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

[Aztectornado]

No, lets not and say we did.

That's the second time in this thread you've failed to provide a counterpoint or add a meaningful rebuttal to something someone's said. This feels more like a verbal downvote than proper argument against doing the above, and feels moderately like an appeal to tradition. Please expand on why it'd be bad to standardize this job to be in line with others? If this is the direction the game's going in with periods of showy cutscenes, rail segments, and more focus on dodging for long periods between bursts, they should balance for that rather than strictly adhering to old standards where the player had full control the entire time.

Wouldn't it be better to fix the problem instead of changing everything else then? Make Umbral soul pause the ice timer so you don't need to spam it. Before it existed, that's what I thought a BLM downtime skill would look like. I don't know why they went with one that requires constant action.

I think that'd be a great solution too, or even giving it a use outside combat similar to how Monk gets Meditation to preload chakras, but both of these options would fail to address content prior to Umbral Soul being unlocked, and contributes heavily to my dislike of how the job plays as I'm leveling it. It's only now that I'm past 70 that it's starting to feel like a real job, but everywhere else it still has that old Monk smell where I feel like I'm having to spam something between pulls, then getting a hard reset in the combo that I have to start over from multiple longcast GCDs the moment a cutscene, rail segment, or suitably long segment of inaction causes me to drop a ball. God save me if I want to take a drink of water at any point in a dungeon, I have to spam Transpose the whole way just like I did with Form Change. Doesn't feel good for Repetitive Stress Injury.