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"I am the Black Mage! I casts the spells that makes the peoples fall down!"
Black Mage, 8-Bit Theater (Episode 024: "She's a White Magic Woman.")

These mages are all about attacking with spells and doing lots of damage with them. Typically these mages will be users of most if not all types of Elemental Powers (one element is not unheard of, though), with Fire, Ice, Lightning being particularly common, and may fall under Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards. They do not heal (or only have minor healing spells) and typically pack Area of Effect spells in their arsenal.

Very frequently Dark Is Not Evil.

The term comes from JRPGs, particularly the Final Fantasy series, and is in stark contrast with its meaning in European tradition which is "a user of evil magic".

Black Magician Girl and Lady of Black Magic are subtropes and are often paired up with The Medic, White Mage, or White Magician Girl as a Foil. Specifically paired with a White Mage it's Black and White Magic. When this character has substantial ability in White Magic as well, then you've got The Red Mage.

Often overlaps with Squishy Wizard and Glass Cannon. Contrast The Medic and White Mage (the defensive or remedial equivalent).

Not to be confused with Black Magic (which is outright evil rather than merely destructive) or the character Black Mage Evilwizardington (though he is an example of both tropes).


Examples:

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    Anime and Manga 
  • The titular Black Mage Zeref in Fairy Tail. He is the originator of most Lost Magic, including his signature Death Magic.
  • In Delicious in Dungeon, Marcille's magic is combat oriented and explosive. But, she also knows healing and revival magic as well. It's hard to say if she's more of The Red Mage, or if healing magic is just more common in this world.
    • There's also the Lunatic Magician, who wields extremely powerful and destructive black magic.
  • Final Fantasy: Lost Stranger, Duston is a Black Mage who can cast elemental spells to deal damage across a wide area, though he prefers the use of Fire in particular.
  • Negima! Magister Negi Magi:
    • There are two classes of normal mages. A "Wizard" focuses on attack magic while others protect, whereas a "Magic Knight" fights up front and uses spells. Negi chose the latter, but Yue has chosen the "Wizard" style complete with the Final Fantasy style Black Mage outfit.
    • Pointed out by Evangeline in an early chapter: when Setsuna is badly wounded, everyone turns to her for help, as she's the most powerful mage present. Evangeline has to explain that she has no idea how to perform healing magic... as a vampire, her own innate healing ability is powerful enough she's never had to learn it, thus all of her magic is destructive in nature.
  • Although Kagura from Inuyasha has shown herself to be very fit physically (being a demon, it comes naturally for her), she always fights using wind-using spells and magic. She also has no issues cutting up your best friend and then turning them into a zombie to lure you into an ambush.
  • In the .hack//Legend of the Twilight anime and manga. Hotaru would be the battle mage of the group, except she's afraid to hurt the monsters.
  • Fatina, from The Tower of Druaga: The Aegis of Uruk. She uses a large staff that resembles a cannon for nuking things with her fire magic.
  • Kuesu from Omamori Himari.
  • While her bubbly and polite personality is perhaps more in line with a White Magician Girl, Magical Circle Guru-Guru's Kukuri dresses in black and uses demon summoning magic.
  • Hayate Yagami of the Lyrical Nanoha franchise, who as the Queen of the Night Sky, comes with the widest variety of nuke-level offensive spells in the cast. These range from releasing city-wide spheres of darkness to creating massive icebergs that dwarf space ships.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! has the Dark Magician. An excellent example of Dark Is Not Evil, as he fights to protect Yugi, and in his previous life, he was a priest who (Mahad, who sacrificed his own ba (life force) so he can fuse with his Illusion Magician) sacrificed his life for the Pharaoh.
  • One Piece gives us Nami, who, through her Clima-Tact, can control weather in such a way that it's similar to her casting elemental spells. While lightning is her specialty, she's also more than able to utilize every element in nature to good effect when she needs to.
  • Three of the Kages fight like this during the Fourth Shinobi War of Naruto. Gaara attacks with his sand and uses no taijutsu techniques, Onoki blasts people from afar with his Dust Release attacks due to old age and back problems and Mei Terumi unleashes a barrage of water, mist and magma attacks.
  • Attack mages in Black Clover mostly use their magic offensively at a long-range. When Noelle, who had struggled to properly control her incredible magic power, learns Sea Dragon's Roar, Yami notes that she's an incredible attack mage even for her great latent abilities.
  • Roy Mustang from Fullmetal Alchemist is the current page image for Military Mage. While many alchemists throughout the series use alchemy in combat, his command of fire and explosions allows for directly aggressive and massively damaging ranged attacks (and on a large scale, if he so chooses), which elevates him to a much more significant threat level than other alchemists who may have to get into arm’s reach of their opponents to deal damage and may only be capable of engaging one or two people at a time. This is why the military employs him. Contrast protagonists Edward and Alphonse who make much more frequent use of alchemy for mundane reasons, and when they do use it in combat, it’s generally more to make weapons, shield themselves, or immobilize an opponent than to do direct damage.

