Regarding the newest Blackmage changes

[LolaLou]

Blackmage is by far one of my favourite jobs to play, yet the new changes leave a sour taste in mouth tot he point of filling me with concerns about the general gameplay experience.

My main issue lies in the changes that have been done to umbral ice, basing the mp recovery on ice spells used rather than the server ticks spend within that state. The change was made in order to fix the issue of inconsistent timings in which your mp would reach the maximum, which has already been fixed by the introduction of paradox in my mind.

It's become easier than ever to allow for enough time to pass so your mp would refresh to full every time by the time you'd naturally want to transition to the fire phase regardless of server ticks. It also allowed for deep and interesting optimization strategies, which revolve around skipping casting ice spells alltogether with the aid of transpose and non ice filler spells including paradox. But this aspect of the job has now been made absolete due to being forced to cast ice spells in order to gain mp which is a big shame in my eyes and took away a lot of excitement I've had for the expansion.

Not to mention that now you're unable to recover mp while being idle in umbral ice between dungeon pulls, until you learn umbral soul at the late 70s.
The only use for transpose is to convert a fire 3 proc into skipping the need for casting a weak fire 3 to swap into astral fire but that's about it.

Blackmage will lose a large portion of skill expression and creativity, along with the risk reward factor that came from using your resources to squeeze out more damage, instead of using them for movement needs. But now there is no way to recover the required amount of mana without casting a set sequence of spells. There will also be no use of going into fire with non full mp depending on how the new job gauge works, doubling the amount of creativity that has been taken away from us.

Okay, rant over. How do you guys feel about the changes tho?