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If you are looking for a 1-to-1, don't. They are different games with different design considerations.
If you are looking for a class that uses mostly elemental spells to wreck face, there are several options. Primal or Arcane traditions will do the most heavy lifting in that regard.
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Any caster class that is either primal or arcane can probably make a BLM (normal FF abbreviation for black mage) pretty easily. Spontaneous caster probably fit a touch better than prepared, so I'm guessing a sorcerer base class, bloodlines that work IMO -- Elemental (fire) or Imperial. (Any element could work for elemental, but you get a damage boost within your elemental, and fire spells are generally the primary damage spells for the BLMs I'm used to)
Cantrips: Ray of Frost, Produce Flame, and Electric Arc cover the normal elementals, and give you a long range, short range, and two-target option; two targeting AC and one targeting reflex. So that's already an effective spread. Electric Arc will normally be your go to if there's close multi targets options, so that's a little off from the BLM I'm used to in FF XIV where fire is your primary element; thunder is your 'special' DoT, and ice is your only when required to recharge mana.
Cantrips in this edition auto scale to a level somewhat equal to your top level spell slots (in practice they feel about half a level to a full level behind, but you can cast them an unlimited number of times. So just off your cantrips you should have the right elemental feel that lasts all day.
There's enough sampling of fire/ice/lightning spells at most levels, and most attack spells can be heightened to maintain increased effectiveness. Burning Hands is a level 1 spell, fireball a level 3 (so available normally at character level 1 and 5 respectively). Lightning Bolt is a level 3, Cone of Cold a level 4, etc.
Being a _single_ element caster would be a bad idea because of immunities/resistances/weaknesses. The three typical BLM elements though help with that, and treating Flare/Foul/Scathe/Xenoglossy (unaspected) as Force would add in a useful often non-resisted category. Magic Missile would be a good level 1 spell candidate for that.
Utility-wise the main things I'd expect from BLM are a touch of crowd control (sleep is normal for them, but that's not a strong in combat spell in this edition) and some movement effects so dimension door might fit in at higher level. Maybe jump or blur could be seen as a lower-level version, but that does feel a little off-brand to me.
Now to answer the 'would a player playing this have a bad time" part of the question:
Spell casters are weaker at higher levels than they were in Pathfinder 1/D&D 3.5. I've found they felt appropriately balanced to martials such that neither overshadows the other when viewed across long time scales. However since casters generally cast one spell a round, while martials often take two swings, a run of bad luck on the dice can feel much more depressing on a caster. If the BLM-player is the type of person who gets upset when their one thing they do this round misses, yes they'll probably find this play style a bad fit -- a heavier focus on save spells (such as electric arc, or most 'touch' or AoE spells) often helps mitigate that as they have effects on misses.
Additionally PF2 is much more about smart tactical play for all classes, instead of just spamming 1-2 high damage abilities. As such I'd suggest being open to broadening the interpretation of BLM. -- sure avoid air/earth/water spells, but grab a Dispel Magic to counteract enemies spells/magical hazards. Wall of Fire could be a good battlefield control spell (the lower level walls are all earth themed so that's a bit tricky. Some of the other lower-level battlefield control spells are air (obscuring mist or cloudkill, etc).
I think you could probably have a solid character, and one that I'd consider fun and effective, if half your spells known (for a sorcerer) were your fire/ice/thunder/force themed and half were other. Those other should generally be looking for battlefield control/buffs/debuffsor out of combat trouble-shooting
Wizard is probably the closest thematically. Sorcerer can definitely get the job done too.
If I were to try it, I'd go for an Evocation Wizard with the Spell Blending thesis for more higher level blasting spells.
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Final Fantasy mages definitely behave more like spontaneous casters than prepared casters imo, though their aesthetic definitely trends towards Wizard than sorcerer. Then again, who is to say that Wizards have a monopoly on pointed wide brim hats?
Playing one is as easy as picking your preferred flavor of arcane or divine primal caster, and eschewing many spells with lines of text more complicated than, "Deal XdX damage to target/s." Final Fantasy casters generally don't dip too heavily into support/non-damaging magic barring status effect causing ones like blindness/deafness or maybe Fungal Infestation to approximate Bio for example.
This doesn't mean you only have access to fire/ice/lightning spells, as there are plenty of other examples of spells that can make decent approximations of FF spells. Gust of Wind can stand in for Aero for example.
TLDR: Play your favorite version of a Blaster, convince your GM to allow your face to be shrouded in darkness save for your shiny golden eyes and don't forget to pack a rod or stave, and you are pretty much a Pathfinder Black Mage.
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Claims that casting is dead are false.
