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

[Taranok]

Gonna have to agree with Grimoire-M on this. The timers on BLM are a small but vital thing that facilitates its playstyle and gives context/purpose to a lot of its skills. Without them you'd need to create new purposes for a good portion of its kit that basically doesn't need fixing.

I play BLM specifically because of the sense of urgency that rewards your knowledge of fights and resourcefulness, more so than the other casters. Without them you're losing a lot of nuance that makes BLM what it is and I don't think it's worth losing all that subtle design just for some fringe cases where the timers screw you over.

You will still have that sense of urgency, you will still be rewarded for playing correctly, as your primary challenge as a BLM is fundamentally unchanged. Your goal is to Always Be Casting, with a secondary goal of Conserve Movement Abilities to strategically Always Be Casting. The AF/UI timers basically function as your face hitting the ground after you've already tripped (no longer casting) and failed to catch yourself on the way down (use instant casts).

They are not part of the core rotation, and the only reason they insist on being part of the core rotation is because no one's dared to question if the reason the core rotation has the structure it does is a good foundation or not. My entire post is to say that the structure of the foundation of the core rotation of this class is absolute garbage because it's a mechanic designed back when BLM had more in common with the modern RDM rotation than the current BLM endgame rotation. That is, a proc-baiting caster class with (random) amounts of free movement. BLM has long since stopped being this class, and as with Summoner finally destroying the aspects rotting out the structure of its core rotation, it's time to do the same to the last legacy class that has a rotted core structure.

Remember, back when AF/UI was first created, transpose was a 15s cooldown, AF/UI timers lasted 8 seconds but were literally always up in AF as every ability except a T3 proc refreshed the duration. If it ever fell off for any reason, you had to cast into AF3/UI3 with F3/B3 but otherwise were instantly back at full power save for any loss of procs. This design is that old, and it's been piggybacked in HW to provide a weird structure to F4, piggybacked and expanded more in SB to provide Polyglot/Foul, and then further piggybacked and expanded again for Xenoglossy and Despair. And every time they've altered the rotation, they've had to extend the timer because the timer was too tight and made the class unapproachably difficult to play. It happened repeatedly in HW, happened in SB, and they did it pre-emptively in ShB for Despair. It's a legacy mechanic that is actively harming the class for new players trying to get into it, and provides little challenge as it is the floor that you need to climb on top of to literally play the class as intended. Once you're on top of it, you're finally able to actually play the class as intended and actually master it. That sense of urgency it provides, that baseline anxiety, turns players off as much if not more than it provides a buzz to players who love the threat of being kicked while they're already down.

And every time a class had a mechanic like this, it has been removed. Your rotation as a DRG used to shut down if you couldn't get a back attack. Imagine no disembowel or chaos thrust because you failed to land a positional. Removed in HW. BotD is literally a maintained buff. Imagine not having 30s of LotD because you dared to have 18s of BotD before going in. Removed in ShB (always at 30s), removed in EW (always have BotD). Imagine a boss mechanic locking you out from a fight and dropping greased lightning, the core structure of how you play your class. Extended repeatedly in HW, SB, ShB, with numerous abilities to try to maintain this buff. Removed. And as a result of removing it, the devs were allowed more freedom in restructuring the class itself.

These limitations don't aid the class design. They hinder and hold it back. Imagine a BLM free of timers where, instead of an underwhelming cooldown like Sharpcast, instead they get a cooldown that allows them to cast 1 spell for free, instantly, no matter what it is. It doesn't need to be this, but they could because it would no longer interfere with the AF/UI timer and disrupt the core rotational structure. That's something that could be done with such a change.

Imagine not needing to go spell speed because it provides safety (and damage), but now you can choose to do it exclusively because it makes the class more fun. That's the freedom this change can offer.