Abilities you hope get renamed in 5.0

[SDaemon]

I would like to see name changes on all those Black Mage spells: I, II and III to their correct form used in all others FF games: Fire > Fira > Firaga, please?

Except I, II, III and so on level spells have been a part of the FF series since the beginning, in so far as the English localization anyway. Not necessarily opposed to them changing the names, but in the name of "correctness" I'd find it rather silly.

[Callinon]

Except I, II, III and so on level spells have been a part of the FF series since the beginning, in so far as the English localization anyway. Not necessarily opposed to them changing the names, but in the name of "correctness" I'd find it rather silly.

Only in the English releases because they couldn't fit the full names of spells in a 4-character space. The original Final Fantasy's Japanese release uses the -ra -ga -ja naming convention.

Personally I preferred FFXI's style which kept the numbered tiers for spells and used suffixes to denote area of effect.

-ra would be a point-blank aoe
-ga would be an aoe around your target
-ja would be a bigger aoe around your target

I will say that for new BLMs, having Fire II and Blizzard II as the AoEs when Fire III and Blizzard III are then not, is not great. Just from an intuitiveness perspective, that's not ideal.

[Rongway]

I will say that for new BLMs, having Fire II and Blizzard II as the AoEs when Fire III and Blizzard III are then not, is not great. Just from an intuitiveness perspective, that's not ideal.

That's because action names are a form of interface feature. The names of the spells allow us to differentiate them. The thing is, if the naming convention isn't meaningful beyond separating the spells into version 1, 2, 3, and 4, then using numbers is superior because we already speak numbers and don't have to learn a new counting system just to differentiate between the spells.

Switching to a suffix system is only a good choice, from a UI/UX designer's perspective, if the suffixes carry some sort of meaning. XI did this beautifully. Spellra was an AoE spell centered on caster and Spellga was an AoE spell centered on target. Using that system, Medica would be Cura and Cure III would be Curaga, while Cure II would still be just Cure II. For BLM we would have Fire, Firaga (targeted AoE), Fire II (currently 3), Fire III (currently 4) and Blizzard, Blizzara (pbAoE), Blizzard II, Blizzard III; Thunder, Thundaga, Thunder II, Thundaga II.

I would approve of such a system.

However, if we just want to rename spells to make them sound more Final Fantasy, without the suffixes having any meaning, then that's not an effective naming scheme. We might as well just stick with pure numbering, because suffixes in this case would really just be numbers playing dress-up, and we'd effectively be asking new players to learn a new number system just for the sake of immersion.