BLM Post-Patch, and where to go from here.

[Ferrinus]

I've posted this elsewhere, but since I've broadly always played standard and never liked having to deal with mana ticks, I like the basic ideas behind the rework. Changes I really want to see are:

1. Button consolidation (F4/B4, Flare/Freeze, etc)
2. Remove Thunderstorm and just make Thunder spells castable whenever you're in astral or umbral state
3. Remove the Astral Gauge and display astral soul stacks on the main gauge instead (they can replace umbral hearts and first appear one by one then light up one by one)
4. Potency increases on HF2/HB2 so that they're worth casting in the AoE rotation even if you could hypothetically use transpose to skip past them

More elaborate mechanical changes I'd like:

5. Umbral paradox back
6. Flare Star becomes castable as soon as you drop to 0MP as long as you have at least 3 (4? idk) astral hearts and are still in fire mode. Its damage could scale slightly with your heart count but this would help to make sure you could finish even truncated fire phases with it.
7. Remove Scathe's MP cost and give it some new utility (health drain, timer refresh, something)