Ideas to Improve The Black Mage (for 4.2 and beyond!)

[Tzain]

Edit: Tzain... you're really suggesting a ground up rework to Black Mage!? That's... not gonna work well in the end.

Its not that much of a rework when you break it down.

What do you normally cast during umbral? Blizzard III, Thunder, Blizzard IV (if Enochian). By making the Blizzard III a DoT I'm simply moving the spell effects around and making the spell a bit more useful.
By using the 'coldsnap(formerly thunderstorm)' proc stack it would look like this. (assuming a 3 stack)
Blizzard III, Coldsnap, Coldsnap, Coldsnap, Blizzard IV
Which is a nice little burst damage phase.
And Astral is similar. You're casting your Fire I spells during Astral, and the blizzard DoT is procing Firestarter for you. This extends your Astral phase MP pool and prevents you from 'double procing' Firestarter when having queued a Fire I, not that it matters as much since it now stacks. But in the end, it's not really that much of a change. spam Fire I and instant cast Fire III.

And by putting the procs on opposite skills I'm setting up a cycle. Astral feeds the Umbral Burst, Umbral extends the Astral gatling gun ammo supply.

The Enochian change is just a side effect of removing the timer. Now the Blizz and Fire IV spells add to the enochian guage, so instead of Foul being 'Timer based every 30 seconds' it's 'Action Based every X hearts' (which you can balance depending on the number of hearts/minds needed to fill the gauge).
Fire I, Fire III, and Fire IV still need a little bit of work in my mind, but that's just because they just lack something to really differentiate them beyond Potency.

EDIT: Actually, what if Umbral hearts only affect Fire IVs and Astral Minds only affect Blizzard IV? This would keep the Enochian effects self contained to the IV spells. Then Firestarter can go back to only affecting Fire III (and II? that might be good for AE)

So 50 rotation would be
Blizz I/III, Coldsnaps, Fire III, Fire I/Firestarter spam till OOM
60 would be
Blizz I/III, Coldsnaps, Blizz IV x 'Minds' (to eat the minds, and generate hearts), Fire III, Fire I/Firestarter, Fire IV x 'Hearts' (to eat the hearts and generate minds)
Then 70 would just add the Foul into the mix as an end-cap then the guage fills.