Yeah, I'm not saying it's the best solution but that's just my guess as to why they made the ice change.

Ultimately I'm not too sure what to do about it though. When they were first making the job, it seemed like a decent way to work black mage into an MMO rotation. FFXIV doesnt' have specs/talents like WoW does, so they couldn't just make 'fire mage, ice mage, lightning mage' as separate things. But in classic FF games, having fire/ice/lightning spells was their iconic thing. But in those games they were all basically the same spell but with a different elemental tag. Fitting well into the turn baed jrpg genre but not so much in a hotbar rotation WoW style MMO.

So the idea of 'fire phase is burn mp for big damage, ice phase to cool down and regain mp, and lightning as a dot' was a clever way to in a sense to work all three into a rotation and cycle. But the unfortunate end is it makes the ice phase lame. You don't want to be in ice phase any longer than neccesary, want to use as few ice spells as possible, and if you like the flavor of an ice mage, too bad. Fire eclipses lightning and ice both. And because it's more fun and exciting to be in fire phase over time, expansion by expansion they add onto that.

I wonder if perhaps BLM could benefit from something similar to summoner and the way it cycles through ifrit/garuda/titan. If they had fire/ice/blizzard stages and the emphasis wasn't all put on FIRE FIRE FIRE with lightning relegated to a dot and ice to mp recovery. Or to the way paladin used to cycle between its physical and magical rotations before things were shaken up mid EW. A way to put all three elements on equal footing and make all three of them just as exciting and interesting. But then copying summoner would likely just make the jobs more homogenous and alienate players who like how the job has played up until now. So I'm not really sure what the best way to go about things would be.