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

[Taranok]

So, this is a rather complicated subject to broach. There is no easy, or simple way to explain exactly why this is a bad mechanic, as there is no one thing that it does wrong, and there's arguments it does things well. So I will try my best to simplify the problem down to its basic components, and then when people inevitably want it fleshed out, build upon it later.

But fundamentally, AF/UI timer is a bad mechanic, and it's bad for a number of reasons.

1. AF/UI exists to serve 2 functions. Provide structure to the boom-and-bust rotation, while the timer provides structure to the AF3 rotation of the class.
2. 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.
3. It serves as the third layer of punishment. The first layer is stopping your GCD from rolling, the primary skill check of the class, and the second is failing to have instant cast GCDs to keep the GCD rolling while moving.
4. This third layer has an excessive amount of punishment. In addition to the failed first and second layers, you also lose polyglot progress on top.
5. This design came about because an old ARR mechanic was just constantly expanded on without any concern for how it would impact the skill floor of the class.
6. This also creates poor quality of life problems, such as needing to spam Umbral Soul between pulls in dungeons or when a boss goes untargetable.
7. 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.
8. And finally, this is exclusively a layer of punishment, not a reward for handling it well.

That last point should have some expounding of why it's the case. The reason it's strictly a punishment is the same reason DRKs are complaining about TBN. Your reward for executing it correctly is doing your DPS rotation exactly as the devs intend it to without any accomplishment in terms of skill. Your punishment for failing is to have some wrench thrown in the works of your class. That is to say, your rotation shuts down for failing it. You are set back not a slight bit, but substantially. And no matter how well you execute it, the rewards for proper play belong to other skills, primarily keeping the GCD rolling. Not from the third layer of maintaining an arbitrary timer that doesn't need to exist. You will always feel better about outsmarting a boss mechanic by prepositioning better, and it's a consequence of keeping the GCD rolling that AF/UI timers stay on track, not a consequence of managing the timers correctly.

The final bit, the insult to injury, is that AF/UI timers aren't needed to get the exact rotation the class has now. By doing something as simple as making F1/Paradox give you 3 stacks of umbral hearts, forcing umbral hearts to cast fire 4 (and allowing them to overcap because there's no reason not to for the purposes of this thought experiment), you can structure the rotation exactly as the devs wish to without needing this excessive layer of punishment on top.

This is the last class with punishment for boss downtime, especially cutscenes. It is the last class with insanity levels of punishment for failing its core rotation even slightly. It will still be punished heavily for want of these timers. Why do they still exist?

[Rongway]

Just to be clear, do you mean to suggest, at least in some part, that Umbral Ice and Astral Fire should last indefinitely once you're in one, like a traditional Stance, eliminating literally just the timer but not the intended rotation; requiring an additional minor mechanism after the first Fire IV triplet wherin a Fire/Paradox enables a second Fire IV triplet? So that the rotation is Ice refresh time > Fire III > 3xFireIV > Firadox > 3xFireIV > Despair, which differs only from the practical rotation by the specific placement of the Firadox spell slot?

I could support this. The rotation would be effectively unchanged, but we wouldn't have to spam Umbral Soul between pulls or lose Affinity during a 16s zipline ride.

There are two subsequences to consider though:

1. Fire III (Triplecast) > Fire IV (Swiftcast) > Fire IV > Fire IV > Fire IV
2. Despair (Manafont) > Fire IV > Despair

In re: 1. You have to start the fire phase able to cast four Fire IVs or you lose a half second because a Swiftcast gets spent on a Fire/Paradox instead of a Fire IV.
In re: 2. You have to end the fire phase still able to cast Fire IVs but for lack of MP.
Simple solution: Fire III, Fire, and Paradox should grant 4 charges of Fire IV, and Despair should grant at least 1. Lose all charges on switching to Umbral Ice.

