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

[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.