Trying to focus exclusively on blasting does have some pitfalls. While a good blast spell can be effective blasting isn't very efficient in terms of spell slot use, because damage spells don't hold up very well when cast with lower level slots. As a result trying to only blast, instead of mixing up spell types can lead to running out of gas quickly.
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Yeah, blasting isn't the *best* but it certainly has its place, and hey, black mages are also known for buffing their team's damage and applying debuffs in addition to blasting. So you could have some support spells on tap for emergencies and still fit the theme.
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I'm playing a Spell Blending Evocation Wizard as a 'Black Mage' right now and its working beautifully.
Right now the meta on attack spells is to use True Strike to boost them up, but I'm expecting to have a freer dynamic in the upcoming SoM book, with at least one spell attack being a multihit, which adds natural partial success to it instead of an all or nothing.
But saving throw spells like Fireball, Lightning Bolt, Sudden Bolt are all just fine, Magic Missile is meta for taking on bosses reliably (though it certainly isn't the only valid strategy)
So while you won't get the Black Mage Rotation, you can def blast away with Fire, Cold, and Lightning like a real Black Mage.
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That’s interesting. Why would spending an action on an attack be a more efficient use of an action than casting a spell to deal damage?Claims that casting is dead are false.
Trying to focus exclusively on blasting does have some pitfalls. While a good blast spell can be effective blasting isn't very efficient in terms of spell slot use, because damage spells don't hold up very well when cast with lower level slots. As a result trying to only blast, instead of mixing up spell types can lead to running out of gas quickly.
I'm not talking about action efficiency, I'm talking about spell slot efficiency. More "support" type spells, or controls or debuffs can end up doing more over the whole length of an encounter, and make it easier to not burn all of your spell slots early in the day, especially because more of them remain worthwhile when they're cast from your low level slots. With blasts, on the other hand, once you get far enough below your highest level spells, there's a real question of whether you should just cast a cantrip, instead, since they are comparatively weak but are always scaled up to your highest spell level.
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That’s interesting. Why would spending an action on an attack be a more efficient use of an action than casting a spell to deal damage?Claims that casting is dead are false.
Trying to focus exclusively on blasting does have some pitfalls. While a good blast spell can be effective blasting isn't very efficient in terms of spell slot use, because damage spells don't hold up very well when cast with lower level slots. As a result trying to only blast, instead of mixing up spell types can lead to running out of gas quickly.
The issue is less inefficiency and more that limiting yourself to damage evocations is basically just limiting yourself to targeting reflex saves; casters are balanced around their ability to exploit the weak save so if you want to just cast Fireball every round then you're gonna get punished for it.
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Shout-out to the Lv 12 Wizard metamagic that gives targets a weakness to elemental damage you deal afterwards! If you don't have any weaknesses to exploit, make your own. :3
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It's definitely doable. Primal and Arcane lists have the most on-point spells for a black mage, so I'd look at Evocation wizards, winter witches, elemental, draconic or phoenix sorcerers or maybe tempest druids as a starting point. They all have their ups and downs.
Themed casters will definitely suffer a bit in PF2 because Pathfinder doesn't like spellcasters specializing, but it will still be pretty functional.
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Secrets of Magic is supposedly adding an “elemental” variant spell list that might scratch this itch.
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I would say casters do better against crowds of low-er level enemies, than against solo bosses. Bosses have stronger saves so often take less or no damage from spells. Crowds of weaker enemies have both weaker saves, and area attack spells can hit more of them at the same time.
At later levels, even mooks have a lot of HP and are a lot of work for martials to hack through. Area blasting can be a valuable contribution to that job. Basically, you clear the way for the martials to focus on the bosses.
PFS often has 5-6 players at the table and many adventures scale up the difficulty to match that, by adding extra monsters. From level 5 onward (fireball) casters start having a much better time in PFS because of this.
Big FF fan here, tried once to (unsecesfully :P) homebrew a red mage
generally I would say the notion for taking an arcane or primal caster for black maage is correct
If you want to divide it further
Arcane -> Black Mage (it has almost all the damage spells)
Dicine -> White Mage (healing and buffspells)
Primal -> Red Mage (Many elemental damage and the core healing spells)
Occult -> Green Mage (lots of buff and debuff options)
we have nothing to emulate blue mages though :P
we have nothing to emulate blue mages though :P
Do monsters get unique spells though?
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I would say casters do better against crowds of low-er level enemies, than against solo bosses. Bosses have stronger saves so often take less or no damage from spells. Crowds of weaker enemies have both weaker saves, and area attack spells can hit more of them at the same time.