    Comic Books 
  • In Supergirl story Demon Spawn the titular heroine fights Nightflame, a sword-wielding sorcerer who can open dimensional portals, use fire-spells, fly and steal souls. Since Supergirl is vulnerable to magic, it is not an easy battle for her.
  • Wonder Woman foe Circe has spent millennia perfecting her magic, almost all of which has offense applications including but not limited to transforming her foes into her monstrous slaves, powerful fire spells, and teleportation.
  • Zatanna is the foremost magical expert on the heroes' side in The DCU. She typically casts spells by speaking backwards.
  • The Scarlet Witch was originally depicted as a Mutant who could affect probability. Over time, she was re-written as a wielder of Chaos Magic and retconned into having come from a long long line of Magical Romani.

    Literature 
  • Trisana Chandler from Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic. This is actually a downside of winning the Superpower Lottery: Her extremely powerful weather magic (where "weather" also includes natural disasters) would put her in high demand as a war mage, but she'd prefer to be a healer, something which she's simply too strong for. To paraphrase, "it would be like performing surgery with a mallet." In fact all four kids, and some of their students, can put their magic to spectacular offensive use when they need to, though Tris is the most naturally suited to it.
  • The Saga of Recluce inverts this and White Mage; those who use order magic (which can improve health, speed healing, and strengthen and protect) are called black mages, while those who use chaos magic (which is, as the name implies, very destructive) are the white mages. On the grand scale, however, the black mages have easily the greatest destructive potential because they can manipulate weather patterns, which makes the nation of Recluce with its numerous black mages a (highly resented) world power.
  • In Slayers, black mages (like Lina and her sometime-sidekick Naga) are specifically wizards who call on Mazoku for their spells; both they and shamans (like Zelgadis) can get very, very destructive effects. In fact, many "elementally offensive" spells, like the classic Fireball, are shared by both forms of magic.
  • A few examples from The Wheel of Time:
    • The Green Aes Sedai are known as the "Battle Ajah." In the final book, they are on the front lines of the Last Battle.
    • Ashaman are trained to think of themselves as weapons first, and men second. There are a few who learn healing spells, but they're generally the exception. They also notably wear black uniforms, and live in a fort called The Black Tower.
    • It is implied by some of Tuon's actions and dialogue that Damane don't learn Healing, and would not be trusted to use it, if they did know it. They are kept on leashes, and outright referred to as weapons.
  • Villains by Necessity: Valerie. Aside from a couple instances, she solely casts spells to kill and destroy.
  • The Witch of Knightcharm is set in an evil Wizarding School. Plenty of witches there fight by racking up damage with powerful spells. Notable examples include the necromancer twins Alejandra and Julia, the water-witch Amira, and the top student Morgan who crushes her opponents with magical shadows.

    Live-Action TV 
  • The White Queen portrays Elizabeth Woodville, queen consort to Edward IV, as a witch with actual supernatural powers.
    • Throughout the series, she is able to:
      • call down terrible thunderstorms on her enemies at strategically critical moments
      • cause her enemies' deaths through magical curses
      • Lastly, otherwise wreck terrible destruction with her magic.
    • When her husband, King Edward, lies dying of a fever, another character, Margaret Beaufort, says that the king will be fine because the queen will just brew some magic potion to heal him. Needless to say, that is not one of Elizabeth's powers, and Edward dies.
    • That being said, Elizabeth, her mother and her eldest daughter (all portrayed as witches) are shown to have some non-offensive powers, including divination magic; also, Elizabeth did use her magic to make Edward fall in love with her in the first place, or at least to help the process along. Still, it would appear that the Woodville women in this show are at least partial examples of this trope.
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Villainous example. The Dweller uses offensive Elemental spells and can shapeshift.