• Blizzard, Blizzard II, Blizzard III, High Blizzard II: unchanged except Umbral Ice lasts until zone/death.
• Blizzard IV and Freeze: unchanged.
• Fire, Fire II, Fire III, High Fire II: Astral Fire lasts until zone/death.
• In addition to Astral Fire, the above fire spells also grant 4 stacks of (i.e.,) Astral Conflagration, to a maximum of 4. All Conflagrations are lost if you switch to Umbral Ice.
• Paradox under Astral Fire grants 4 stacks of Astral Conflagration.
• Fire IV requires and consumes Astral Conflagration in addition to its MP cost.
• As before, starting the fire phase with 3 Umbral Hearts means there is enough MP to cast 7 Fire IVs during the fire phase, but due to Fire IV's Conflagration cost, you can only cast 3 unless you spend one cast on Fire/Paradox to generate another three Conflagrations.
• Astral Fire is no longer timed, but MP is still a hard limiter for the fire phase. Failures now include
  • neglecting to cast Blizzard IV during the ice phase, reducing the MP available for Fire IVs even if you generate enough Conflagrations
  • moving too much, drawing out your fire phase over a longer timespan
  • casting lower damage / higher cost fire spells instead of the ones prescribed
  • casting Fire/Paradox too early, overcapping Conflagrations

So if you were bad, you could do:

(with 3 Umbral Hearts)
Fire III (AC_4)
Fire IV (AC_3)
Fire IV (AC_2)
Fire (AC_4)
Fire IV (AC_3)
Fire IV (AC_2)
Fire (AC_4)
Fire IV (AC_3)
oops no MP for any more Fire IVs, so Despair

or (still bad):

Fire III (AC_4)
Fire (AC_4)
Fire IV (AC_3)
Fire IV (AC_2)
Fire IV (AC_1)
Fire IV
oops no more Conflagrations, choose between casting Fire+FireIV+Despair or cutting your losses with an early Despair.

But the intended rotation would be unchanged:

Fire III
4414444, 4441444, or 4444144
Despair

The hard limit to your Fire phase is your MP, after all, and letting fire spells stack a additional charges of Fire IV wouldn't alone allow you to cast more Fire IVs in a single fire phase.

[Grimoire-M]

I have to somewhat agree with Rongway's conclusion that Fire IV would need something else gating it to make this work. My issue is more with the framing of AF/UI as being bad for having the tension they do. It would be difficult to maintain the same level of forethought that the timers do encourage you to have once you start accounting for how some of your mobility options come into direct conflict with them. Particularly when you factor in that it also rewards you for gearing into spell speed and using Leylines in particular. My overall interpretation of the job is that the reason it's a successful turret mage is because the timers allow for some level of flexibility while still putting some rails on how you handle things, and Polyglot and Fire IV both were ways to reward you for maintaining those timers (Fire IV more for Enochian, specifically in regards to HW). And then you get into edge cases. Manafont doesn't work unless you have a timer. Firestarter and Fire I/Paradox have no explicit purpose without that timer. Some of the value of Triple/Swiftcast is lost without those timers. It adds tension, sure, but not excessively so, because it doesn't ask that you juggle a bunch of secondary resources. Astral Fire and Umbral Ice are the core, including the timers themselves. At some point you have to ask, "Does taking this away add anything?" And judging by the hoops Rongway jumped through to get it to work without it, I'd say no, which is distinctly different from how Monk was handled previously. And honestly new Summoner gets punished more than Black Mage ever has by downtime, which isn't something I ever thought I'd say given where both were back in 2.0.

[KDSilver]

I don't see the prob

[Rongway]

At some point you have to ask, "Does taking this away add anything?" And judging by the hoops Rongway jumped through to get it to work without it, I'd say no

I think one of Taranok's major points though is that making UI and AF persist until zone/death would change nothing for the top 15% BLM players, but BLMs in the lower percentiles would have a smoother time, enough that they're not severely punished for being half a second too late on a midphase Fire cast, but the lower percentile players would still have enough other aspects of the job (continuous GCDs, preemptive choreography, the MP dance) to improve on.

I must have done a bad job of explaining my interpretation of the suggested mechanical changes if it sounded like I was jumping through hoops? Applying edit to previous post.

[Grimoire-M]

I think one of Taranok's major points though is that making UI and AF persist until zone/death would change nothing for the top 15% BLM players, but BLMs in the lower percentiles would have a smoother time, enough that they're not severely punished for being half a second too late on a midphase Fire cast, but the lower percentile players would still have enough other aspects of the job (continuous GCDs, preemptive choreography, the MP dance) to improve on.

