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

[Kabooa]

Apart from no longer having to pay attention to when your ultra nuke spell is actually less powerful than your AoE filler, that would be a complexity increase.

I'd kind of have to disagree here.

As the pack size increases, T4's value increases. You will never not use T4 except in like, 3 pack AoE, and this particular variant wouldn't want to use Freeze in 3 packs. It wants to use B4 so you can get into Fire and F4/F4/Flare/Flare.

As pack size increases, the increased value of flare means anything beyond the necessities that prevents you from getting to your next Flare gets dropped. And the necessities are T4 and B4. After that, you start up F3 because you'll definitely hit two ticks by then, go into AF and Flare Flare transpose. Removing the damage penalty of the Stacks also diminishes freeze further in this scenario.

Tranpose being at 10 seconds means you can tranpose, T4, B4, Flare, Flare, Transpose. Why use Cheap Freeze when you can use 260 Flare then uber amped Flare? (Umbral hearts remember)

If there is a complexity increase, it's not notable. I'd see this being a shift back since you basically expanded the Double Flare scenario from 3-6 to 3-8, which covers almost every dungeon pull.

Edit: Even the 3 pack size is probably reduced to just Transpose, B4, Flare Flare.

Edit edit: Also, 1.8 x 260 vs 1.6 x 310, is roughly a 5% increase in potency. (468 vs 496)