    Music 

    Tabletop Games 
  • Dungeons & Dragons:
    • The Forgotten Realms setting has the Cormyrean War Wizards, masters of combat magic, who have made it as both a 3.x edition Prestige Class and a 4th edition paragon path.
    • The 2nd Edition Complete Wizards Handbook had the militant wizard kit, which concentrates on offensive spells.
    • The 3.5 Complete Arcane and Miniatures Handbook Sourcebooks both featured the Warmage class, which is this trope to the exclusion of everything else.
    • Evokers, specialists in the Evocation school of magic, tend to take this role in general, as Evocation is focused on manipulating and discharging all kinds of elemental energy - Fire, Ice, Lightning is perhaps iconic, but they can also wield acid, poison, and other elemental types depending on edition. This makes Evokers generally fall under the Person of Mass Destruction archetype, as their school's singular trick amounts to different flavors of "blast the hell out of everything around you".
    • In 4th edition, this became the defining niche of the Sorcerer. Whilst wizards could still throw around plenty of elemental attack spells, they were a "Controller" type class and focused more on winnowing out minions and otherwise manipulating the battlefield. Sorcerers, in comparison, were a "Striker" class; they specialize in picking one target (or a small cluster of targets; Sorcerers are unique amongst Strikers in their focus on small area-of-effect attacks) and killing it quickly with a lot of elemental damage.
    • The Warlock class tends to specialize in damage-dealing spells with a comparatively small arsenal of non-lethal tricks, and is mechanically quite close to the Black Mage archetype. Flavor-wise, they're close to the other kind of black mage, as warlock powers generally stem from a Deal with the Devil (or The Fair Folk, or an Eldritch Abomination).
    • Dungeons Of Drakkenheim features three ways of using this archetype. Firstly, a spellcaster can choose to use Delerium-fueled "Contaminated" spells; whilst these have no overt moral component, they are Black Magic in that they will literally poison the user's body and mind until they turn into a monster unless the user is very careful about regularly purging the Contamination they induce when used. Secondly, a player can choose to play one of the subclasses that actively embraces Delerium; the most obvious fits for this trope are the Delerium Soul sorcerer, whose powers stem from being corrupted with Delerium and who can radiate anomalous arcane energy, and the Malfeasant wizard, who is dedicated to mastering contaminated spells, but there's also the Haze Rager barbarian (who uses Delerium as a Fantastic Drug) and the Circle of Contamination druid (who believes the mutations caused by Delerium are the next step in evolution). Finally, there's the Oath of Hexes paladin, who overlaps this trope with Black Knight, being a warrior-priest of eldritch and occult deities who uses curses to punish and weaken their enemies.
  • Spheres of Power: Any mid- to full-caster with a focus in the Destruction sphere.
  • Vampire: The Masquerade generally avoided this (overt magic use being a breach of The Masquerade), but there were still a couple paths of Blood Sorcery based around massive eruptions of magical energies, such as Path of the Levinbolt, Lure of the Flames, The Fires of the Inferno, and the incredibly fun Koldunic Way of Fire.
    • The magic-focused World of Darkness property, Mage, has the forces sphere, which is all about throwing around elemental forces that are increasingly destructive, blatant, and generally terrifying. Low levels start out with redirecting natural fire and electricity into damaging effects, and increasing mastery gives the caster the ability to grab increasingly fundamental physical forces like gravity and radiation and use them to blow things up. Even non-damaging uses of the sphere like flight and invisibility are usually so blatantly supernatural that spell backfire is going to do something dramatic and damaging anyhow.
    • Because their effects are generally ignored by people to begin with, a lot of changeling powers also fall into this category in the New World of Darkness edition. Elemental ones, obviously, but many goblin contracts fall into this category too, doing things like dropping the wild hunt into a scene at random.
  • Magic: The Gathering: Instant and sorcery focused decks tend to function this way, as opposed to the Summon Magic of creature-based ones. Red is your go-to colour for this, since it's the colour of "kill it with direct magical damage", with maybe a bit of blue mixed in for card draw, instant/sorcery recursion and the occasional counterspell. Black can do okay, with a lot of effects that instantly kill creatures or drain life from the opponent, but the other two colours tend to be much more focused on summoning and as a result rarely have a place in this kind of deck. Of course, virtually every red-aligned mage will have direct "kill it with fire/lightning" spells, but a lot of the time they're used to open up a hole for the monsters to go through and occasionally as a finisher, rather than being the be-all and end-all of the player's strategy.
  • Ammo: Almost every player character that knows magic at creation will use an offensive spell (Air, Water, Earth or Fire). Learning more elements later is helpful because of Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors being in effect. The fifth option is Life that, while loved by the team, is serious crap for the character himself. ALL demons that know magic will spam elemental attacks like rain at a funeral.
  • The 4th edition Champions supplement Mystic Masters makes the observation that superhero comic book wizards in general usually lean in this direction, since what we'll typically see them do most prominently with their magic is fight while at the same time healing or regeneration magic is (barring dedicated healers, who then in turn tend not to fare too well in combat on their own) noticeably not much in evidence in their personal arsenal. It consequently advises keeping that convention in mind if one wants one's game to feel like the comics themselves.
  • The Bright College of Wizardry in both Warhammer and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. The other seven schools all have some kind of offensive magics but also include things like healing, illusions, or prophecy. The Bright College wields the Lore of Fire; of its seven spells, six can be summarised as "set your enemies on fire and watch them burn". And the seventh is "set your allies' weapons on fire so that they can set your enemies on fire".
  • Ars Magica: Of the twelve Houses in the Order of Hermes Magical Society, House Flambeau focuses on honing offensive magic. Playing with Fire is their signature skill, but many also train in the perdo magical Form, which can degrade or destroy any sort of target — bodies, substances, minds, or magic itself. While the House considers itself the Order's equivalent of Knights and have established a code of chivalry to match, other Houses tend to find them a bit overenthusiastic in that respect.
  • Fabula Ultima has the Elementalist, a magic class whose spell list consists primarily of damage-dealing spells drawn from five of the game's elemental damage types. It also has skills which can increase the accuracy and lethality of these spells under the right circumstances.

