Tether which is also totally useless... and that's a new job. Not sure why with their whole action rework to get rid of unused actions, they would keep useless actions in, and even add one on a brand new job. Crowd control in this game is so pointless because combat is based around face rolling as fast as possible. One thing I really miss about XI was needing to control adds instead of just smashing aoe buttons all day and totally ignoring their usefulness. I miss the days where you used to have to crowd control and come up with strategies for fights, but in XIV unfortunately it's run in and face tank all the things almost all the time. Or dodge some form of circle.

Not to mention almost all of the mobs you actually might want to crowd control are randomly just totally immune to it, making those spells absolutely worthless.

/nostalgia

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It's true bind has always been a useless affliction in combat, and is especially useless vs mages and archers, but vs melee attackers with no ranged attacks or for just plain escaping it has its uses. Mind you these are pretty rare situations for it to be used... As for Sleep, it comes in handy in those solo instances where you have to deal with voidkin from portals while closing said portals. Yes CC isn't exactly ideal in this game and is situational and it would be nice if SE would acknowledge it a bit more, but this is also one of those games where if you do then you don't have much need for tanks and healers since dps could just stunlock enemies. They won't get rid of such things though since it is useful for getting through those solo instances. Also Tether does proc dualcast so despite being situational it has its uses, like for example Tethering enemies then Vercuring because you were being attacked by multiple enemies and losing to them.

Much better idea. get rid of freeze entirely.

OP's aoe rotation wastes an excessive amount of mp. Umbral hearts reduce flare's cost by 1/3 per heart available. I use the rotation:

Blizzard 3 > Enochian > Thunder 4 > Blizzard 4 > Fire 3 > Fire 2 > Fire 2 > Triple Cast > Flare > Flare > Convert > Flare> Transpose > Swiftcast > Endless Loop back(skipping the 3rd flare and CDs when they're not available at the time)

Fire 2 may be 80 potency, but keep in mind it gets a super buff from the astral fire bonus with enochian's 10% bonus. Think astral fire 3 is an 80%ish buff to fire spells. So with that math in mind Fire 2 is around 152 potency so that's around 304 potency loss.

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Originally Posted by SomeRandomHuman

OP's aoe rotation wastes an excessive amount of mp. Umbral hearts reduce flare's cost by 1/3 per heart available. I use the rotation:

Blizzard 3 > Enochian > Thunder 4 > Blizzard 4 > Fire 3 > Fire 2 > Fire 2 > Triple Cast > Flare > Flare > Convert > Flare> Transpose > Swiftcast > Endless Loop back(skipping the 3rd flare and CDs when they're not available at the time)

Fire 2 may be 80 potency, but keep in mind it gets a super buff from the astral fire bonus with enochian's 10% bonus. Think astral fire 3 is an 80%ish buff to fire spells. So with that math in mind Fire 2 is around 152 potency so that's around 304 potency loss.

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Wasting MP doesn't matter. What matters is potency per second when factoring in casting time spent. Fire II is only worth it when you have 7+ mobs (if I remember correctly from the spreadsheet full of math stuff). Flare gets that same potency buff as well when in Astral Fire so that's a moot point. On a normal pull (5-6 mobs) it is absolutely better to just Flare (and gets even better when you have Swiftcast and Triplecast available, which make situations where even using Fire II on 8-9 mobs is actually a potency per second loss compared to just Flaring), according to the math spreadsheets I have seen. Yes you lose potency from not casting Fire II, but you are also spending more global cooldowns which equates to a lower potency per second than using Flare (again, depends on the number of mobs). If you have a huge pull, then yes Fire II your heart out. Average pull? Flare all the things.

Either way, have no idea what that has to do with the original topic: Umbral Heart on Freeze please!

I wanted to revisit this to see if it can get some official dev attention!

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Originally Posted by DJaySaint

I wanted to revisit this to see if it can get some official dev attention!

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It would not surprise me to see this get pruned in 5.0. May not be the kind of dev attention you wanted though.

Yea after finding out they plan to remove some spells and actions that rarely get used as opposed to combining combos (Pvp) I fully expect to see freeze removed. Don't think I've ever used it other than to see what it does and how it works that one time....
Still think it could be the blm variant of shadow flare and salted earth etc just create a freezing some of aoe damage for 10/15 seconds. Cast at start of rotation to et things going.

I don't know, we all expected them to get rid of Tri-Bind but that ended up becoming an aoe filler for SMN during Dreadwyrm Trance. They might surprise us yet.