What's the point of Umbral Soul?

[zcrash970]

So you don't lose stacks between pulls or down time in trials

[Roxas_Andrade]

It is for skipping Blizzard IV or Freeze. Ice is the lower damage part of your rotation, so reducing time in that phase will mean higher damage. You go directly into Thunder III or Fire III in single target. For AoE, you go directly into Thunder IV or Fire III.

But you can't use Umbral Soul unless you're already under umbral Ice and Enochian, so you can't Blizz III + Umbral Soul (would be a DPS loss in your example) and if you use Freeze, you'll already get one Umbral heart, making double Flare possible... If you had to use US 3 times, better use Blizz IV...

So you don't lose stacks between pulls or down time in trials

For not loosing stacks between pulls and keep Enochian going, we have transpose (Of course Umbral Soul would be better in this case, but not being able to use it on the first pull is annoying, why the requirement of Enochian AND umbral Ice?) For downtime in trials I accept it, but then it doesn't feel as powerful as I thought it would be...

[zcrash970]

For not loosing stacks between pulls and keep Enochian going, we have transpose (Of course Umbral Soul would be better in this case, but not being able to use it on the first pull is annoying, why the requirement of Enochian AND umbral Ice?) For downtime in trials I accept it, but then it doesn't feel as powerful as I thought it would be...

You are thinking about it wrong. You're seeing it as a dps tool but it's far from that. It's a QoL tool. BLM has always had a problem getting back into dps after downtime. Umbral Soul is nothing different from MNKs new anatam/ form shift or DNCs improv.