    Video Games 
  • Aion: Tower of Eternity has the Mage Class, which at level 10 branches off into either the Sorcerer (Direct Heavy Damage, AOE Damage, Crowd Control) or the Spiritmaster (summons pets, not as much direct damage).
  • Khunag of Albion. His spells are all about dealing damage, with only a couple of exceptions that seem like an afterthought. He comes from a Proud Warrior Race that views wizards as a more advanced type of warrior.
  • Imoen from the Baldur's Gate series, a friendly and upbeat sort who starts out as a thief in the first game but then becomes a black mage.
  • Breath of Fire I and Breath of Fire II give us Deis/Bleu, the nagaesque Person of Mass Destruction. Nina as well, with the exception of the first game.
  • Lester Deth in Charlie Murder combines this with Summon Magic.
  • Magus from Chrono Trigger, specializing in multiple elements and even having a Jack of All Stats collection of spells used by other characters. However, he leans towards a Dark Magic specialist, with his Dark Matter spell emphasizing this.
  • Donald Duck is somewhere between this and The Red Mage in the Kingdom Hearts series: his starting staff even resembles the classic Final Fantasy Black Mage. The Magic Knight hero Sora's spells tend to pack more of a punch, though. Donald finally gets to show his stuff near the end of Kingdom Hearts III by casting Zettaflare, a spell that has so far only been cast by one other person in any game using the Final Fantasy magic system, and that person was the herald of a world-ending Eldritch Abomination who had already entered her One-Winged Angel form. In other words, Donald Duck is one of if not THE most powerful Black Mage in Square Enix's shared universe.
  • The Sorceress in Diablo II, who focuses entirely in Fire, Ice, Lightning offensive spells.
  • Disgaea has both male and female magic users (they're coloured differently according to element). They learn spells of increasing power and area of effect that deal damage within their element (so fire mages learn fire, mega fire, etc; ice mages learn ice, mega ice, etc and so on). The highest level mages can learn most of all the elemental spells, but cannot master the strongest spells of each type.
  • Dragon Age:
    • Dragon Age: Origins: Although you have freedom to spec her as you wish, Morrigan starts off as a Black Mage as well. It's also possible to turn the player character, The Warden and Hawke, into Black Mages as well in both games.
    • Dragon Age II: Merrill, who despite being much nicer than Morrigan, practices Blood Magic which is considered one of the most dangerous forms of magic, and has no healing magic other than using said blood magic to steal others' life force for herself.
    • This is the role of the Rift Mage specialization in Dragon Age: Inquisition, which maximizes offensive ability.
  • The Dragon Quest series is fond of this trope.
    • Dragon Quest II: The Princess of Moonbroke wields the most powerful destructive magic in the game, gaining spells of the Wind and Blast families which her partners never do.
    • In Dragon Quest III, the Wizard class specializes in casting destructive spells.
    • In Dragon Quest IV, Both Maya and Borya fit this.
    • In Dragon Quest V, Flora/Nera wields powerful offensive magic and has access to the powerful Kaboom blast spell.
    • In Dragon Quest VIII, Jessica fulfills this role till late in the game when she gains pretty decent healing spells.
    • In Dragon Quest IX, the Mage class has all attack magic with a few debuffing spells overshadowed by the Sage class which has both better attack spells and gets healing spells, though the mage gets better stat growth for casting offensive spells.
    • In Dragon Quest XI, Veronica is a textbook Mage, opposite her sister Serena, a Priest. She is the party's master of offensive magic and her Magical Mending stat never grows on its own.
  • Duel Savior Destiny: At the beginning, Lily is the strongest member of the Savior class, but she looks down on healing magic as worthless. This really comes back to bite her in the fifth chapter when the regular healer is incapacitated and she can't heal her or the other injured people, thus forcing what remains of your party to retreat, apart from Rico. Apparently, it's actually rare to see mages who specialize to this extent in pure combat and within a few more chapters she has begun picking up standard healing spells.
  • Ana from Earthbound Beginnings and Paula from EarthBound (1994): They both use offensive spells such as PK Fire and PK Freeze (Ana also has PK Beam). Kumatora from Mother 3 also fits.
  • The Elder Scrolls:
    • Throughout the series, masters of the Destruction school of magic are the Black Mages of the setting. The elemental spells of the Fire, Ice, Lightning trio are classed here, as are spells which make opponents weaker to those elements. Depending on the game, generic non-elemental "damage health" spells may also be classed here, as well as poison-based spells.
