Quote Originally Posted by Ramiee View Post
The main difference then before is that the main spender (Xenoglossy/Foul) outside of just straight up using your Fire spells was connected to simply keeping Astral/Umbral up. It seems to be that Fire IV's tokens that give you Flare star forces you to linearly use as many Fire IVs to get it then use it and switching back to ice form drops this making you lose potency. This along with the MP regen changes has made it that switching to Ice phase and dropping Flare star fails your rotation ergo destroying non-standard rotation where you'd use tranpose to switch to Ice for certain reasons.

It makes it similar to how other Jobs in the game make you do a combo rotation that gives resources (Sen for example) to use on a spender (Midare Setsugekka) when previously BLM didn't have anything like this. Instead you were limited to using Despair or Flare at the end of your "combo" because your MP was running out. So you could technically switch to Ice to regain Mana and skip Despair or do Despair early even if you have enough mana to spend on extra Fire IVs.
But now because we have Flare Star we are forced to do as many Fire IVs as we can to get Flare Star as our finisher after Despair removing the decision making from it.
Well, Fire IV has always been BLM's single hardest-hitting and spammable spell, so the goal (on single target, anyway) has always been to maximize the density of Fire IV (and Despair) of casts in the total list of spell casts populated over the course of a fight. Even if Flare Star didn't exist, you'd still be trying your hardest to execute an astral cycle consisting of six F4s, one Paradox, and one Despair every time you can, with an awareness of an imminent boss jump/death just leading you to cut your astral cycle short by casting your Despair early.

Various transpose/lucid/paradox tricks ultimately amounted to purging as many weaker-than-F4 spells from the rotation as possible, but if by some miracle you could still cast six F4s per astral cycle while also skipping B3, B4, F3, whatever, that's what you'd do, because it would further increase your F4 density. So it's just generally true that you always want more F4s, and lose out on damage if you can't do all your F4s. DT knows what the maximum number of F4s is and rewards you for hitting it, which is a bit of a win more mechanic, but doesn't really change your basic goals in so doing.