Why turned BLM into just another DPS... boring...

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

That's because Fire 2 and Blizzard 2 are basically only used to switch betweem UI3 and AF3 and then the cast time is halved (and the potency lowered anyway). If Fire 2 and Blizzard 2 were 2 second casts they would drop down to 1 second in practice, even less with spell speed. At this point they could simply make them instant casts.

In practice they are already at 1.5 seconds.

With Blizzard II/High Blizzard II after Freeze, fair enough. You don't really use them excessively unless you Transpose then B2/HB2. I lowkey blame the boring design of Ice phases for this one.

With Fire II/High Fire II, the story is very different. This spell by design of how MP and Umbral Hearts work is designed around being used more than a stance swapper (AOE Fire III). It even was so during Endwalker when they not only boosted the potency to 100/120, but also created an Astral Fire effect that boosts Flare damage when used beforehand. They buffed it because in Shadowbringers these spells were the potencies we have today, i.e. too weak.

Going 1-2 F2/HF2 then 2-4 Flare (Manafont, Ether) was a normal thing to do during Astral Fire beyond the stance swap. It felt organic and right.

Except now they reverted the potency in DT, making it so bad that using Fire II or Blizzard II spells after Lv58 (Umbral Hearts) is an active damage loss over just using Transpose, even if clipped / not woven in. The potency-per-second is just plain too low, both for stance swapping and for normal attack usage. This was true even when Flare had a higher AOE penalty of 40% and 4s cast time, even without swift/triple.

Potency per second can be improved by speeding up cast time, which they did TWICE with Flare in Dawntrail, cutting off a second each. It can also be increased by increasing base potency, naturally.

The fact they did neither is baffling, both because these spells are functionally useless for how weak they are and because they were inconsistent with their casttime treatment. Given this was also a patch where they jumbled around AOE damage numbers on almost all jobs, even BLM with Foul, but fail to adress the basic AOE spells feels like a great oversight to me. That or the person in charge of potencies can't do BLM math, which I dearly hope is not true.

That said, we had AST do 0.5s casts on Gravity a long time ago under Lightspeed. Esuna previously was also an extremely short cast under 1.5s. Having stanceswap casts do that is not exactly illogical, given the contextual precedent.