I must have done a bad job of explaining my interpretation of the suggested mechanical changes if it sounded like I was jumping through hoops? Applying edit to previous post.

I understood your intention well enough. The 'jumping through hoops' comment was only referring to the amount of programming that would be necessary to facilitate the change in the first place, while also attempting to showcase how the timers limiting BLM also encourage it to think about its sequencing, and highlight that aspect of the job during the rotation, even if it feels rote at times. They're intentionally just loose enough to work with, and no more than that. Removing them essentially means you have to account for new edge cases where there wasn't any before and add more mechanics, all to solve a pain point that doesn't need as much attention as it seems in the first place, given the OP themself admits it's just about getting access to the core rotation. That's the point. The timer facilitates that with less text and cleaner intention. That said, regarding your particular choice of replacement for the timer, I'd probably make manafont and fire III give the new stacks for Fire IV if used in AF and UI respectively, rather than create this awkward situation where you have floating stacks of it that you have to juggle through multiple AF windows or consume in some manner. Less abilities would need to be changed while still encapsulating the original intention, with the only weird additional case being able to move Paradox/Fire I anywhere within the AF window, or skip Fire I entirely unless you need the Firestarter proc. Though even that could be solved by giving Paradox & Fire I a shorter cast time so that there's a smidge of extra movement for using it.

[VentVanitas]

Gonna have to agree with Grimoire-M on this. The timers on BLM are a small but vital thing that facilitates its playstyle and gives context/purpose to a lot of its skills. Without them you'd need to create new purposes for a good portion of its kit that basically doesn't need fixing.

I play BLM specifically because of the sense of urgency that rewards your knowledge of fights and resourcefulness, more so than the other casters. Without them you're losing a lot of nuance that makes BLM what it is and I don't think it's worth losing all that subtle design just for some fringe cases where the timers screw you over.

[Taranok]

Just to be clear, do you mean to suggest, at least in some part, that Umbral Ice and Astral Fire should last indefinitely once you're in one, like a traditional Stance, eliminating literally just the timer but not the intended rotation; requiring an additional minor mechanism after the first Fire IV triplet wherin a Fire/Paradox enables a second Fire IV triplet? So that the rotation is Ice refresh time > Fire III > 3xFireIV > Firadox > 3xFireIV > Despair, which differs only from the practical rotation by the specific placement of the Firadox spell slot?

I could support this. The rotation would be effectively unchanged, but we wouldn't have to spam Umbral Soul between pulls or lose Affinity during a 16s zipline ride.

There are two subsequences to consider though:

1. Fire III (Triplecast) > Fire IV (Swiftcast) > Fire IV > Fire IV > Fire IV
2. Despair (Manafont) > Fire IV > Despair

There's a lot to break down here in this post, so we have to really look at it in detail.

First of all, you are correct. The problem with BLM's current rotation as detailed with AF/UI having timers is that the rotation has 0 structure. There's secondary knock-on effects to this, such as the uneven leveling experience and people not understanding what the actual rotation is without really deep diving the class.

As a preface, the goal of changing AF/UI timers is to not change the rotation the devs patently want out of the class, but simply to redefine how that rotation is structured and enforced. This is a very important distinction to make. As such, understanding this, there would need to be changes. You probably wouldn't be able to triplecast fire 3, it would still cost an arm and a leg and it's still one of the lower DPS things you can do in your AF3 rotation. Actually, outside of extending AF3's timer, fire 3 is in general a waste. It very slightly increases your average PPS over the course of your baseline rotation (ignoring Xenoglossy/Maim and Mend, and all oGCDs, fire 3 cast in AF3 is a pretty small potency increase, about 0.2 pps over your entire core baseline rotation, this would need a fix).

There is a way to do this, and you caught on to it. We can use umbral hearts to enable fire 4, and we can allow fire 1 or paradox (AF only) to give more umbral hearts. This is a way to restructure BLM to not need timers, but it has more consequences. For instance, do you allow umbral hearts to stack to 3 in UI phase only, but 6 in AF phase so someone could theoretically do Paradox->F4x6->Despair as your baseline AF3 rotation, or you force a strict F4x3->Paradox->F4x3->Despair? Part of the fun of BLM is, well, this being a choice.

