Quote Originally Posted by Voidmage View Post
Timing our casts to the last second will no longer be needed because we always have the safety net of two instant casts to refresh the fire timer.
The flow of the firephase will be gone because of the wait times after the instant casts (at least on low spell speed).
UI Paradox is gone so that emergency tool is no longer there (and the worst thing is that with the removal the of that spell the "flare" of it is gone)
There is no thunderprog to manage any more as far as I can see.
I think that last-second casts are always going to be a thing, just because of the fundamental contradiction between having cast times and bosses forcing you to move. They'll be rarer, since we have more mobility in fire phase (and less in ice) than before, but you're still only going to have a triplecast approximately once every other fire cycle, but I feel confident that I'm going to find myself under enough pressure + have made enough mistakes to occasionally need to sneak in 1s-left-on-the-timer Despairs.

There's still going to be a pressure on BLM to refresh Thunder as it falls off (this I think is going to be functionally identical to EW use of Thunder, since if you're on top of Sharpcast you are also just casting it at instant speed for 0MP every 30 seconds) and to not overcap polyglot. On average, you'll need to use one Thunder and one Xeno every 30s, and if save them up or put them off you can still find yourself in awkward situations in which you literally can't fit all your overdue Xenos and a Thunder alongside your F4s unless you cheat some stuff out using Swiftcast. (And of course instant-cast Xeno and Thunder were already breaking up the flow of watching cast bars fill in EW).

I'm going to miss UI paradox, though! It's possible that it's gone because, with it, BLM would literally have too much free movement. Also, since Paradox is IIRC slightly lower in potency/second than Fire IV, it's possible that it'd end up optimal to skip UI Paradox even if it was available (but they could fix that with a potency buff)(but they would have to make sure it doesn't accidentally become optimal to just maximize Paradox casts by transposing rapidly).

They managed to make fire 2 good in EW only to almost make it useless now in DT.
I wouldn't say useless so much as the equivalent of Fire 3; you use it to swap, because it does more damage on 3+ targets than Fire 3 would. I can sort of get why; it's difficult to create a Fire II that's worth casting ahead of Flare purely based on the math (even if you pick the exact right damage, mp cost, and cast time that it's better than F4 but worse than Flare on 3+ targets, players might still just start skipping it in order to get to Flare faster), so the designers pretty much have to just put in a special trait that causes F2 to buff Flare in order for F2 to get used at all. But that feels kludgey, and also makes Flare itself weaker by default, which means it's less exciting to learn at level 50.

What they could do is make F2 generate Flare Star pips while Flare generates less; like you get 1 pip per F2, and 2 pips per Flare, or something. But that's also kind of a heavy-handed order from above rather than an organic result of potencies and cast times, so it feels a little less appropriate to BLM's general design.