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

[Taranok]

Ideally in a fight, you're only going to do your opener once and do your rotation for the whole fight. In some ways, reopeners can have a higher pps depending on the availability of LL, Triplecast, Swiftcast, and Manafont. Even without Manafont and only having those 3 skills, it's still only slightly* less pps.

That is why I'm still in favor of just adjusting Umbral Soul.

Because at the end of the day, if the core rotation is preserved and the rotation is the same, and the class plays the same as well as the class feeling the same, does the class really warrant major reworking for the sake of lower the skill floor?

If SE would rework BLM, I don't want to be doing F4 spam AGAIN. I want it to be something new. Otherwise, it's a waste of resource to put that much development effort into it only for the job to feel the same in the end.
Players starting the job might appreciate this, but the majority of BLM players who already know their rotation wouldn't even notice this.

TLR - BLM is fine save for a few encounters. Asking for a rework to the entire kit is pointless if your intention is to preserve the feel of the original kit.

It wouldn't be a rework to the entire kit, and any change that simplifies learning a class to teach new players how to play the class as the devs want it to be played is a good change. Or, to put it another way, I saw a lot of complaints when Greased Lightning was removed from monk, yet the class is so much better without it despite it not being an issue. And who knows what removing the timers could actually allow the devs to do in terms of actually designing the class.

Hell, I find it hard to believe the devs had to discuss removing enochian (as a button) because it was such a non-issue except to the worst of the worst BLMs. But by removing it, they did drop the skill floor very, very slightly in removing a terrible thing, freed up bar space very slightly, and removed a fourth layer of failure from the class.

Timers primarily affect people learning the class, not masters. They add anxiety to certain players that harms the enjoyment of an otherwise stellar class (others actually enjoy the buzz for some reason), but beyond that have no purpose beyond structuring the rotation, which can be done in another, vastly better way that makes understanding the class easier for new players without realistically impacting the end-game rotation beyond a couple fuzzy things here and there, such as sharpcast having 2 useless abilities to spend it on instead of its current 1 (scathe).

So I'll counter your question with another question. If it can be seamlessly integrated, primarily drops out the skill floor, doesn't realistically touch the skill ceiling, and makes the class much easier to teach just with tooltips, why wouldn't you add it? They've done literally the same thing to most classes in the game. From MCH (SB->ShB), to NIN (Mudra GCDs, +TA duration), to Monk (GL removed), to Dragoon (BotD removed), they're dropping out the skill floor on SAM (buffs on combo finishers during Meikyo, 2 charges tsubame so it won't drift off mistakes), nevermind literally everything that's happened to Summoner since Heavensward. What is so sacred about AF/UI timers when it legitimately makes BLM so difficult to learn without providing anything of true substance to high-skill players, while also dragging on the classes overall quality of life?

[Taranok]

What I think I missed that's more pertinent here is that 'tension' I'm referring to is consequence. Yes, the AF/UI timer is an explicit punishment mechanic. That's the point. It's designed to keep you on the rails and guide players towards the core rotation and the ways in which you're allowed to flex around it.

I think this is the crux of the issue. AF/UI timers are not a punishment mechanic primarily. They're a structural mechanic. A structural mechanic that makes the class much harder to learn, allows for rotations that are much easier to break (E.G. hypermeme), rotations that the devs very much do not like (Why else would Paradox require UH3 to get after leaving UI3?), and doesn't impact high-skill play meaningfully while massively reducing the enjoyment of the class at low skill play. This lack of enjoyment trickles up into high-end play, where one of 2 kinds of people exist: Those who thrive off the anxiety, and those who see their enjoyment reduced. This doesn't need to be the case, and provided the class has structure in absence of AF/UI timers, the class would be a lot better for the lack of them.

To look at it from another perspective, since you're focused on downtime, we could ask "Why don't we just fix the downtime instead?".

To look at it from another perspective: "Why would you intentionally hamstring the class with a badly thought out mechanic just because you personally don't hate the anxiety it causes, and refuse to recognize the detriments it causes?" A band-aid is just that, a band-aid. You can fix the downtime issue, but you're not dealing with the underlying problem or the severity of it.

Oh, one final thing.

Well, really, what it's actually there to prevent is Chad McThunderhax from spamming Thundercloud a potentially infinite number of times in a row while maintaining AF3 the entire time

People wouldn't do that because T3 by itself, even in proc form, is a pretty huge DPS decrease if it's not allowed to tic. If you literally spent your entire rotation just chaincasting T3 one after another in its proc form, it would be worse DPS than doing the entire AF/UI rotation without a single T3.

The problem is so interesting that a T3 without a proc, unless I flubbed the math, is actually a DPS decrease over the new EW rotation. Fortunately, as it has a pretty high chance to proc (about 57% over 24 seconds) this is rarely an actual problem, but seriously, if it doesn't proc it's a DPS downgrade.

