Having gotten to play a few levels of the new design by now, my immediate complaint is that it's a little jarring how short the umbral cycle is now, especially since you don't actually regain MP until after B4 or whatever's animation is over. This means that you end up fastcasting or transpose-firestarting when your HUD still indicates that you've got like 200mp to your name, which works fine but feels very weird.

The whole Thunderstorm mechanic also feels a little superfluous; if they wanted to guard against player error they could just make Thunder aways free and instant to cast but only usable under AF or UI.

I'm also wondering if going like F4-F4-F4-(swiftcast)Flare might not be a way to cheat a flare star out of a short/no-hearts astral cycle.