Chad Mages What else would you want right now for our class

[Archwizard]

-snip-

Most of your post reads as nonsequitur, honestly. Obviously there is a difference between minimizing the kit down to one or two buttons to spam over and over, and streamlining it so tools with redundant functions don't bloat the kit.

We don't need extra "options" for every niche case, like 2 targets or 3-second burst or "freshly raised" recovery periods. Those are scenarios that an experienced player would anticipate and tools they would either only pull out a fraction of the time or go out of their way to avoid using in the first place, much as we avoid Scathe now so long as we have alternatives. Tools specifically designed for those become (at best) safety nets for bad play, and (at worst) buttons we feel penalized having to push.
We just need tools for practical purposes -- focus-fire, and multi-target -- and the ability to use them unimpeded. If they also happen to cover the niche cases, even better, but it shouldn't be their core justification for existing, and as a friend of mine once said, "failure to improve a ridiculous circumstance doesn't nullify [a tool's] benefit across all reasonable extents and circumstances."

If your argument from the beginning had been "I want Flare to return to purely being a finisher across all levels, so here's my proposal to use Fire 2 until a certain percentage of our MP where we Flare, and some adjustments that would make Fire 2 a useful filler before the final burst, much like our single-target rotation with Despair," I might still have disagreed with you but I would at least have respected your opinion and efforts.
Instead, you argued for Fire 2 and Blizzard 2 to gain redundant functions in end-game, not for the purposes of expanding or smoothing out the kit (quite the opposite, in fact, since you nerfed the smoothing tools we have to push tools we don't need!), but wholly in order to justify their continued bloating of the hotbar. All of this because you "don't want" to use Flare as a transition tool because it "feels bad", but still "want" symmetry with the ice rotation obliging you to keep Blizzard 2 as long as Fire 2 exists, while using fictitious examples as empirical data. Well, with the way our phase transitions work something will "feel bad" either way, and what you want is about as valid as what anyone else wants -- which in my case is in direct opposition to you -- so let's just cut to the chase and call that argument unproductive.
And now you're trying to use the line "confusing examples" between mid- and end-level rotations when you literally said you don't care what our rotation becomes at mid-level? Reads like backpedaling to me.

You've repeatedly stated that Flare is working as intended, but the only actual verification of that is... the way things currently work in-game, which is the definition of circular reasoning, and solves nothing when "the way things work" is in direct opposition to "the way their tooltips say they should."
The devs have never said "Flare doesn't actually cost all of your MP, but rather burns a percentage of your MP as a separate effect on cast, which is why it's unaffected by Aspect Mastery" -- no, Flare lists "all" of your MP as the Cost, and if that's the intended effect then that should be a corrected tooltip that needs fixing yesterday.
Either things aren't working as intended because they defy the tooltips, or the tooltips are wrong and players are using spells in unintended ways, and I have zero reason to trust another player pushing their own agenda to tell me it's the latter.

I have no problem with buffing B2 and F2 for the leveling process, but if they're still phased out by end-game, they don't need to exist in end-game. A trait upgrade will not only allow them to live on in spirit, but save us bar space and/or the trouble of going back into our A&T menu whenever we level sync. Don't overcomplicate it.