I'm actually wondering if there will be meme strats that completely dump T3 in favor of forcing F3 procs to make the transition back into AF3 literally twice as damaging. I doubt it, because T3 with a proc is a sizeable DPS increase provided the DoT is allowed to tic, but the point still stands. Also, there will definitely be strategies about keeping F3P all through UI3 just to transpose->firestarter the start of the AF phase. Literally ARR strats coming back, only this time intentionally.

[Gruntler]

BLM already has the easiest rotation in the entire game.

It's difficulty and challenge come from fight design forcing movement and you working around it, and the UI/AF timers and how they interact with that. This creates the tension that makes the rotation challenging and makes the job appealing from a skill-based aspect. This is an intentional feature of the job.

Removing Enochian removes the 'locked into a subpar rotation' part of the recovery because recovering your rotation is as easy as 'Blizzard 3 I'm back in the game.' Before, if you screwed up when Enochian was on cooldown, you had the subpar rotation. in EW you just have to B3 B4 and F3 puts you back in the game.

[Ferrinus]

First, it'd be great if Umbral Soul "froze" the UI timer until you cast something else, although this would be a functional buff to BLM's ability to maintain Enochian through stuff like the Eden 1 phase transition. Maybe US should just give you a 15s or 30s buff that freezes the timer.

Second, figuring out an "ammo" rather than "timer" based BLM is an interesting exercise - I think you'd have to make it so that B4 gives you three Umbral Hearts (which allow you to cast F4 at a reduced cost) and then for Fire/Paradox to give you three Astral Sparks (which just allow you to cast F4 at full cost), and then Manafont gives you one spark, and so on. In principle it's possible to cut out the time element entirely but still ensure that the BLM goes through a F4 x3, F1, F4 x3 sequence each astral cycle.

However, this would make the class much stronger and much less interesting to play. The timers are good because they create puzzles for you to solve above and beyond "always be casting", because BLM is only kind of rotation-based while also being kind of priority-based. The general game, since Heavensward, is to try to cast as many of your powerful, unsustainable spells and as few of your weak, sustainable spells as you can. Trying to burn off polyglot stacks and thundercloud procs before they expire and dodging mechanics and using oGCDs in a timely fashion are all plates you have to keep spinning, and depending on how comfortable you are with the job and the fight you might have to either replace F4s with F1s or flat-out do an emergency Transpose to keep the Polyglot gauge building. If there was never a threat of AF expiring, then you'd never have to make emergency substitutions, and the challenge of playing the class would be reduced completely to saving swift/triple/procs for times you have to move. Right now, you have to do that, but you also have to think about what to instacast based on where you are in your timer and how greedy you've been with other spells and abilities. If you've just cast your fifth F4, and only have 3s left on the timer, you might have been planning to go F4-swift-Despair, but now maybe you should straight up swift-Despair because doing a swift-F4 and dodging an AoE could leave you unable to finish Despair all together! Without the timer, you'd be guaranteed the ability to use all your spells in their optimal sequence no matter what.

[Kabooa]

You can fix Black Mage's learning curve without gutting its ability to be played in ways the average player won't ever think of.

Riding the timer is one of the few genuine joys of playing any job, and getting rid of them is not only a mistake for Black mage, but should have been curtailed since moving into Stormblood.

[Absurdity]

I don't know about you but to me it's completely backwards to rework job timers so that they don't punish you during long cutscenes instead of, idk, maybe not having 1 minute cutscenes in the middle of a fight?

Those cutscenes may look cool the first time but afterwards they offer basically nothing of value.

[Ferrinus]

Cutscenes like that serve two purposes: one, they reset everyone's timers, and two, they give everyone a short break.

[Taranok]

BLM already has the easiest rotation in the entire game.

It's difficulty and challenge come from fight design forcing movement and you working around it, and the UI/AF timers and how they interact with that. This creates the tension that makes the rotation challenging and makes the job appealing from a skill-based aspect. This is an intentional feature of the job.

Removing Enochian removes the 'locked into a subpar rotation' part of the recovery because recovering your rotation is as easy as 'Blizzard 3 I'm back in the game.' Before, if you screwed up when Enochian was on cooldown, you had the subpar rotation. in EW you just have to B3 B4 and F3 puts you back in the game.

The problem is, you lose a significant chunk of damage. Far more than any class, if you make this mistake. At present, you will lose a minimum of 2 fire 4s, both from the time lost in needing to cast back in if you go straight into AF3, as well as the MP cost. That's 540 a piece each. If you go into UI, it's a bunch of fire 4s and a despair to recover the rotation. The biggest DPS loss comes from Xenoglossy being dropped, which fails and causes you to drop an open ended timer, which can be anywhere from 0 potency to 725 potency in losses by itself, nevermind the AF/UI timer being lost.