    • In Morrowind, the Master Trainer in Destruction magic isn't a high-ranking official in the Mages Guild, or even an ancient Great House Telvanni mage-lord...it is a little Breton farmer by the name of Leles Birian. She can train you to a higher level in the Destruction skill than anyone else in the entire game.
    • Oblivion:
      • Delphine Jend, a sweet little woman who likes to kill cute woodland creatures with Expert-Level destruction spells.
      • And the Master Destruction magic trainer Bralsa Andaren, who is actually out doing said killing of woodland creatures. Bonus in that she's also a gray-skinned Dunmer (Dark Elf).
  • Gwen, an NPC in Guild Wars, is first encountered as a happy-go-lucky little girl who befriends the player in an idyllic countryside. Fast-forward eight years of game time, and she's a powerful Mesmer described as being driven primarily by hatred and anger.
  • In Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, the Wizard class is an offensive mage with spells from four of the game’s six elements at their disposal. There is also the advanced Sorcerer class, which specializes in blasting the entire battlefield with storms of elemental energy.
  • Final Fantasy is the Trope Namer and possibly Trope Maker. Black mages are a staple class in the series, appearing in almost all of the games.
    • Final Fantasy III also has the Magus job, which functions as a stronger version of the Black Mage job.
    • Final Fantasy IV has Palom (in contrast to his twin Porom), who is from Mysidia, a town full of mages. Rydia also possesses black magic, though she primarily focuses on Summon Magic.
    • Black Mage is one of the first jobs obtained in Final Fantasy V.
    • Black Mages are an entire race in Final Fantasy IX. One of your party members, Vivi, is a black mage.
    • In Final Fantasy X, Wakka even refers to Lulu as a Black Mage in one of the tutorial fights.
    • Final Fantasy XI as a Mythology Gag to the first game makes the Black Mage one of the six jobs available from the very beginning. The Taru Taru race's base stats are tailor-made for making them Black Mages.
    • Final Fantasy X-2 has the Black Mage Dressphere.
    • Final Fantasy XIV has the Thaumaturge Class, which can unlock the Black Mage, the Job that primarily focuses on using Fire, Ice, and Thunder magic. They have some of the highest DPS potential in the game, and are able to easily regenerate MP, but their magic have both massive MP costs and longer casting times that make them less mobile than other casters to make up for this.
  • The Fire Emblem series has the Anima mage class, sometimes simply called the "Mage" class. Anima mages specialize in the three Elemental Magic types (called "Anima magic" in a few games) in the series: Fire, Wind, and Thunder. Anima mages most often promote into the "Sage" class when at a sufficient level, and gain the ability to use healing staves alongside damaging tomes.
    • For a long time, Fire Emblem Gaiden was unique in that it had a lot more in the way of traditional RPG elements, the magic system included. Unlike other Fire Emblem games, it had the Final Fantasy-esque categories of offensive black magic and supportive white magic. Fire Emblem: Three Houses brings back this system, although it also reintroduces dark magic, which wasn't a distinct category in Gaiden.
  • Dark Elf Warlocks in Heroes of Might and Magic V specialize in Destructive Magic, and their racial abilities are aimed at enhancing its damage, lowering the enemy's resistance to it, and replenishing mana quickly.
  • La Tale has the Sorcerer class, one of the two advanced classes after Wizard, which abandons all healing magic for pure offensive magic.
  • League of Legends: In general, "Burst" Mages are all about quickly destroying enemies with their incredibly damaging spells, usually though at the cost of any kind of defensive traits like health, armor, get-off-me tools, and no melee abilities.
    • Syndra is designed to damage her enemies from afar using her array of powerful ranged spells, including creating orbs, firing off said orbs to stun enemies, grabbing minions like rocks and tossing them at each other, or dealing a nuke's worth of damage by clicking an enemy target (its damage being dependent on having those aforementioned orbs everywhere.)
    • Veigar, a very unsubtle parody of the original Black Mage, is a mage that just gets stronger and stronger the more damage he deals due to his passive granting bonus ability power by hitting targets with his spells. That bonus grows infinitely, meaning he's potentially one of the strongest spellcasters in the game. He also has no way to shoo away enemies up in his face outside of trying to kill them first.