In re: 1. You have to start the fire phase able to cast four Fire IVs or you lose a half second because a Swiftcast gets spent on a Fire/Paradox instead of a Fire IV.
In re: 2. You have to end the fire phase still able to cast Fire IVs but for lack of MP.
Simple solution: Fire III, Fire, and Paradox should grant 4 charges of Fire IV, and Despair should grant at least 1. Lose all charges on switching to Umbral Ice.

Personally I think that fire 1/3 blizzard 1/3 need a redesign as well. BLM is a class that's oddly broken in the same way Monk was broken. The core rotation is fine, but it has a lot of bad abilities in its kit. Nowhere is this more obvious than with the poster child for forgotten class abilities, Scathe. This is also why I laugh at anyone who claims BLM is a perfect class. No, it has a great core rotation, but it's pretty flawed when you get into the nitty gritty of it. However, this isn't the focus of the topic so I'll leave this topic here, as is.

Blizzard 4 should still give 3 umbral hearts. You should want to get this. Fire 1/paradox exclusively should give more hearts. Otherwise we run into a bizarre situation. We go into AF3->Fire 4 x3->fire 1/paradox->fire 4 x3->+1 umbral hearts->fire 3 proc-> we now have 3-5 umbral hearts and no MP to spend it. We want to maintain the core rotation, which means changing as little as possible while providing the structure, and fixing the things that are legitimately broken from this change either simultaneously or at a later change. The goal should never be to make the rotation more confusing.

EW actually presents us with an interesting mechanical solution to it. We can actually give Paradox (the mechanic) at a lower level. Not the skill, but the ability that maintains the skill. Spending Paradox can increase your umbral hearts stacks by 3 when spent in AF3. This can add to the confusion though, so it will need some work. We can consider making Paradox a replacement for blizzard 4 as well, but this just gets confusing and conflicts with it. The goal of removing AF/UI timers is to clean up the structure and drop out the skill floor without harming the core rotation or the core challenge of always be casting, but part of keeping the skill floor low is making sure new players can understand how to play the class without needing to read a guide.

• Blizzard, Blizzard II, Blizzard III, High Blizzard II: unchanged except Umbral Ice lasts until zone/death.
• Blizzard IV and Freeze: unchanged.
• Fire, Fire II, Fire III, High Fire II: Astral Fire lasts until zone/death.
• In addition to Astral Fire, the above fire spells also grant 4 stacks of (i.e.,) Astral Conflagration, to a maximum of 4. All Conflagrations are lost if you switch to Umbral Ice.
• Paradox under Astral Fire grants 4 stacks of Astral Conflagration.
• Fire IV requires and consumes Astral Conflagration in addition to its MP cost.
• As before, starting the fire phase with 3 Umbral Hearts means there is enough MP to cast 7 Fire IVs during the fire phase, but due to Fire IV's Conflagration cost, you can only cast 3 unless you spend one cast on Fire/Paradox to generate another three Conflagrations.
• Astral Fire is no longer timed, but MP is still a hard limiter for the fire phase. Failures now include
  • neglecting to cast Blizzard IV during the ice phase, reducing the MP available for Fire IVs even if you generate enough Conflagrations
  • moving too much, drawing out your fire phase over a longer timespan
  • casting lower damage / higher cost fire spells instead of the ones prescribed
  • casting Fire/Paradox too early, overcapping Conflagrations

So if you were bad, you could do:

(with 3 Umbral Hearts)
Fire III (AC_4)
Fire IV (AC_3)
Fire IV (AC_2)
Fire (AC_4)
Fire IV (AC_3)
Fire IV (AC_2)
Fire (AC_4)
Fire IV (AC_3)
oops no MP for any more Fire IVs, so Despair

or (still bad):

Fire III (AC_4)
Fire (AC_4)
Fire IV (AC_3)
Fire IV (AC_2)
Fire IV (AC_1)
Fire IV
oops no more Conflagrations, choose between casting Fire+FireIV+Despair or cutting your losses with an early Despair.

But the intended rotation would be unchanged:

Fire III
4414444, 4441444, or 4444144
Despair

The hard limit to your Fire phase is your MP, after all, and letting fire spells stack a additional charges of Fire IV wouldn't alone allow you to cast more Fire IVs in a single fire phase

An issue with this approach is you're adding more layers onto the rotation instead of keeping it clean. As we need to add an extra buff, instead of just piggybacking on things that already exist. Let's look at using umbral hearts to handle it in more detail. Due to this change, UH no longer reduces the cost of any AF3 fire spell.

