Of note: Flickering Flame also fills a weird niche:
It stacks with most other damage shields.
It, however, does not stack with things like fire elemental illusion.
Basically, it means its marginally useful (5 pt ds) since it never got an upgraded spell line, with fire elemental illusion going to 17 at 65, basically being a ghetto fire elemental illusion that isnt an illusion.
If working on balance still, could consider a higher level version or two of this, to make its weird niche useful.
(and it was already a weird, unexplored niche in normal everquest, where, like a lot of spell lines, simply got abandoned / ignored)