sorry but your job sucks.....

[Dyvid]

As a rule, if you need to cite low-level examples to explain how an ability can be useful, it is generally useless.

I don’t think it’s okay or that it’s good design that Freeze’s uses are so incredibly niche while leveling and virtually non-existent thereafter.

I agree with you that any change to Sleep to make it useful in current content would have to go beyond simply allowing it to work.

Clearly ARR was original designed with Crowd Control in mind but quickly abandoned. Sadly those CC still hang around like a forgot ghost. BLM suffers most from this since they were the primer CC class with nothing to bind. I suppose they could rework these skills into indirect damage modifiers like sleep would able a slow debuff and and freeze a defense down debuff. Or SE could simply start adding CC elements to the game.

[Joe777]

As a rule, if you need to cite low-level examples to explain how an ability can be useful, it is generally useless.

Not quite, since if you level-sync low enough to have it while still being under 50 it can be useful. Best examples: Cutter's Cry - Aurum Vale. It's therefore only useless if you never run lower level dungeons.

[Remedi]

Dunno what you mean for it to have more opotency than F2 considering AF3, but that aside most of BLMs gripes are about end game content not low level ones

[zuzu-bq]

Midas had Crowd Control in mind for many fights. Needing them to be used at all of the raid's encounters in their Savage versions.

Sleep was abused at early ARR so they started making so we can't use at all, it's a hard thing to balance around so not being able to use in actual content is a safe change. Thats why I said the ability could've been deleted in a previous post.

[Llugen]

They were mad because sleep was used to skip mobs, so the REAL fix should have just been making the boss rooms not open until the mobs were dead instead of making sleep useless. Simple.

[Cynfael]

Not quite, since if you level-sync low enough to have it while still being under 50 it can be useful. Best examples: Cutter's Cry - Aurum Vale. It's therefore only useless if you never run lower level dungeons.

...it is generally useless.

Freeze's window of relative usefulness pretty much begins and ends with the UI phase in low-level mass AoE before Flare becomes available. Its actual crowd control capability is garbage because of how Bind works in this game and rarely saves anyone from anything.

The solution appears to be simple: give it additional functionality and/or potency that makes it generally worth using while preserving the crappy Bind for the odd leveling situation or other miscellaneous application.

[Llugen]

No amount of potency they could give Freeze would be meaningful because it's either less than flare (so useless) or more than flare (so broken). It MUST be an additional effect.

Making it so that it procs at zero MP and gives immediate Umbral Ice III (so no more need for transpose after flare) and then at level 68 letting it give you Umbral Hearts so you can always use them for Flares. This would at least partially fix BLM's current AOE damage "issue" (since it is lower than SMN due to the burst nature of AOE phases rather than the sustained nature of them).

[Cynfael]

No amount of potency they could give Freeze would be meaningful because it's either less than flare (so useless) or more than flare (so broken). It MUST be an additional effect.

Making it so that it procs at zero MP and gives immediate Umbral Ice III (so no more need for transpose after flare) and then at level 68 letting it give you Umbral Hearts so you can always use them for Flares. This would at least partially fix BLM's current AOE damage "issue" (since it is lower than SMN due to the burst nature of AOE phases rather than the sustained nature of them).

Yes, I’m familiar with the discussion. No, I don’t think a simple potency increase is the actual solution, but the spell is so bad that almost anything would be an improvement. Right now it’s not even eligible as UI downtime filler.

[zuzu-bq]

Yeah, Freeze can't be solved with potency buffs. It has to be an additional effect. Either Umbral Hearts or something else involving Umbral Ice and/or MP would work.

Right now Freeze has a really select niche of UI refresh in dungeons' mob pulls.

[Llugen]

Semantics kinda, but "anything" really wouldn't improve the spell. It's either used or it's not used. They've buffed its potency like four times since 2.0 but still no one uses it because no matter how much they increase its potency, it will still be stronger to just go into Astral and use fire spells.

Unless of course they buff it so that its potency is stronger than Flare, but in that event Freeze would be the only spell BLMs would spam during AOE phases (and with infinite Umbral MP!). That doesn't sound like a meaningful solution, either.