Quote Originally Posted by Ferrinus View Post
This is the crux for me. I've always more or less played BLM like this; I remember the introduction of "cursed"/"hypermeme"/etc. rotations in Shadowbringers that involved weird transpose and lucid trickery but that would result in a hypothetical ~1 percent damage gain while actually becoming vastly more vulnerable to disruption from any required movement. I think I'm only realizing now that the EW equivalents not only preserved or improved your movement but made you more mobile rather than less.

If they want to crank the numbers up on BLM damage, great, but I appreciate the challenge of figuring out when to use my movement tools for damage vs. when to actually use them for movement (and it feels good when those two coincide). Umbral paradox specifically returning would be a nice way to fill out the ice phase a little, but it'd also be an ease-of-play buff, and there's such a thing as a job being too easy.
I don't have a problem with ShB style nonstandard coming back. The issue is that we don't even have that. We don't have any way to easily shift the alignment of the standard rotation loop versus the fight, beyond choosing AF3 F3p vs AF1 F3p or doing some stupidly cursed things with Lucid Dreaming. So you have LESS agency than in Endwalker when it comes to utilising those movement tools.

I also don't get why people think baseline BLM play needs to be harder. It already had the biggest skill gap of all the jobs in Endwalker. In a world where all jobs were in HW/Stormblood design and all of them had ways to mess things up, sure, maybe you could argue BLM could be more difficulty. But we're not in that world, we're in the one where melee uptime is nearly free, hitboxes are still huge, positionals are getting taken away, and mechanics still have you running back and forth across the entire arena. This isn't Eden's Promise any more.