You know, I used to be willing to just take this at face value, but in this week's session we fought a level+3 Frost Giant and the far and away most successful character in the party was the Druid chipping away at fire weakness with half-on-success spells while I (Monk), the Swashbuckler, and the Rogue kept missing and mostly just focused on surviving and keeping him out of reach of the Druid.
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It's a fun thing to note that, while TTRPG and JRPG games tend to be fairly different, specifically Final Fantasy has a lot of Western archetypal influence and vice versa, or at the very least came to similar ends through different means, even when looking back all the way to FF1. Nowadays it'd be hard to look at a game like FF14 and then at a modern fantasy TTRPG and not be like "huh, there's a lot of overlap here, huh?"
Speaking of cool Final Fantasy stuff in 2e, yoshisman8 on the 2e Homebrew Reddit made a cool Red Mage Archetype and even a whole Astrologian class based on those in FF14. Very neat. Relatedly, PF2Tools' creation tools are some of the best things to happen to 2e homebrew.
But as for BLM in 2e specifically? As others have mentioned, the classic fire/ice/lightning combo exists within Arcane list alongside other things BLMs have done in the series, such as Haste (for more actions) and Fly, and Lulu in FFX even has a Bonded Item as her familiar! ...Or a Poppet, if that's more your thing.
WHM is definitely either a Divine or Primal caster, considering their access to Water/Stone/Aero in some games (though those three things sometimes overlap into BLM too), as well as sometimes having access to Summons (though sometimes that's split into its own class).
I'm not talking about action efficiency, I'm talking about spell slot efficiency. More "support" type spells, or controls or debuffs can end up doing more over the whole length of an encounter, and make it easier to not burn all of your spell slots early in the day, especially because more of them remain worthwhile when they're cast from your low level slots. With blasts, on the other hand, once you get far enough below your highest level spells, there's a real question of whether you should just cast a cantrip, instead, since they are comparatively weak but are always scaled up to your highest spell level.That’s interesting. Why would spending an action on an attack be a more efficient use of an action than casting a spell to deal damage?Claims that casting is dead are false.
Trying to focus exclusively on blasting does have some pitfalls. While a good blast spell can be effective blasting isn't very efficient in terms of spell slot use, because damage spells don't hold up very well when cast with lower level slots. As a result trying to only blast, instead of mixing up spell types can lead to running out of gas quickly.
You can mitigate this with good focus spells though. The elemental bloodline sorcerer probably has the best options here, with a good one action blast at level 1 to round out turns and AoEs focus spells later. Being able to bust out a rechargable spell that hits as hard as your second highest spell slot is lovely.
Focusing purely on blasting does limit you though. Martials are usually the better option at slugging it out one on one because that is all they can do, so single target direct damage being less consistent on casters is meant to be balanced out by them being able to do everything else.
I suspect the kineticist will be the best way to play a pure blaster, as their entire power budget can be allocated to that goal.
Never forget about your cantrips, either! Sometimes I've seen people devalue cantrips because of their low immediate damage (leading to low damage-per-round), but if you really need to save slots, they've still got by definition the best bang-for-buck, especially since they're auto-heightened to the highest spell level you can cast. Electric Arc is, of course, always a good meme, but Ray of Frost and Produce Flame aren't strictly bad, either. They're like your Fire, Blizzard, and Thunder compared to the spell slots being Firaga, Blizzaga, and Thundaga.
It's all about that mana (slot) management! Just make sure your Fighter is keeping things at arms-length.
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Here I am twiddling my thumbs waiting for Paizo to make a solid Dragoon type Class (or even Archetype) that lets a Heavy Armor PC jump 25-250 ft in the air to deliver devastating aerial attack charges with two-handed piercing weapons.
There's a build on reddit that made a pretty decent dragoon using the Staff Acrobat archetype. It's actually pretty close.
There's also this one that uses barbarian.
Dragon Instinct Barbarian fighting with a polearm with the cloud jumper skill feat would make a good dragoon?
Here I am twiddling my thumbs waiting for Paizo to make a solid Dragoon type Class (or even Archetype) that lets a Heavy Armor PC jump 25-250 ft in the air to deliver devastating aerial attack charges with two-handed piercing weapons.
Funnily enough the first PF2e character I ever played was based on this very idea, made appropriately enough for Age of Ashes.
Dragon Scholar for Dragon Lore, focused on polearms and took very nearly every feat I could for leaps and jumps. Very nearly almost to level 15, and once I get Cloud Jump holy hell will I be abusing that. Combined with Sudden Leap and felling strike, it may not be "devastating" but you'll be bringing down dragons and airborne foes.