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)

[LilimoLimomo]

It's still early days for level 100 BLM, but in my experience Fire Phase has so much to do with so little bandwidth that plenty of the things that I would normally have been fine doing in Fire Phase now need to be done in Ice Phase; if I don't put spells like Thunder and Xenoglossy in Ice Phase, it's that much more likely that I won't have time to reach Flare Star during single-target. Not saying this is a good thing (I think this design for Flare Star is needlessly restrictive), but at present I don't feel like my Ice Phase is in need of more to do.

[Azebra]

It's still early days for level 100 BLM, but in my experience Fire Phase has so much to do with so little bandwidth that plenty of the things that I would normally have been fine doing in Fire Phase now need to be done in Ice Phase; if I don't put spells like Thunder and Xenoglossy in Ice Phase, it's that much more likely that I won't have time to reach Flare Star during single-target. Not saying this is a good thing (I think this design for Flare Star is needlessly restrictive), but at present I don't feel like my Ice Phase is in need of more to do.

This is admittedly something i forgot to think about when posting this, I'm currently running high spell speed on my melds so i can fit stuff into my fire phase fairly easily (not trying be like "just run spell speed lawl" btw, I'm aware people prefer high crit, or play more casually where they dont really need melds). That being said I do agree with you on the fact that out of the gate fire phase feels incredibly cramped, perhaps the devs just intended stuff like xeno's to just offloaded during ice phase, but i don't think that this should be the way you have to play to avoid dropping your timer.

[Tint]

perhaps the devs just intended stuff like xeno's to just offloaded during ice phase, but i don't think that this should be the way you have to play to avoid dropping your timer.

Offloading your Xenos was made harder to do in ice phase with the removal of ice Paradox (a change which also ruined the whole theme of the Pardox spell).

I also used to offload my Xenos after casting Despair, before I changed back to ice, which is now also harder to do with the addition of Flare Star.

[Krakatoa]

Scrap Flare Star entirely, and instead make it so that F4s increase the potency of Blizzard III, and if you complete all F4s, B3 becomes Absolute Zero or something along those lines. Now I can get the reward for my F4s on the back end, Ice phase is more interesting, and I'm less punished for missing one or two F4s because B3 would still be higher than normal due to the scaling previously mentioned. You could even make it so that Absolute Zero buffs B4 (or turns it into Ice Paradox), further incentivizing planning ahead to ensure you can try and find a reasonable spot to cast those spells.