As of Patch 7.2, the Black Mage’s Elemental Gauge got a smidgen of a change – where the timer was completely removed. I decided to continue my silly ‘Ticker Thingamajiger’ schematic with the change included.
Personally, I’m somewhat mixed on the change. One ear it’s a nice adjustment to make the class a smidgen more relaxed only to now worry about positioning for optimal damage in each encounter, which makes getting a Flare Star off at level 100 a lot easier. However, it kind of trivializes a major aspect of the class itself as well as ‘break’ the reason for abilities to be there to begin with. Firestarter doesn’t feel as necessary now as there’s not big reason to worry about refreshing the timer anymore. It’s nice to quickly flip between Umbral and Astral plus a damage burst in general when it proc’s, but… I don’t know, I kind of miss the timer now that it’s gone.
Something tells me that there’s going to be some more changes by or before 8.0 to give some of these abilities a more useful task – or they’ll just remove it entirely, which I hope doesn’t happen. Regardless, still love the class and will continue to for the foreseeable future as my main.