Quote Originally Posted by HikariKurosawa View Post
It ends where it ended. The rotation is standardized and streamlined. This is the goal the devs set out to accomplish and they did just that. If you don't like it, that's too bad. The enjoyment of the majority is far more important than the enjoyment of a few elitists. You can always make your own game with a bunch of weird situational non-standard gameplay. See how successful it is.
The "goal" from what I figured from the slides was to make MP generation not tick-dependent, which is a good thing. Please refer me to where the goal was explicitly stated to kill off non-standard BLM gameplay in an effort to streamline and unify Black Mage gameplay down to one route, because I'm not buying it otherwise. You call it enjoyment of elitists, but I feel like it would be neat if we actually took into account what our dear Yoshi P does on Black Mage at the moment - there is probably data somewhere on it.

If enough feedback comes in asking for non-Blizzard-spells during Umbral Ice to generate MP (a reasonable request if you ask me, depending on MP values) and that gets implemented, then we'd essentially have non-standard available again with a different MP system, which is what many don't mind. Personally also hoping that the Astral Hearts (or whatever the new gauge is) don't empty out upon entering Umbral Ice and just "freeze" for lack of a better pun, then we'd have a solid all-around Black Mage with the most annoying part, the MP regen ticks, fixed.