Astral Fire/Umbral Ice timers are actually bad mechanics at a meta level.

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Originally Posted by Taranok

The second I had to make a macro explicitly to manage maintaining umbral ice when I went into DRS as BLM

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Couldn't fill with blizzard 1? What is a macro doing for you here?

I don't know. Honestly I don't care. This all just seems like a long winded way of saying 'I don't like Black Mage's core mechanics so it should be changed to a different caster job' when you could just as easily have said 'Can we have another caster job?'

There seems to be this idea in the community that it's okay to want to wreck a job's core gameplay for the people who love it in order to satisfy those who hate its core gameplay--see also 'RDMs' who want it to have dots because they heard dots are good on other jobs, or people who want to remove continuation from GNB, or... well you get the picture.

I would simply like the timer to be a bit longer, like 20 seconds or 30 seconds to accommodate the mechanics tempo.

I would go the opposite direction: shorten the timer but make the difference between F4 and F1 (or Paradox, which is adjusted to be weaker than F4 overall) less dramatic, so that it's more common + justifiable to use multiple AF-refreshing spells during your astral cycle depending on how often you've had to move, how many procs you needed to discharge, etc. AAABAAAC would still be best but AABAABAC could be a little less of a loss.