Black Mage changes aren't enough. (As far as we know.)

[Taranok]

*snip*

I'd be surprised if they change the core rotation. Short of maybe merging skills like fire 1 with fire 3 or blizzard 1 with blizzard 3, plus some obvious things like merging fire 4/blizzard 4 and other mutually exclusive skills. Even then, the BLM community isn't advocating for a reduction to BLM's egregious button bloat, so I'm not expecting changes here.

1. The removal of ice paradox isn't really that big an issue. The ice rotation is exactly 3 skills unless you recast thunderhead, xenoglossy stacks combined with 40s swiftcast and 60s triplecast means if you absolutely need to, you should have options.

This is doubly so when factoring in you get a guaranteed triplecast, meaning you have over 4 instant casts per cycle. 1 xenoglossy, 1 paradox, 1 fire 3, 1 thunder. Averaging out to roughly 1 instant per 10 seconds before bringing in triplecast or amplifier instants. If that's not enough instants, then the issue is encounter design. And boy is encounter design exceedingly bad for casters right now. But that's another matter entirely.

2. I agree, though my position is that thunder feels orphaned. Personally, I'd prefer they reworked thunder outright into a multistep combo that was fed off of some mechanic other than timing or stance swapping. It is a newb trap, and it feels like a soft replacement for scathe.

3. Manafont is indeed extremely badly designed atm. If you get down to it, manafont is literally a 100s cooldown that saves you 3, whole, gcds. Blizzard 3, blizzard 4, fire 3. That is literally all manafont does. To call it extremely badly designed at this point is a gross understatement. It went from +2 GCDs at a specific time to -3 GCDs, also at a specific time. The button could literally be removed and I, personally, wouldn't notice a difference outside of missing quad flares below 100, and sextaflares at 100. Plus other obvious leveling changes.

The secondary issue is that, because of how long it is, flare star not refreshing timers, and the timers being completely pointless now, I have to question why the devs haven't just removed AF/UI timers. It'd drop the skill floor out from under the class and give them room to, I don't know, make the umbral ice phase more interesting than 3 meh GCDs and maybe a thunder refresh or transpose firestarter. Like giving room for a real thunder rotation as well. Plus it'd make the class more than just a fire mage 95% of the time.

That's what I want. Expanded/stronger UI phase, no timers, thunder doing more than just a dot. You know, using more than 1 element. Though that type of rework won't happen until 8.0 I feel.