While Phoenix Dive always did area damage at both the start and end of its journey, it did not used to set the user on fire. It doesn't hurt to ask the developers if this is actually intended or a bug.
Honestly, Phoenix Dive already had enough drawbacks. You had to take special care that you were well away from the rest of your group when using it, as the launch would damage every ally around you. And landing amidst a pack of adversaries isn't exactly the safest situation to end up in either.
If setting the caster on fire is intentional (and I highly doubt it is), it seems like overkill on the penalties for what is essentially an alternative to Battering Ram. Yes, unlike Battering Ram it can more easily avoid elemental ground effects when moving from point A to B, but (unlike Battering Ram) it also isn't knocking down and damaging everything along its entire path.
Spoilers: As I'm certain your aware once you reach a certain point in the game Phoenix becomes: A self heal, a teleporter, and an AoE. None of these effects are game changing and I can see why, at lower levels, it's a pain in the ass but if you build your character with fire in mind it's actually a very nice power.
I'm actually very much against the notion that resistances over 100 cause characters to heal in a given element. It makes sense for NPC opponents when you're trying to discourage players from using a particular elemental against certain creatures (e.g. don't fireball a fire elemental or you'll heal it). But (in my opinion) that should not be the case for players. Being magically resistant to fire shouldn't be the same thing as being made of fire or thriving on fire.
I'm hoping that's an oversight and something that will eventually be fixed, as it creates some serious imbalances in the later stages of the game. So, I'm not quite ready to label Phoenix Dive as a "self heal" just yet.
Phoenixes burn, dude.
There are whole lot of features in this game that have an upside *and* a downside, both. It's almost like it was a design philosophy or something.
Also, "I do not like this thing" does not actually mean "It is poorly designed or tested or broken."
Sometimes it just means "I do not like this thing that they executed exactly as intended."
There's quite a few spells and abilities which have downsides, or debuffs which have upsides.
The tooltip doesn't tell you that you're going to be set on fire, but the first time you use it you'll figure it out. And really, there are LOTS of tooltips that don't tell you everything they should. The Elemental Shield spells don't mention that they give you extra hp (which is huge), Boulder Smash doesn't mention that it leaves poison, Flurry doesn't mention that it hits 4 times (which is the entire point of the skill), etc etc.
I'm also going to disagree with the above two comments. Skills/spells are designed to benefit the user. These are not Talents (which is an example of an ability that has pluses and minuses).
Friendly fire aside, I think most (if not all?) spells are designed to benefit the caster without costing him health in the process. As spell balance can be achieved through action point cost and refresh times, I'm not sure why people are assuming Phoenix Dive is meant to harm the caster, particularly when it never used to and at no point did the patch notes ever indicate that changed. I think there's a big difference between the spell description failing to mention some obvious benefits versus failing to warn the caster that it will harm them upon use.