Despair costs 800, and that's a good, odd number for a 10k mp cost. It's designed to work both 400 MP under (T3 at the end of UI3 without an MP tic) and also with. If we fix this MP tic issue it wouldn't be a problem, but that's not the issue with BLM.

So we want 8800-9200 MP, and to get 7 casts. 8800 / 7 = 1257 mp, 9200 / 7 =1314. On average, we need to get the cost of every fire spell under 1314 MP cost, whereas if we don't fix the UI MP problem, we need to be under 1257. This gives us a nice number, 1250, to work with. "But that gives you 8 fire 4s/fire 1s/etc!" Nothing should change in a vacuum.

With umbral hearts used as the exclusive means of enabling fire 4, and with the first fire 1/fire 3/paradox used while under AF3 giving you 3 more umbral hearts, we can only get 6 fire 4s. At this point, we need an MP cost for fire 1 that is above fire 4's cost but doesn't lower MP too much. So our rotation could look like this.

fire 4, 1250 mp x6 = 7500 MP total.

Fire 1/paradox = 1300 MP. Total cost 8800 MP.

Despair, 800 "all" MP.

All other MP costs kept as same for now.

1. Blizzard 3
2. Blizzard 4 (UH3)
3. Thunder 3
4. Paradox*
5. Fire 3 (9600/10000 MP)
6. Fire 4 (UH2) (8350/8750 MP)
7. Fire 4 (UH1) (7100/7500 MP)
8. Fire 4 (UH0) (5850/6250 MP)
9. Fire 1/paradox (UH3) (4550/4950 MP)
10. Fire 4 (UH2) (3300/3700 MP)
11. Fire 4 (UH1) (2050/2450 MP)
12. Fire 4 (UH0) (800/1200 MP)
13. Despair (0 MP)
14. Blizzard 3

*not used strictly on the opener, doesn't generate new UH3 stacks when in Umbral Ice.

In this way, you use Umbral Hearts to strictly enable fire 4, and design the MP costs to never change due to umbral hearts. You use fire 1/paradox to get more umbral hearts, and because of the MP cost values, if you have the extra MP, you can still cast a thunder 3 (400 MP) provided you start with 10000 mp, so that part of BLM's complexity is maintained.

And you can accomplish this by simply making UH required to cast fire 4, and give fire 1/paradox a paradox mechanic to generate UH3 at least at level 60. Again, maybe UH should be allowed to stack to 4 or 5 or 6, but should only be allowed to stack up that high in AF.

Benefits: This is a simple way to redo the class, is easier for new players to understand, and only requires a slight redo of a couple abilities beyond a specific new mechanic to enable fire 1/paradox to generate more UH stacks once during a rotation.

Drawbacks: What about manafont?

Ah yes, manafont. This would be easy to fix. Have it give 2600 MP. Below level 60 (without changing anything else), that's 2 more fire 1s, exactly as it is now. At level 60, make it give 2 more umbral hearts in addition to the 2600 MP. At level 72 (Despair), increase it to 3300 MP so it's enough for TWO fire 4s and 1 despair. This is purely to make it an additive mechanic instead of reductive.

Alternate changes: Your next 2 fire spells can be cast for free costing 0 MP, does not work on despairs. At 72: Additional buff: Can cast 1 despair for free.

Alternate alternate change: Your next 2 fire spells can be cast for free without any umbral hearts (works on enhanced flare as well!). -> 2x despair, 2x fire 4s below 72.

It really doesn't matter at this point how manafont is structured, any concerns with balance can be fixed by changing numbers as required later. The primary point is that it would need a change, but if we're already having abilities create UH stacks, we can just change this ability to fit within this refined structure.


This would then require changes to Sharpcast, Scathe, Firestarter, and Thundercloud, but that would need to be adressed in its own time.

