How Could We Make Meaningful Use of MP?

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Originally Posted by Acidblood

BRD – Song effects can be extended to party members, but cost MP to maintain. Song cooldowns reduced to 40s, with a 20s shard cooldown. Troubadour changed to apply current song effect to nearby party members, costs 1000 MP to activate and 600 MP per second to maintain, 8s cooldown on both activation and deactivation.
Song effects are:
Mages Ballard slowly restores MP (except to the BRD).
Army's Paeon reduces damage taken by 10% and slowly restores HP.
Wanderer's Minuet increases critical hit chance by 5%.
BRD regains MP via Refresh, which is changed to only work on the BRD. Battle Voice changed to also pause Troubadour MP usage, duration reduced to 12s.

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It might also worth thinking about making the songs last as long as you have MP rather than on a timer as they have been so far. Make it like Foe Requiem used to be as that was somewhat of an interesting way of doing it

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Originally Posted by HumanNinjaToo

Okay so to be clear, you are saying that using MP to cast certain buffs/debuffs would then give reason to reduce the cooldown of the skill? Because I am not seeing how giving some skills an MP cost would allow them to be cancellable, unless you just mean they could be recasted and therefore have their timer reset.

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The design of those abilities would to be altered so they could be toggled off (think SCH Aetherpact) ... the reduced cooldowns are to allow flexibility, as MP would now limit how often / for how long they could be used (i.e. their uptime). Note: Remaining cooldowns / activation costs are to prevent abuse (e.g. rapidly toggling the ability on and off to line up with individual big hits).

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Originally Posted by jrmswell

It might also worth thinking about making the songs last as long as you have MP rather than on a timer as they have been so far. Make it like Foe Requiem used to be as that was somewhat of an interesting way of doing it

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That would be how Troubadour works... I didn't want to alter BRDs personal gameplay too much though, with the exception of making the song cooldowns shorter so the BRD has more choice about which song to play when, but still requiring some planning / fight knowledge.

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Originally Posted by jrmswell

It might also worth thinking about making the songs last as long as you have MP rather than on a timer as they have been so far. Make it like Foe Requiem used to be as that was somewhat of an interesting way of doing it

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I'd suggested back when we first heard about the SB changes to come that they use increasing drain rates over use, which diminish back to the normal drain rate over time without use.

For instance, if I opened with Wanderer's Minuet, it'd start off depleting my MP more slowly than I gain it, but would rapidly decrease to a loss and a increasingly steep loss with further time, until it'd bottom out my MP after about a minute. So, I'd tend to swap around 30 seconds in, restoring MP at a decreasing rate over the first 15 seconds, then losing it at an ever-increasing speed again, until I'm forced to swap off again. So, by the time I finish my first song, the penalty on the first is gone. You maintain the rotation, but with an MP bar's worth of flexibility, allowing you to effectively bank duration and make more flexible use of downtime.

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Originally Posted by HumanNinjaToo

Okay so to be clear, you are saying that using MP to cast certain buffs/debuffs would then give reason to reduce the cooldown of the skill? Because I am not seeing how giving some skills an MP cost would allow them to be cancellable, unless you just mean they could be recasted and therefore have their timer reset.

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I would assume it'd be because the core ability or abilities (where mutually exclusive and/or alternated, such as through dynamic MP costs) would have MP drain costs, and that drain would end up cancelling the buff, such that you can refund the remainder of the buff, having effectively only wasted some portion of the initial activation cost.