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

[Llugen]

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.

[zuzu-bq]

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).

[Hasrat]

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.

[Remedi]

DRG lost their spam in town though

[Llugen]

DRG lost their spam in town though

These are the real issues. Bring back pole dancing!

[NovaLevossida]

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.

[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.

[Llugen]

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.

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

[Kabooa]

They stopped having a purpose mid-ARR

[Kacho_Nacho]

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.