Third, it wasn't balanced. If you were a MCH you should know how useless wildfire was, or turrets were, and how much you relied on one move, between the eyes, and loading the target up with debuffs. You couldn't even land wildfire back then due to its long duration and ability to be purified or shut down via one of those many stuns people had. Most of the kit in 3.0 was designed for relatively immobile pve. BLMs had trouble even landing Fire IV due to how tight enochian was and how easy it was to zone it. You're not remembering it accurately.