I wish BLM's Ice phase felt more meaningful

[Azebra]

I feel like this has been an "issue" with black mage in the past, but with the 7.0 changes to the class I feel like my feelings towards ice phase have been greatly exacerbated, where it feels more like a minor annoyance than an interesting aspect to the gameplay. Ice phase at level 100 is only 2 spells (compared to fire phases fire 3, fire 4, despair, fire paradox, and flare star), both of which are weak and you'd rather not cast, which was the part of reason people developed nonstandard rotations in the first place.

I think it sucks that nothing was done to address the root reason why people were trying to avoid ice spells, by doing something like just making them a bit stronger and faster (obviously not as much as fire spells) or continuing on the idea that setting up ice spells make your fire phase stronger that umbral hearts introduced, or a big powerful ice move as a counterpart to despair that does something like refill all your mp.

With fire phase now being twice as long, it really makes it obvious that ice phase is just so empty. Not that I want to spend anywhere near as long as a normal fire phase in umbral ice but its literally just. Switch into it with Blizzard 3 and then cast blizzard 4. Maybe refresh thunder.

It's been ages since we got a proper new ice spell (paradox doesn't count since they just removed it) and by contrast some of the fire spells now seem to be kind of redundant in terms of function like Firestarter/Fire paradox and Despair/Flarestar. I wish they had done more with ice with 7.0 and tried to make umbral ice a bit cooler. (pun absolutely intended)