As for the paradox mechanic: What I mean by this is, the buff that enables the cast of Paradox is a flag we can use. It is only gained from going from AF3->UI, or UI3 + UH3 -> AF (works with transpose, basically). When it is spent down, it's gone until the next transition, meaning that flag is useful for the purposes of creating a 1-time UH3 infusion into the rotation. It would require some additional programming as well as a trait to enable it slightly earlier, but most of the leg work is already in the game. It would 'only' need to be enabled sooner, give UH3 when spent, and then have a second trait later to enable Paradox off the same mechanic.

[Taranok]

Gonna have to agree with Grimoire-M on this. The timers on BLM are a small but vital thing that facilitates its playstyle and gives context/purpose to a lot of its skills. Without them you'd need to create new purposes for a good portion of its kit that basically doesn't need fixing.

I play BLM specifically because of the sense of urgency that rewards your knowledge of fights and resourcefulness, more so than the other casters. Without them you're losing a lot of nuance that makes BLM what it is and I don't think it's worth losing all that subtle design just for some fringe cases where the timers screw you over.

You will still have that sense of urgency, you will still be rewarded for playing correctly, as your primary challenge as a BLM is fundamentally unchanged. Your goal is to Always Be Casting, with a secondary goal of Conserve Movement Abilities to strategically Always Be Casting. The AF/UI timers basically function as your face hitting the ground after you've already tripped (no longer casting) and failed to catch yourself on the way down (use instant casts).

They are not part of the core rotation, and the only reason they insist on being part of the core rotation is because no one's dared to question if the reason the core rotation has the structure it does is a good foundation or not. My entire post is to say that the structure of the foundation of the core rotation of this class is absolute garbage because it's a mechanic designed back when BLM had more in common with the modern RDM rotation than the current BLM endgame rotation. That is, a proc-baiting caster class with (random) amounts of free movement. BLM has long since stopped being this class, and as with Summoner finally destroying the aspects rotting out the structure of its core rotation, it's time to do the same to the last legacy class that has a rotted core structure.

Remember, back when AF/UI was first created, transpose was a 15s cooldown, AF/UI timers lasted 8 seconds but were literally always up in AF as every ability except a T3 proc refreshed the duration. If it ever fell off for any reason, you had to cast into AF3/UI3 with F3/B3 but otherwise were instantly back at full power save for any loss of procs. This design is that old, and it's been piggybacked in HW to provide a weird structure to F4, piggybacked and expanded more in SB to provide Polyglot/Foul, and then further piggybacked and expanded again for Xenoglossy and Despair. And every time they've altered the rotation, they've had to extend the timer because the timer was too tight and made the class unapproachably difficult to play. It happened repeatedly in HW, happened in SB, and they did it pre-emptively in ShB for Despair. It's a legacy mechanic that is actively harming the class for new players trying to get into it, and provides little challenge as it is the floor that you need to climb on top of to literally play the class as intended. Once you're on top of it, you're finally able to actually play the class as intended and actually master it. That sense of urgency it provides, that baseline anxiety, turns players off as much if not more than it provides a buzz to players who love the threat of being kicked while they're already down.

And every time a class had a mechanic like this, it has been removed. Your rotation as a DRG used to shut down if you couldn't get a back attack. Imagine no disembowel or chaos thrust because you failed to land a positional. Removed in HW. BotD is literally a maintained buff. Imagine not having 30s of LotD because you dared to have 18s of BotD before going in. Removed in ShB (always at 30s), removed in EW (always have BotD). Imagine a boss mechanic locking you out from a fight and dropping greased lightning, the core structure of how you play your class. Extended repeatedly in HW, SB, ShB, with numerous abilities to try to maintain this buff. Removed. And as a result of removing it, the devs were allowed more freedom in restructuring the class itself.

These limitations don't aid the class design. They hinder and hold it back. Imagine a BLM free of timers where, instead of an underwhelming cooldown like Sharpcast, instead they get a cooldown that allows them to cast 1 spell for free, instantly, no matter what it is. It doesn't need to be this, but they could because it would no longer interfere with the AF/UI timer and disrupt the core rotational structure. That's something that could be done with such a change.

Imagine not needing to go spell speed because it provides safety (and damage), but now you can choose to do it exclusively because it makes the class more fun. That's the freedom this change can offer.

[waifugenerator]

BLM is the most well designed job in the game currently, and the skill floor is already being considerably lowered with the removal of enochian. Why do people want BLM neutered so badly? Making the most of your AF timer is half the fun.