it's doing that while solving mechs.
You do know that if you have to cancel a F4, it's not the end of the world, right? Yes, to achieve optimal damage, you need to know the exact positioning of every attack in a given encounter, but if it turns out that you're standing in an aoe, just cancel your cast, use a triplecast, and walk out of it.
The reason I'm on about it is because all the bluster about the job being complicated is generated by people who don't play it. Dropping enochian is something you want to avoid, obviously, for example, but people speak as if this dumpster-dives your damage and is unrecoverable. In reality, you press swiftcast, you B3, and you restart the rotation.
The main annoyance of the class was that its rotation changed every 10 levels due to passives, but that got fixed in Endwalker. Now, the core rotation is maybe nine buttons plus a few cooldowns every 2 minutes and you don't have to remember what level bracket AF->B3 still costs mana in.
In lines where you aren't using transpose, just use them in ice phase after B4, unless you think you'll need the mobility.
Everything you said just means we spend more time in fire phase across an entire fight (based)
Huh? No, it doesn't. You'll be spending the exact same time now as normal. Always having firestarter now just means that the ending of ice phase is more rigid - you must use xenoglossy here, because you need to then transpose and use the firestarter'd F3 (it gets the 1.4x AF damage boost without costing mana). Which means that the above, where I said that xenoglossy timing isn't that important, is now wrong and Xenoglossy timing is very important to the rotation.
For the base rotation, it means that the changes haven't altered anything about it. It's functionally the same as it always was, minus the one oGCD it had. Well, the first AF will be busier, actually, since you now need to fit in 3 F4s as well as thunderhead in that 15 seconds due to the changes. Which means for more casual players, the core rotation is now easier to drop enochian in.
wacky recovery ice lines that require lucid to prevent capping are a bug not a feature
See, someone said to me, "you should check out the transpose lines." And I had no idea what that meant, so I looked into them. And it was really cool to see the class's mechanics and abilities used in such a way - all for the benefit of cutting out B3 from the rotation in favor of paradox, meaning a net gain of a whopping 190 potency per cycle.
By removing this line, Lucid is now completely useless on the job, transpose is almost completely useless on the job, and there is no real benefit to removing Paradox-Ice for the base, easy rotation. You skip it in the base rotation unless you need the mobility or to stay in UI for two more seconds, because 500 < ( 310 * 1.8 ). This is a change that took something away from people who opted-in to a more complicated rotation, for no benefit to the people sticking to the baseline one.
