Hey if all ranged had cast times I'd be down. Honestly I'm of the opinion that casters should be casting more, although Endwalker's fight design often forgets it has players who don't have infinite movement options.

Personally I'm interested to see what the new caster is and what they plan to do. Cynically I see them moving in the opposite direction Lyth would like, instead of merging the ranged altogether (which I disagree with but I'm just a caster / melee main so I guess I'm biased :shrug they're instead gonna crack the caster role in half along the lines of "raise caster" and "damage caster."

In my ideal world raise is just removed from the role and damage is overall increased but that's because I think casters need to either be as mobile as phys ranged or do more damage, because otherwise they get completely dropped from meta as has happened for almost two entire expansions in a row. Heck even today you can see the most popular "caster" by far has no cast times basically, SMN's savage population totalling RDM's and BLM's combined. And when they keep designing fights like casters are all as mobile as SMN I can see why; Program Loop and Panto are absolute nightmares in TOP, Abyssos was relentless in its hatred of casters, and I can see a few mechanics in Anabeisos that would be frustrating but I got to melee this tier and lemme tell you its been blessedly easy as melee.

My other chief worry is that they'll keep adding insta casts to casters and making them more mobile, which if they all become as mobile as SMN instead of them kneecapping SMN and stealing their nikes, then yeah their damage should have parity with phys ranged. Like they currently do bar BLM I guess.