  • Marvel: Avengers Alliance: Most of Nico Minoru's spells have various debuffing effects and her strongest offensive attack takes advantage of enemies being given a lot of debuffs first.
  • Mass Effect: Adepts focus on devastating and disabling enemies using biotic powers. Recurring squadmate Liara T'Soni is a prominent Adept, with Jack in Mass Effect 2 also qualifying.
  • Octopath Traveler: Scholars get access to spells of three elements, while most other classes only get one. Taken Up to Eleven with the Sorcerer, which grants access to spells of all six elements.
  • Rune from Phantasy Star IV is a full-on 'blast everything until it dies' type, whereas Kyra is a warm and friendly sort who appoints herself Cool Big Sis to the hero but can still blast things (and heal a bit).
  • Pokémon: As pointed out by Lockstin, the Dragon-type leans into this trope's territory, controlling raw Infinity Energy in a similar fashion to arcane spellcasting in Dungeons & Dragons. Dragon-type Pokémon tend to be able to learn moves of a wide variety of types, and Dragon-type moves themselves tend to be largely focused on doing very large amounts of damage to the opponent.
  • Ragnarok Online has the Mage first class which branches as follows:
    Sage - Professor - Sorcerer
    Wizard - High Wizard - Warlock
    • They both use damaging spells and for the most part perform no healing or support spells. The Wizard branch uses area spells with special effects like a chance of stun or freezing and the Sage branch can cast two streams of bolt spells at once with Double Cast as well as endow weapons with an element to increase weapon damage.
  • In Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale, there's Calliou, the Squishy Wizard who has a grand total of one utility spell, with the rest being solely for offense and no melee combat ability whatsoever. To a lesser extent there's also Arma, who's later weapons are pretty much Magitek WMDs.
  • Cierra in Riviera: The Promised Land.
  • Shadow Era's Mage Heroes (both Human and Shadow) are this.
  • Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars: Mallow is another "somewhere between this and The Red Mage" example, and his appearance borrows elements from the Final Fantasy Black Mage (in his case, the striped pants). He gets an early healing spell, but that gets eclipsed once Princess Toadstool joins you, and his specialty is in combat magic and rounding out the party's Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors with Mario; between the two of them you can take advantage of every elemental weakness in the game.
  • Touhou Project:
  • The Secret World: The elemental magic skill tree is dedicated primarily to blasting anything and everything into little pieces. Not that the other skill trees don't have perfectly viable means of damage-dealing, either, but they're often a little more diversified. Elementalism is classic Black Mage material.
  • Star Ocean: The Last Hope gives us Lymle and Myuria.
    • Star Ocean has Ronyx, who is the only caster not to learn any healing magic and also the only one who can cast Dark element spells.
  • Genis Sage from Tales of Symphonia.
  • Grune from Tales of Legendia
  • Jade Curtiss from Tales of the Abyss.
  • Warcraft:
    • Warcraft: Orcs and Humans have the Human Conjurers and Orc Warlocks who exclusively use offensive magic, especially Summon Magic. They also have the Area of Effect spells Rain of Fire and Poison Cloud respectively.
    • Warcraft II: Tide of Darkness carries on tradition of offensive-only casters, but also added Ogre-Magi to the mix who are in essence mage-cavalry who use Bloodlust to dominate battles with overwhelming boost it gives to allies. They also have a rune-mine spell as a supporting option for laying down traps, something that might be typically be cast by a Squishy Wizard character.
    • Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne: The game still has caster units, but it's your Hero Unit(s) that will potentially take on this role instead due to a new game paradigm. Stand outs include the Human-Alliance Elven Bloodmage who focuses upon destructive fire magic, The Undead Lich who focuses upon Frost and Death magic, The Orc Farseer who favors earth, lightning and summon magic, and Night Elf Demon Hunter who favors the use of Fel Magic to wade into melee battle and burn the mana out of spell users, can use an immolation aura to damage melee attackers surrounding him, and can ultimately morph into a Demon to become a devastating ranged attacker.
  • World of Warcraft:
    • Mages fulfill this role. No self healing while nuking from a distance.
    • Destruction Warlocks are all about throwing hellfire at things until they fall down.
  • Yakuza: Like a Dragon: Yu Nanba acts as this role in battle, as he sports not only the highest Magic stats in the party but also the most TP. However, he is also a Combat Medic as he has access to various support skills ranging from healing to buffs and debuffs.