Losing the AF/UI timer costs you, usually, a minimum of 1000 potency in losses by itself just in lost fire 4s/despairs/time wasted on a cast that didn't finish. Tack on the Xenoglossy losses, and it's a very heavy punishment, equivalent to completely botching a Ten-Chi-Jin as Ninja, but it can happen at any point during the rotation, unlike TCJ which is a small 4 second window every 2 minutes.

Nevermind that dropping GCDs unnecessarily is already the single highest per-GCD potency loss of any class in the game, as the majority of BLM's damage comes directly from its core rotation, not from any burst it does. Factor in that that's not the 'true' potency values, as that's just listed potency + AF3's multiplier, and it really shows just how punishing this is.

I don't know about you but to me it's completely backwards to rework job timers so that they don't punish you during long cutscenes instead of, idk, maybe not having 1 minute cutscenes in the middle of a fight?

Those cutscenes may look cool the first time but afterwards they offer basically nothing of value.

I mean, sure, if that was literally the only thing I was writing about.

The problem is you're being punished in cutscenes (Greased Lightning/BotD say hi, also removed), you dropped xenoglossy (Massive potency losses, other classes only got resets/gains, BLM/DRG/MNK got losses from resets, DRG+MNK had the loss component removed), makes the rotation much harder to learn and understand (I seriously cannot begin to count how many sprouts I run into chain-casting Fire 3 still), makes the rotation very punishing (AF/UI/Enochian dropping, which will still be a problem in EW), and isn't even the primary challenge of the class (Always Be Casting), but a tertiary challenge from knock-on effects. It's a lot of punishment but requires you to fail repeatedly at the primary and secondary challenges of the class. The primary being to sit still and cast, the second to save your movement options so you can be moving and casting when necessary.

All of this while being a major component of anxiety in certain people, including myself despite my intense love of the class despite this mechanic. This is my favorite class, it is my best class by a mile, but the timers add nothing of actual value to the classes rotation, and are directly dragging the class down.

You can fix Black Mage's learning curve without gutting its ability to be played in ways the average player won't ever think of.

Riding the timer is one of the few genuine joys of playing any job, and getting rid of them is not only a mistake for Black mage, but should have been curtailed since moving into Stormblood.

Riding the timer is a really, really silly reason to enjoy a class. "I like a class that threatens to kick me into the dirt after I already trip into the ground." And it wouldn't gut the class at all. Just as removing Greased Lightning didn't ruin Monk, but made it better. Just as removing BotD will not ruin Dragoon, but will make it better. Removing AF/UI timers will remove the giant skill cliff that makes the class difficult to understand, actually make the rotation better overall, and allow the devs to do even more with the class. Removing GL from monk is the single best thing the devs have ever done with monk, just as removing oGCD Mudras was from Ninja.

You delete a structural component, it has a couple growing pains as you try to refocus it, and then you realize without the limitation that you can do a hell of a lot more with the class than you ever did.

Oh, and for this part in particular:

without gutting its ability to be played in ways the average player won't ever think of.

This is really awful logic for any class. This logic is why a Summoner was allowed to be the single lowest DPS class in the game when you had no idea what you were doing, an above average class when played correctly, as intended, and completely and utterly broken when you played it 'in ways the average player won't ever think of.' That's the Heavensward Summoner, by the way. Hypermeme, the JP opener, basically any rotation that is designed to cut out the low DPS sections of the class, including the soon to be transpose->firestarter proc to get out of UI strat are not healthy for the design of a class. It makes it difficult to understand the class, more technical to play the class, and substantially harder to balance.

It's a big reason why Stormblood summoner had to have its damage reduced after buffing it from the botched 4.0 start to the class. As it turns out, when you play classes in ways that aren't intended (oGCDs to proc extra DB wyrmwaves, in this case), it actually harms the class and its overall design more than it helps. It is not healthy for the game and is a pretty bad reason to keep the status quo.

[VentVanitas]

Riding the timer is a really, really silly reason to enjoy a class. "I like a class that threatens to kick me into the dirt after I already trip into the ground."

You're being pointlessly pedantic. You don't get to tell anyone that the way they're enjoying a job is "silly." It doesn't effect how you or anyone else plays, so why do you care?

Some people like high punishment jobs. There's nothing wrong with that.

[Ferrinus]

You write that timers add nothing to the job's rotation, but, in fact, timers are precisely why BLM is not just a class with a preset rotation. There's an ideal sequence in which you'd cast your spells if nothing ever came up, but random elements like procs and boss mechanics can force you to make substitutions in order to keep your next polyglot stack building and prevent yourself from having to hardcast F3/B3 after a drop. Figuring out if and when to you need to break from 4-4-4-1-4-4-4 involves creativity and quick thinking which makes the class exciting to play. It also makes it feel great to attain such a high spellspeed that you're able to pull off really greedy proc uses or save yourself from disaster at the last minute with a well-timed swiftcast.

Enochian becoming a passive trait had already removed the old "kick you when you're down" element off HW+ BLM, namely being locked out of F4/B4 for up to 30 seconds.