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

[Taranok]

None of those suffer nearly as much as BLM.


Reapplied on second GCD, activation time two GCDs


Reapplied on second GCD, activation time two GCDs


You mean Eye, but reapplied on third GCD, activation time three GCDs


No big loss here. Draw a card immediately after the thing finishes? Activation time 0s because you'll either have time to draw before the boss is targetable again or you'll draw in your first weave window.


BLM has to

(a) hardcast Blizzard III, which takes twice as long to to cast outside of Astral Fire III, and then delay their next cast by activating Enochian outside of a weave window;
(b) Swiftcast Blizzard III which takes almost as much time as hardcasting it but gives a weave window for Enochian,
or (c) substitute Freeze into a single target rotation losing damage but gaining a heart, that's nice I guess.

then spend another two or more GCDs getting back into fire phase before they can cast Fire IV again. EW will remove the Enochian activation time, but Aspects will still need to be reapplied and BLM loses a Paradox every time Aspect drops.

This is not something "every other job" has to deal with.

A couple things to add:

Burning swiftcast to restart your opener means you burn a critical movement skill exclusively to bring the classes rotation back. Furthermore, there is absolutely no evidence that dropping AF/UI also drops Paradox, and there's evidence it might actually be saved. Notably, in this video, he simultaneously loses AF/UI but Paradox isn't instantly interrupted. It finishes casting, and isn't put into a stance. Which means Paradox can also get trapped to burn MP, do 20% (percentage points) less damage, and potentially make it more difficult to get into a stance if you accidentally overburn your MP.

Also, quick addition, Storm's Eye doesn't lock out your rotation for want of it. In fact, none of these lock out your core rotation. You want to maintain it, and it's part of your skill ceiling to maintain these class buffs, but that's the important thing. BLM has no core rotation without AF/UI. A warrior simply loses out on ~9% of its total damage until it gets storm's eye up. Which is annoying and should be considered to be looked into, but is not as serious a problem as, say, dumping their entire stack of rage while simultaneously setting back the cooldown of Inner Release, which is what dropping AF/UI is practically doing. In comparison, a Monk in the same situation has its core rotation seriously hindered due to a loss of GL3. DRG has its entire main loop completely reset when BotD is forced to drop as it often is at present. These are both being, or have been, removed.

Good point.

A fix would just be to make Umbral Soul freeze UI timer, granting 3 UI and either, 3 Umbral Hearts outside of combat or 1 while in combat.

It will still cost a GCD. You will still always want to use B4 over US. But it helps with downtime and those long travel phases.

I can't help but think of all of the mechanics the devs kept adding to Monk to fix the problem of Greased Lightning being dropped, which was often just as disastrous to MNK's rotation as it is to BLM to drop AF/UI due to the timers, before the devs finally acquiesced and removed GL3, and found out the class was better with its removal than with it as a major part of the class. At a certain point, you're really just bending over backwards to justify poor design while claiming it's good design. In a broad, general sense. I'm not trying to put words in your mouth as I'm very much editorializing based on trying to fix a problem by creating silly asinine workarounds instead of dealing with the problem directly.