Quote Originally Posted by Archwizard View Post
Have you crunched the numbers on that or are you just crossing your fingers?
180 potency on 1 target versus 80 potency on multiple targets. Better than F1 on 3 and better than F4 on 4. Most jobs do this kind of math when choosing single target vs. multitarget abilities on non-massive pulls.

So you want to hamfist in an ability that's dead to the community for a technicality, in lieu of an option like, say, just patching Flare to actually be affected by Aspect Mastery so you still have Umbral Hearts after a Cold Flare (which I think we can agree is a massive oversight that it doesn't already)?
Nothing hamfisted about it. There's an obvious gap in the fire spellset (an AoE that swaps you to AF3 with your mana pool intact) and a longstanding AoE fire spell that falls out of use long before level 80. It's a match made in heaven! The B2/Freeze stuff is a bit questionable but making F2 effectively an area of effect F3 is a slam dunk.

I don't agree that flare consuming umbral hearts when cast out of ice mode is an oversight. If Fire 2 simply didn't exist at all, I could see using Flare as the swap-to-AF spell as well as your heavy-hitting AF AoE, but given that F2 needs a home there's no reason to change Flare's behavior in that way.

Are you aware of the difference that that 17 levels makes? That's all of the post-ARR content, the entirety of Heavensward and most of Stormblood, for a first-time leveler that's nearly a month and even for someone with Armory bonus that could be weeks. Compare that to the gap from 35 to 50, which is like... A day? Three tops?
Not to mention how incredibly disjointed it is to get a spell you use for 14 levels, ignore for 17 and then recover for 12 more.
Making sure every spell is useful at level 80 is more important to me than making sure every spell is useful for every level in the entire progression, but like I said, you could just make Freeze cost 0mp by default, regardless of aspect, (Flare costs All, so Freeze costs None, see?) and fix even this issue.