Chad Mages What else would you want right now for our class

[Ferrinus]

When niche cases are the primary justification for those spells to continue existing, it's the same thing.

No, those niche cases aren't the justification for those spells to continue existing. The justification is twofold:

1) We don't have a good spell for swapping to fire mode on 5+ targets. Having to AoE five or more monsters is not a niche case.
2) Fire 2 can't upgrade into Flare because Flare costs more and casts more slowly than Fire 2.

If you were willing to break symmetrical job design you could change B2 to targeted instead of PBaoE and then upgrade B2 into Freeze, but turning F2 into Flare wouldn't work, and making Flare free to cast in UI3 would be an extremely bad idea for reasons I'll elaborate on below.

1) Who said anything about Despair doing the same? Despair is literally unable to be used in Umbral Ice, or even out of Astral Fire -- a point I made before when I mentioned that Flare has a weak position as a "finisher", since it can be.
Even if Despair could be, in the hypothetical world where that was on the table, I would be arguing as much about the unnecessary redundancy as I am here, with Despair likely getting the short end of that stick for being new.

What you're asking for is the equivalent of being able to use Despair in place of Fire 3 on single target.

2) Despair? "Classic, well-established"? What are you even talking about, it literally has never existed before FF14, and only to fulfill a niche in our rotation at that.
Even the fire-elemental variant of Flare that we use is functionally a distinct spell from the classic non-elemental "Nuke" of early entries, rather existing as part of the Elemental Wheel of ancient magics established only as far back as FF11 (Flare, Freeze(!), Flood, Burst/Surge, Tornado, Quake), with other spells (like Meteor and Ultima) taking the place of "ultimate" magics since. It's not the strongest spell in our arsenal, or even the strongest in its rotation -- it's been functionally just a filler since Stormblood for a multitude of reasons.
You want to save it from being "obviated"? Because you're a few entries late for that.

You really need to read more carefully. Obviously, Despair is not a long-running, well-established spell Black Mage spell in the MMO Final Fantasy Fourteen. However, Fire III is, and you are effectively arguing for Flare to replace both it and Fire II.

3) Ignoring just for a moment my earlier mention that all damage would have to be rebalanced regardless of whatever behavior we change, your literal justification for Fire 2 to replace Fire 3 in AoE is for damage reasons: "on a specific number of enemies [...] Fire 3 becomes a damage loss." Yet you're also arguing that by letting Flare do that same job, it's too much damage?
Okay. Let's address that real quick: Flare and Fire 3 have a 20 potency difference, base. Used as a transitional spell from UI3, that's 14 potency, in addition to the reduced peripheral damage of Flare adding a bit under 110p per additional target, versus Fire 2 adding about half that per target.
If the damage is a problem, Flare has multiple tuning knobs on it, it won't kill us if they use them. If those prove insufficient or would weaken it too much in AF, you're literally already suggesting a trait to completely alter Fire 2, so I don't see why there couldn't be one for when Flare is used under AM/UI, or even to increase its damage even further in AF. Or easier solution, just buff F3, since we only use it on transitions and procs anyway.

So you acknowledge that free Flare would obviate Fire 3 even on single target, but your solution is even more fiddly passives and potency rebalancing? Good lord, that's even worse!

4) You didn't even suggest touching the potency of Fire 2 -- if your concern was that Fire 3's damage loss "isn't all that obvious from spell tooltips", I would think this would have been on the top of your priorities? Particularly since as it stands, they're still exactly equal at 3 targets.

If Fire 2 had Fire 1's cast time and MP cost, it wouldn't need any potency changes since it'd be easy to compare to F1 (at lower levels) or F3 (at higher levels) to determine when using one in place of the other is worse, equivalent, or better. It's fine if they're even at three targets at which point F2 pulls ahead at four. The point is to have clear transition spells and clear damage spells, same as we do for single target.

No, you're right, you said "it's lame".

Semantics, bud.

Semantics are actually appropriate to bring up when you're being misquoted, and, yes, it's lame, because, and here's something else I actually did say, it leaches spells of their distinctiveness and identity and leaves us spamming singular one-size-fits-all spells rather than choosing them situationally. Imagine if Fire 3 had Fire 4's damage and casting cost, so that you used it both to swap and to do maximum potency per second on single target. You have to admit, it'd allow for even more button consolidation!

More backpedaling, editorial...

... and flat out not your decision.

Funny how some tooltips are misleading, and spells are being used against their intent, but only whenever it supports your position, no?
Or more likely, you're just fitting the evidence to your agenda rather the other way around.

I need to make two things clear here. First, my position is clearly supported by the evidence, because Flare consuming MP in UI3 when it isn't supposed to is obviously a huge change to both gameplay and balance that has material effects on every dungeon run and many boss encounters past level 72. At this point we're several balance patches in to Shadowbringers, and the team has had ample opportunity to correct numbers and MP costs on BLM, which they've never done. Flare costing MP even after Aspect Mastery is clearly intended behavior or, at worst, a happy accident - as in, they forgot to fix it, then saw how the game worked with it, and decided to leave it in because they thought that BLM AoE was in a good place as is. If you have some problem with the way I'm drawing conclusions from the evidence, or evidence of your own that rebuts this analysis, I invite you to present it, but to me it looks like you're just grouchy because you don't have a counterargument.

Second and more importantly, I don't actually care about developer intent, I care about the gameplay of the final product. If whoever designed SHB BLM intended for its AoE rotation to involve no fire spells whatsoever from level 35 to 49 then that's his or her right, but it's a terrible idea and needs to be corrected. Likewise, it's possible that we're actually supposed to be breaking out Excel and calculating that four enemies merit Fire 3 but five enemies merit casting a less-than-half-damage Flare instead, but because that's both nonobvious and unsatisfying (a Flare that deals less than half the damage it should? where are my big numbers) and needs correction.