Quote Originally Posted by Taranok View Post
Welcome to Black Mage.
DT BLM has nothing to do with HW or ShB BLM.
Both had their own version of "short fire lines" and Sharpcast to deal with movement.
In fact, in HW, you'd sometimes hold the Enochian ogcd and let the one that was running (usually when the refresh was down to 20s) expire naturally to readjust when you'd re-enable it (since you could go into UI and use Thundercloud in ice to coordinate all this). HW BLM also had a damage steroid, so you'd also do that to setup your buff phase.
ShB had a different version of short fire lines, be it ones using Transpose or skipping Blizzard IV to go for a quadra Fire IV > Despair or penta Fire IV > Despair AF cycle under Ley Lines.
People act like this was some ground-breaking EW tech, but this sort of manipulating the length of your fire lines was present for 6ish years of post-ARR BLM.
SB was the closest to DT, but you incurred no penalty for cutting AF early.
This isn't some "great design problem that's been here all along". This is a new design problem brought on by the crappy DT changes, the Flare Star system, the removal of Sharpcast, etc.
Hell, I remember in HW using Sharpcast for mobility and being able to decide if I wanted to refresh AF early (Fire IV > Fire > Fire IV x3) or late (the opposite order of the aforementioned fire line). You could also "drop" AF after pressing Blizzard III because, as long as the spell went through and you got UI, it didn't matter as Enochian wasn't tied to AF/UI at all.
You're comparing very different realities of the BLM job.