Quote Originally Posted by GartredZW View Post
Why do you keep talking about difficulty? no one said anything about how much easier or harder the job is. I really don't care how easy or hard it could be as long as it's still fun and well designed.

and what do you mean by "nobody actually starts awake ..."

Did you forget that we're not talking about striking dummies here? There are mechanics going out where you need to move your eyes away from the gauge for some time to see what's going on. Perhaps even movement where some players don't mind letting the GCD clip a bit. I know I do that sometimes because I prioritize survival over numbers like a good little Black Mage..
It's you who mentioned that the Paradox change is detrimental to new players, i.e. it will make it harder for them to play BLM. The thing is that that's definitely wrong; even discounting the guaranteed proc, the instant cast makes it much easier to abort and preserve AF3 in the face of emergency and more movement means more leeway in general. It's also an additional opportunity to weave stuff in without clipping.

I mean exactly what I say by "no one starts awake"; even if you got distracted by a boss mechanic or party chat or something you'll have actually been playing BLM with your particular spellspeed parameters for more than zero seconds and have a sense for what you can or can't get away with. Because spellspeed exists, at all, not to mention leylines, any particular timer-based rule of thumb is only going to work by accident and for a fraction of the playerbase, unless you're willing to aggressively round up, in which case it will work for everyone but is also so cautious as to be useless. Like, in EW, I was safe at all "5"s and many "4s". If I didn't build for SPS, I would have been safe at most "6"s and all "7"s. So it's actually 7 which guarantees an F4+hardcast Paradox for all players. But, in fact, that 7 also guarantees two hardcast F4s and a swiftcast Paradox, which is the situation we play in under DT. So in general I don't believe that there was some kind of gem of intentional design based entirely on Paradox having a cast bar or not.

Like I said, adding a decimal to the phase timer would be a welcome change, and it'd be funny if they REALLY committed to customizability by, like, making the Fire button turn into 2.5s cast time Paradox while the Blizzard button turned into 0s cast time Paradox, but I don't really see myself using the former in the vast majority of cases. They could give Paradox the special property of generating an 18s or 20s astral timer, but, really, I think your astral cycle is pretty well spaces out already because the "top-heavy" 4 or even 5x F4 at the start is counterbalanced by the Despair and Flare Star at the end.