Quote Originally Posted by Gemina View Post
Let me see if I can be a little more clear. I am not actually suggesting that SS, Indom, and Excog have their recast times reduced to 2.5s, which is what I think some of you are under the impression I am stating. I actually never even stated what the recast times should be reduced to. What I am saying is that aetherflow skills already use aetherflow as a resource, and it is a flawed design to put skills in there that also have CDs. If the ability is so powerful that it warrants a CD, then have it operate free of aetherflow much like Chain, Deploy/Emergency, or Recitation.

After giving it more thought, I came to the inquisition of, "Why even have aetherflow at all?" With energy drain gone, we're all kind of scratching our heads about it: It can't be used outside combat, nothing to dump stacks on if we don't need the heals leading to overhealing, most of its abilities already have their own CD timer... seriously, why aetherflow?
The cooldowns are there for balance. Aetherflow is there to make us thing about what kind of healing footprint we are going to have for the next minute. Are we going to focus on AoE? Single target? Mixture? With energy drain and bane we could also factor damage in that equation previously.

If you remove aetherflow, you take out one of the last mechanical expressions of "tactics" that are part of the Job's core lore and identity.