Frustrations with BLM immobility

[Taranok]

Hard disagree about the timers being bad design. What is it about the timers you think need adjusting? Or what would you propose to replace that aspect of their gameplay? I'm curious because I have really fond memories of HW blm where we had TWO timers to juggle so the current iteration already feel streamlined to me. I don't want the job changed to appease people that do not play the job. They should absolutely do more to communicate to players how to learn a job but unifying every job to some nebulous standard fit has already caused way more problems for job identity health than it has solved. See tanks, healers, 2 min meta dogma.

Alright, starting from the top.

• It is an old ARR design element that has been coopted into a primary structural mechanic.
• As an ARR element, it almost exclusively existed to buff fire 1 damage/enable ice regen.
• Because of complaints about cDPS having 'static' rotations (my speculation,) the devs wanted to add rotations to the classes moving into Heavensward. Summoner got the very badly designed (for the time) Dreadwyrm Trance, Black Mage got fire 4 at level 60.
• The timers at this point were coopted into structuring the AF3 rotation. It is why you don't cast fire 4s, effectively. Note, my complaint with timers is not that it forces you to cast something other than fire 4. The standard rotation as of EW would have you cast 6 fire 4s, one paradox, and 1 despair regardless of timers existing, because paradox is higher DPS than fire 4.
• Going back even to ARR design, but also including level 60+, people still don't understand how fire 3 and fire 4 fit into the rotation, with fresh to 35 black mages regularly chaincasting fire 3, and fresh to 60 either chaincasting fire 4 until they drop AF/UI timers, or sometimes never casting fire 4 outright, because of the timers. Yes, I have seen people like this and told them they should be using fire 4. This translates into: "Players don't understand how the rotation works, and timers as a structural mechanic fail to convey the intended rotation to players." This by itself is worth completely throwing them out.
• The timers eat up a significant amount of bar space. Transpose and Umbral Soul are mechanically redundant. No, I don't count GCD vs oGCD in this case. Blizzard 1/fire 1 are redundant. Fire 4 and blizzard 4 are redundant. Fire 3 and blizzard 3 are only not redundant because you use them to swap between rotations and start up the rotation, at least post 35 (another problem of the class.) Freeze could be deleted and no one would actually care provided blizzard 2 had freezes functionality.
• The timers restrict what the devs can actually add to the class. There's a reason why the core rotation hasn't seen anything significant added since HW's launch. It got despair, polyglot, and paradox on the UI rotation, that is it.
• Because the timers are such a poorly designed structural component, it adds in 'nonstandard' rotations like hypermeme, which are in many respects mandatory to learn now. These all represent significant design problems by themselves as it becomes very difficult or impossible to design a class when people use nonstandard rotation. See summoner in the HW era. The devs even keep trying to fix it, yet keep failing.

Timers massively ramp up the skill floor of the class, don't touch the skill ceiling at all beyond meme rotations thatr shouldn't exist, make the class exceedingly difficult to understand, nevermind play, especially in high-end content like savages and ultimates, restricts future job growth, eat up a ton of bar space, and especially now, make the class so unapproachably difficult to play that the playerbase is actually abandoning the class. Or, to put it another way, the timers are the reason that black mage's DPS spread is "Almost literally the worst DPS to bring," all the way to "Literally the best DPS to bring." Having a range in numbers that large is, by itself, awful design since it means the skill ceiling is very far apart from the skill floor, and the skill floor itself is also astronomically high.

Just like Monk lost greased lightning, but gained masterful blitz, Black Mage needs to lose timers and gain an actual structure with a core class gimmick that isn't something that other classes should also enjoy.

Timers are a mechanic that date all the way back to 2.0, and it's time they were thrown out and replaced, with the class brought up to the same standard as other jobs.