BLM needs a rework because of new content difficulty

[Ferrinus]

I'm not just talking about maximising your instant cast uses, I'm talking about all the other ways in which they've made the job harder:

- High Thunder can't be hardcast, so a long manafont fire phase can cause it to fall off

- High Thunder has such low upfront potency you lose a lot more damage refreshing it early, compared to throwing out an early T3P in Endwalker

These two complaints are in tension with each other. Is Thunder in danger of falling off, or is Thunder in danger of getting clipped? In the first place, Thunderhead rationing means that you're never going to have a proc burning a hole in your pocket and demanding to be used early by sheer dint of its own timer; you'll only feel the need to burn early Thunderheads for movement (I often find myself doing this early in Ex2, clipping like ~5 seconds of the dot) if you're completely out of other movement tools. On the other end, Manafont gives you the Thunderhead buff, so you'd have to Manafont when your Thunder's already run out, then Thunder, then spend a full 30 seconds in Manafont's extra fire phase, which on paper and with 0 Spellspeed should contain 27.8 seconds' worth of fire spells, and that's assuming you used your F3P instead of saving it. If you also had to dump a couple Polyglots, well... then your enemy's going to not have a DoT on them for like two GCDs tops.

These aren't catastrophic or even significant failures on the level of dropping Enochian, missing a Flare Star, or overwriting a Polyglot. They're just damage shortfalls that can be fixed by better planning and optimization. They don't make the job harder to learn or play at a competent level, they make it harder to optimize.

I should add that I think Thunderhead is a pointless mechanic and that it'd be better if Thunder spells could just be cast at will whenever you had astral/umbral status (to protect newbies from losing the Enochian damage bonus) but while Thunderhead does exist it doesn't increase the job's difficulty so much as constrain (but not entirely remove) your ability to make mistakes.

- Flare Star makes the consequences for missing an F4 much greater

- Flare Star is an additional 3 second long hardcast

This is true (Flare Star definitely makes the job harder to play), but is counterbalanced by instant paradox and guaranteed F3P. If you're just working on making sure you get a Flare Star every astral cycle, you will, thanks to those particular QoL improvements. When I miss a Flare Star it's usually because of a combination of being flustered by boss mechanics and having greedily spent all my triple and swiftcasts last astral cycle to try to save a few extra seconds of cast time. The job is hard for me precisely because my spellspeed is much lower than usual and because I'm aware of, and constantly trying to perform, optimizations that increase my outgoing damage at the cost of risking that my whole rotation collapses.

- If you mess up the end of your fire phase e.g. with an interrupted Despair cast, you can't transpose Para B1 B4 and then resume. You have to slowcast a B3 before you can get back to your normal rotation.

Para -> B1 is two GCDs' worth of spellcasting, while hardcast B3 is 1.4 GCDs' worth, and so gets you back in gear faster. It's less damaging than the now-impossible alternative, sure... but so what? There's no more damaging option. It's not somehow easier doing the first thing than the second thing (in fact I would argue it is harder as it requires more button presses and more game knowledge).

All this is to reiterate that it being harder to maintain hypothetical maximum damage isn't the same as it being harder to just maintain uptime or execute the job's basic mechanics consistently. The difficulty that veterans are feeling is not something new players are feeling, and being able to relax and compromise on things that you wouldn't have to do in Stone, Sky, Sea (e.g. using F3P on mobility and AF maintenance rather than saving it for damage every single time you get it) makes the job feel a lot more able to adapt to movement-heavy bosses.