The vision for 7.0 Black Mage

[Taranok]

BLM's theme is simple. ARR was defined around a proc mage with hastily thrown together and extremely janky proc interaction. HW heavily marginalized procs in favor of fire 4 spam with fire 1 to mix it up, as a common complaint in ARR was classes casting the same skill over and over multiple times in a row. SB was also a marginalized proc mage that focused on explosions. ShB, also, was an even more marginalized proc mage focused on more explosions, with an accidentally added exploit that allowed for slight DPS gains by completely ignoring the Stormblood rotation that was still present in the class. Endwalker is also an even, even more marginalized proc mage (notice the trend?) that had a second exploit added because the devs wanted to make the all-but-guaranteed-already procs easier to use by upping the timer duration, the 50,000th time the class has had proc timers increased,, and managed to bring back some of ARR's jank. That's right, transpose firestarter existed in ARR as a consequence of netcode and bad ability design, especially related to when timers refreshed, which coincided with when the procs showed up. They were extremely delayed so you often could be halfway through casting blizzard 3 before you even saw the proc, and transpose firestarter let you salvage some of the damage of the missed proc.

Dawntrail is an explosion mage getting yet more explosions while fixing the mistakes erroneously added to the class in both ShB and EW. They also decided that proc mage, an already heavily marginalized concept, was just removed because it has long since been a core identity of the class.

And, of course, it's still a boom and bust cycle across all iterations.

No controllable procs for lvl90 and below content. No mana regen. No ice paradox means no emergency contingency for mistakes and also means no weaving window for smooth transpose into AF1 F3 which doesn't make sense seeing as they just made the transpose F1 more accessible with the guaranteed proc change! And they can't increase the potency on the thunder too much because people will abuse it for infinite insta-casts because it's like they insisted on retooling it to work off of the abandoned polyglot generation on switching stances.

This is why the ice phase is now only 2 GCDs. Blizzard 4 and fire 3. You also have thunderhead as your emergency movement in UI3. You also won't ever use transpose firestarter because they nerfed AF1 to no longer increase fire damage at all, and UI3 hardcast of fire 3 is now 100% damage as per the aspect mastery 3 tooltip. UI 1 and 2 list damage drops, UI3 does not. Fire 3 is also DPS neutral with fire 4 (slight gain) so using a transpose firestarter is now actively bad for you, as per all known tooltips on the class.

No, really, here's the tooltips. People abused transpose firestarter so much that the devs straight up nerfed BLM below level 20 just to make sure no one would again, and made sure that there was no damage penalty at AF/UI3 as well so even if it did have gains, the gain is no longer enough to matter compared to the damage of just casting it in AF3.