    Webcomics 
  • Black Mage from 8-Bit Theater, naturally. Parodies his character class, just like his teammates—he has several incredibly destructive spells, but rarely uses anything other than his once-per-day hadoken, and just as rarely manages to actually hit something with it. His real weapon of choice is his seemingly endless supply of daggers, mostly used for stabbing his teammates when they do something annoying.
  • Ariel from Drowtales, though she prefers shapeshifting to her offensive spells.
  • Richard from Looking for Group is as black as they come, and deadlier than he is dead.
  • The Order of the Stick:
    • On the subject of liches, Xykon. Other than the occasional hold spell, he tends to leave all non-hurty spellcasting to menials.
    • Vaarsuvius was initially this, mostly going for powerful and destructive spells like Fireball. However, after a brief stint as evil, a chat with Xykon of all people, and a Heroic BSoD, V is trying to be a little more rounded, creative, and strategic, and use support spells more. It was off to a rocky start, but helped with the return of Zz'dtri.

    Western Animation 
  • Teen Titans: Raven serves this role to her team, attacking by firing ebony blasts of black magical energy. Jinx serves this role for the Hive Five.

 
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FFXIV Black Mage Job Actions

A showcase of the abilities and actions for Final Fantasy XIV's Black Mage job as of the game's "Endwalker" expansion.

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