Flare needs a slight revamp

For a level 50 job ability, Flare is extremely limited in its uses, and even when a use is found, it is very cumbersome to execute without becoming useless for a good while.

Flare's issues can be broken down as follows:
1. MP. The single most glaring issue with Flare is that it plunges your MP to 0. At that point your only options are to use Convert, once every 3 minutes, or to use Transpose, and wait for a tick of mana from UI1.

2. Cast Time. Flare has a base 4 sec cast time, making it the longest cast we have, and difficult to use in fights, even more than Thunder 3. This means that Swiftcast is the only logical option for using Flare, once a minute.

3. Power/Cast/MP Ratio. Lets compare Fire 3 to Flare. Fire 3 is 220 potency with a 3.5s cast, or 62.9 pot/sec, and costs about 1/3 of your mana pool at most.
Flare is 260 potency with a 4s cast, or 65 pot/sec, a whopping 3% more dps than Fire 3, and leaves you dry to boot.

Proposal:
Make Flare a base 5s cast, with 500 potency, with a 5y aoe range, affected by the umbral-astral buffs in the same way all other Fire spells are.
Make Flare cost 0 mana, and have a 3 minute recast, to match with Raging Strikes.

The idea is that Flare, like many other final job abilities, should feel powerful, be relatively easy to use, but not spammable.
Right now we can do (F3), Flare, Convert, S-Cast, Flare, Transpose, wait...
This gets you, ignoring Fire 3 for the AF3 buff, 520 potency over about 5 seconds, counting the minor internal gcd of ogcd abilities. And you pretty much rely on these extra abilities to make Flare remotely useful.

By changing Flare to be a 3 minute recast, we can justify making it roughly as powerful as the current "Flare Combo", but without have it leave us with 0 MP at the end, and being overly reliant on several other abilities to be useful.

Flare is great how it is. Put a 3 min CD on it, and you ruin BLMs defining trait - Sustained AOE DPS.

Try using flare with a BRD popping manasong.

Flare's perfect as it is. It's the strongest AoE attack in the game in AH3, amazing as a finisher and a great accommodation to the BLM's already top-tier AoE ability. With how strong it is, of course it's situational, and often warrants use of Swift Cast, Raging Strikes, etc, but it's an amazing finisher.

Besides, it's a mad aggro draw. Using it in your rotations draws the crowd from your tank and unto you - making it so you can cast it more often wouldn't help if you're only allowed to cast it as a finisher anyway.

You think your Flare is bad?? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Summoners at 50 get a 5 min cd ability that needs to be used with a 1 and 2 min cooldowns to still do about 30% less damage than a Flare.

Flare is only good to use in niche situations or if you're going to hit more than 3 targets with it, otherwise it's less dps than simply continuing your fire rotation. With convert it can be used in any situation, but convert is on a 3 min cooldown so it's pretty pointless.

And even then it's not all that great. it barely does more than a Fire III and if you are using it in an aoe rotation, its arguably better to use blizIII > Fire II instead of using flare. The problem with flare is it takes too long to recover after using it.

If you're constantly using flare in every rotation, you're doing it wrong.

I'm pretty happy with Flare as it is but if were to get buffed I think it would be cool if it did increased damage based on remaining MP.

Flare is the only REALLY useful job skill we learn IMO. Plus its fun trying to fit it into a rotation since it takes all your mp.

can we use an ether den cast flare again ;)