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

[Phaty]

BLM doesn't feel as bad on movement now that it has 9 instant casts a min then there's a forced polyglot charge and 2 charges of sharpcast. It still has its rotational identity but now has tools to deal with its weakness

[Tarrick]

The AF/UI timers don't exist to make interesting choices, they exist to force the class to not resort to fire 4 spam, because this was the behavior exclusively hated about ARR's design.

This isn't true at all. Other spells exist to enable Fire 4, not to take away from it. The flavor of BLM is that you're tapping into this power, Fire 4, but you can't maintain it all the time and you need other spells to make it possible, like Blizzard 4 enabling the use of more Fire 4. If they changed BLM to just be a repeated rotation with consistent baseline DPS then it just wouldn't feel like a BLM. You're intended to get that feeling of manipulating powerful magic. If you want to change something, complain about Thunder because those spells are incredibly boring and contribute nothing to the rotation. A 3-phase mechanic using all 3 fire, blizzard, and thunder might have been more interesting.

[PyurBlue]

The mechanic is strictly a skill floor mechanic, not a skill ceiling mechanic. Failing the timers mechanic locks you out of your core rotation, and the reward for success is...your core rotation.

That's the intention. It's perfectly fine. Punishment for failed execution is OK.

At its most severe, it turns the class into the only class in the entire game as of Endwalker that is severely punished simply because the devs want to add gaols, stuns, or cinematic cutscenes to boss encounters.

My problem here is with the latter. They're annoying even without resources to disrupt and don't tend to add anything interesting to content. Give us continual control over our characters and everything is fine.

[Caiahar]

A simple example. The situation: you've just entered AF 3. Swiftcast and other cooldowns are down, but Triplecast is up. You have a Thundercloud proc, and Thunder's going to expire on your target in 10 seconds or so.

The plan: F4, F4, F4, F1, F4, Thundercloud Proc + Triplecast, F4, F4, Despair.
The reality: After your first F4, the boss targets you with a mechanic. You burn Triplecast in order to be able to keep casting. You throw F1 and begin to cast another F4, but you're targeted with another mechanic that forces you to run around for several seconds because AoEs chase you or something. You've already spent Triplecast; by the time you can stop running, you'll have only 5s left on your AF timer.

Well, you can use your Thundercloud, but then what? Do you cast another F1 to refresh your timer, and then proceed with F4s into Despair? Do you just cast F4->Despair and transition to Umbral straight from there? Maybe you throw in a Scathe while running around? Maybe you panic or get too greedy, end up casting two F4s, and then realize you don't have time for Despair or even B3 and just hit Transpose. Maybe you don't even realize you should Transpose so you drop Astral entirely, resetting your Polyglot timer.

If you had no timer, you'd be guaranteed the ability to cast your three F4s and another Despair and not have to make any of these decisions. This is why I said Black Mage has an aspirational rotation. There's an ideal thing you want to do, but the world will conspire to stop you, so you have to make compromises and substitutions based on your knowledge of the fight and your own job mechanics. If there were no timers, this wouldn't happen; BLM would actually be as simple and boring as you're pretending it is.

Man, I love this so much about BLM
I'm still a casual, haven't gotten into the raiding scene yet so I haven't really done the whole optimizing specifically for a fight yet but as much as I hate losing to the timer because I couldnt get in a F1 and was greedy on something, it keeps it engaging for me, these little decisions make every fight a new experience(though it can also be real frustrating when there are so many mechanics that I have to move for when I don't have movement abilities available). The only thing I hated (because I'm not very good) was dropping enochian too soon after I already dropped it once, which meant it was on cooldown and I couldnt even do my rotation anymore until it came off which imo was too punishing. Otherwise, the punishment for losing to the timer is just enough that you don't want to do it but not overly so.

[IruruCece]

Considering every other class that had a mechanic remotely like it has had it removed, as well as the fact that it's a core requirement of playing the class correctly, yes, astronomically high is fair.

Guess what? I don't care if people get "punished" for making mistakes at a videogame. That's what happens when you make mistakes. A black mage that fails to maintain their rotation should lose potency and build back up to peak performance. That's what they get.

The solution should never be "take away any and all things that require the player to be competent", it should be "recognize what you did wrong, learn ways to mitigate or prevent that, deal with it the best you can". Yes, there are going to be situations where you can't be optimal, where things are outside of your control. Too effin' bad. Play better, or learn to work around those moments where you can't greed all the dps you want.

Black Mage has been, historically, one of the hardest hitting dps jobs in the game, one of the most consistently performing, and it comes at the cost of the best players needing to understand fights thoroughly, to understand where and when they can greed, and when they need to drop the "plan" and improvise. That's actually mechanically interesting game design.

Players who don't want to deal with that can play MCH or nuMonk. What next? Do we want to remove cast times because it's hard to stand still and wait for a cast to go off? It's too hard to "slidecast"? Should we also remove MP as a mechanic? Reduce the leylines cooldown to 10 seconds because it's not "fair"? Come on.

[Ferrinus]

I suppose if you hated timers specifically but wanted to keep the dynamic, adaptive playstyle of Black Mage you could cut out the middleman and make movement itself directly hurt your rotation. Like, every three yards you walk is an AF stack lost or something. It'd definitely be less elegant than what we have now but the BLM's new weakness would need to be at least that weird and fiddly in order to maintain the job's uniqueness while getting rid of, specifically, a visible clock.

[MMOtte]

There is one, and only one, change I would like to see to AF/UI that would most of the issues addressed;

Only have the timer go down while your GCD is rolling/you are casting.

This might be technically challenging to implement, certainly more demanding on the server than a simple timer as it is now.

But it would stop the need to spam Umbral Soul during downtime, while still keeping the skill floor aspect, and ties beautifully into the ABC mentality.

[Ferrinus]

I think the timers should definitely keep moving while you're moving (and not casting) in the usual course of a fight, but to repeat myself from earlier in the thread I've love it if Umbral Soul, specifically, "froze" your umbral timer until such time as you cast another spell.

[Alargo]

Still can figure new rotations(

[Ferrinus]

Still can figure new rotations(

Single target is basically unchanged: B3, T3, B4, F3 to get into astral, six F4s with one F1 in the middle somewhere capped off by Despair, then B3 to go back to umbral. At level 90, you cast Paradox instead of F1, and also throw Paradox into your umbral cycle somewhere.

Multitarget is different: B2, T4, Freeze, F2, F2, F2, Flare, Flare, B2. You use (high) Blizz 2 to enter umbral, Freeze to get hearts, (High) Fire 2 to enter Astral, more Fire 2 to spend your first two hearts and buff Flare, and then Flare to spend your last heart and the remainder of your MP.