Why Black Mage is the best designed job and what can be learned from it

[Rongway]

Leveling experience:

• You get the basic rotation and resources right at the start. Fire, Ice, mana.
• Leveling up adds things into the rotation instead of tacking them onto the end of the rotation to extend it. Fire 4 replaces some fire 1 cast but umbral ice still gives you a reason to cast fire 1 (see above). And they all feed into the same cycle of fire to ice back to fire rinse repeat.
• No, I didn't mention the Thunders mostly because I don’t really see a reason for them, they just feel tacked on the side, but I am absolutely against the removal of a DoT just because. I’m slightly confused as to why thundercloud doesn’t proc firestarter instead but whatever its not broken don’t touch it.

This is the absolute worst part of BLM. One spends so much time changing their rotation that they can't develop consistent habits. It's not until one reaches Lv90 and stops doing syncked content that one can develop good BLM habits for Lv90. It's not even just differences between each cap level: there are sometimes spans where things change every two levels even. Playing syncked content means playing a completely different BLM every time one goes into a duty. One simply can't carry habits from lower levels to higher levels on BLM. That is not a good leveling experience.