Quote Originally Posted by Ferrinus View Post
I took a careful look at Rinon's Youtube video about the Dawntrail Black Mage and noticed that Fire III deals ~13k damage when cast from neutral state, and then that Blizzard III deals around 13k damage when cast to swap from AF3 to UI3, and then that Fire III deals around 13k again when cast to swap from UI3 back to AF3.

This indicates to me that the Aspect Mastery III tooltip is probably not misleading, and once you're level 35 or above, you don't actually suffer a damage penalty for casting opposite-element spells. This means that Transpose-Firestarter isn't a damage gain (or a damage loss) compared to just using Firestarter procs in the same astral cycle that you generate them. I have to assume there's still some sort of typo or accidental deletion in the base Aspect Mastery tooltip, though, because it'd be very silly for AF to be all-downside until level 20 or whatever it is.
If this is true, then yeah, transpose-firestarter is still a damage loss. But it's because you're losing +70 percentage points from the opportunity cost of chasing +10% damage instead of AF3's +80% damage. The opportunity cost of holding it is harmful, especially since it's fire 4 neutral at AF3. It's still not all downside, it's still +10% when at AF1, but yeah, they basically harmed BLM heavily below 20, and further reinforces the thought that BLM is in desperate need of a leveling rework. Personally, the fire 4 rotation needs to be dropped from 60 to 35 (without using fire 4 here,) and in the process it'd be pretty easy to just pare down skills, modernize the design, and build it back up with other, newer skills.

Quote Originally Posted by wildvenonat View Post
The funniest/saddest part of this is that Triplecast is ... a level 66 ability, which appears to be unchanged! In all content through ARR and HW, Black Mage has their single use of Swiftcast and nothing else, which is now going to need to be used for MP regen in dungeon pulls.

Black Mage having no MP in Baelsar's Wall and St Mocianne's Arboretum and Dun Scaith. Absolutely brilliant.
You have no idea the amount of times I wind up in a HW dungeon and just forget I don't have triplecast... Speaking of leveling reworks, seeing triplecast dropped to a lower level would be great. Would also give the class some much-needed mobility in ARR, especially in reworked dungeons that follow's EW's anti-caster fight design principles. At least, in HW, the class was designed around only one swiftcast and actually performed well in HW content. Even back with ye olde enochian. Except nidhogg ex. Man HW BLM sucked on nidhogg ex...