Black Mage

[Sfia]

A lot of suggestions here are great in terms of quality of life at lower play (fixing scathe usage etc.) but really it seems like most people are missing the mark on what I have said.

Even when played with absolute perfect execution Black Mage does not do enough of anything to justify it's slot in any end game situation.

The solutions are VERY simple. Provide much more personal damage or provide raidwide damage utility or provide unique and valuable defensive utility. A combination of these can also be used to create a strong class, however you then risk losing identity from an iconic job, and would (in my opinion) be much harder to achieve a healthy point with.

One or more of these options needs to happen for this job to be worth bringing into a raid/trial.

[TsuKoj]

It should be offensive utility or more personal damage. Defensive utility is too hard to balance. It ends up either too good and you have to bring it, or it's not vital and it might as well not be there. While defensive utility might be useful for midcore groups, most people won't admit they need the crutch and won't pick it up anyways. It's the problem with tenacity. Tenacity is useful for midcore groups that don't have the most amazing healers and tanks to progress, but since top groups have amazing healers and tanks and don't need tenacity, healers aren't going to admit they need the help, and tanks are going to just tell the healer to get good and keep their dps melds.

[Wyti]

A lot of suggestions here are great in terms of quality of life at lower play (fixing scathe usage etc.) but really it seems like most people are missing the mark on what I have said.

Even when played with absolute perfect execution Black Mage does not do enough of anything to justify it's slot in any end game situation.

BLM definitely need to have their ceiling raised, but focusing on quality of life at lower level is probably the single most important thing to make a BLM usefull to any group.
Just take a look at Rabanastre logs: https://www.fflogs.com/statistics/18#dataset=50 at the 50 percentile and below (that is half the BLM population doing rabanastre !) the class is literally the last in personnal dps.
Playing it correctly in mechanically intensive fights is quite difficult and currently far beyond the reach of most casual players.

The problem with BLM is more that at the top level the players understand that it isn't doing nearly enough to justify its place in a group compared to other classes, and at low level the gap become so wide that you begin to question taking a BLM because of the risk of getting a bad BLM that will underperform so badly you instead choose to take a more stable DPS that can at least press a button every 2 minute to boost everyone else.

Simply boosting the potency of fire IV / foul would only widen the already too large gap between top and bot BLM. I really do like the idea of increasing the duration of the Thunder, at least 30 sec would make it last until the next UI phase.
After that I would propose some buffs to fire I, sure It may cause problem with Blizzard IV not being used everytime by top players, but it would enable weaker player to at least do decent damage if they happen to drop enochian, which will happen a lot when not used to the class.

The change I would really like is to make fire I a bit more usable when on the move. Making it instant case would probably be OP and quite frankly not sounds too BLM to me, but I would love a base 1.5 cast time (still 2.5sec GCD) that way we could use a Fire I to weave OGCD during it with a minimal potency loss and gain 1 sec per cast of movement.

[NovaLevossida]

Just take a look at Rabanastre logs at the 50 percentile and below (that is half the BLM population doing rabanastre !) the class is literally the last in personnal dps.

This raid was my breaking point with BLM. It's not a hard raid (no 24-man ever really could be), but I got really, really frustrated with the amount of movement, mechanics targeting me, people running over to my leylines to have their mechanics target me, etc. I just got to the point where although I like the concept of the job, I just grew really, really annoyed with the frustrations that easy content like that had for the job. The worse your team is doing / the more they die, the more you get targeted and hit, and the more you can't cast when swift/triple are down. I don't think the amount of annoyance with the job in that raid is anywhere close to proportional to the difficulty of the content.