Bard / Machinist and MP Management

This is something that's irked me since 2.X, and I'm wondering if anyone else feels the same.

Currently, Bard and Machinist are the only jobs in the game that make heavy use of their MP with absolutely no innate way of recovering it. They have absolutely no way of increasing the maximum MP due to the way piety scales, and Ethers are out of the question in any serious content because you'll be using stat potions.


I just don't understand...why? At first I assumed it was because they didn't want healers to have infinite MP / dps to have infinite TP. Except...they already do. In almost all content I can think of a healer should not be running out of MP unless the party is dying or certain situations call for heavy use of AoE dps abilities (e.g Holy spam, but even then you'll probably have Assize up anyway if you're desperate for MP). TP management is the same as far as I'm aware; I very rarely see any dps/tank run out of TP and even in the scenario that they do, you can use Goad on demand, for no MP cost, outside of the GCD, with no cast time.

Both classes are already heavily disincentivized from using support abilities because of the dps loss, so I just can't understand why the MP usage for songs/promotion exists as an arbitrary way of limiting them even further.

The only possible explanation I can think of is that they didn't want Foe Requiem to have a 100% uptime, but there's far better ways of ensuring this doesn't happen than just slapping a large MP cost on it and calling it a day.

I just feel like everytime I try and enjoy the game I'm hit with stuff like this that - to be brutally honest - just seems more like bad design than anything else. If anyone can offer an explanation for this design I'm more than willing to listen because I don't want to start disliking the game, but as stuff like this becomes more and more apparent it's hard not to

I don't think we need to recover MP. Regeneration of MP/TP is used heavily on new trial and raid, because not everyone is used to them yet. Healers will over heal because they don't know 'when' to heal yet. Players will die while learning. A9S is a fight where TP is mandatory because there is no rest. By no rest I mean the boss does not jump or fly or go invulnerable. DDs are moving from boss to adds and from adds to boss none stop for 7 to 10 min. It eats up their TP. Of course with better gear they will speed run this fight and kill it faster without the need of TP.

While learning the fight, regeneration of TP/MP is very important. Nidhogg extreme is a fight were I had to burn my MP on healers due to other players dying. But hey, in the end that MP saved the run and we got a clear. You're very valuable with those abilities. Not forgetting the dps buff MCH and BRD give. Giving TP and MP are very situation dependent. For example, even if healers had 85% MP but the boss can not be targeted, you pop MP for them. Full MP bar is better than 85%.

Our MP bar is there to help other players when needed or in BRD case give Foe. So I don't see why we need to recover MP.

You must not raid much if you think people don't run out of TP.

TP management becomes quite important when you're doing a fight that lasts nearly 10 minutes with minimum breaks. Especially when AOEing is involved.

A healer can easily run dry on MP if they aren't good at managing it. Too many AOE heals deplete it quickly.

Honestly, in all but serious raiding, you never need to recover someone's TP or MP because the content isn't hard enough for it.

Easy fix for your problem...bring a good AST, have them throw on the Ewer onto you while you have a song up. The Ewer seems to completely cancel the MP loss from the song, so you can keep it going for a lot longer. And if your song just ended and you need the MP, that same card will throw your MP back up pretty fast. In terms of MP, BRD and MCH are the equivalent of NIN and Goad, you can help everybody else but yourself with the problem your move fixes.

If you could stack enough Piety on Bard so that MP regained is equal to MP loss from songs, you would have infinite MP. That means you could have infinite Foe Requiem uptime. On Bard, you have an opportunity cost of buffing caster damage, restoring MP, or restore TP. If you could have 100 percent uptime for all songs, that would provide overwhelmingly strong utility.

I wish SE would make up their mind and decide whether or not Bard is a support job or a damage-dealing job. They keep removing utility away from Bard and giving more utility to pure DPS jobs or tanks. Imagine if Bard had the old Rain of Death, Battle Litany, Shadewalker, or AST buffs.

Bard is just a badly created support job with an equally abhorrent battle design.

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Originally Posted by lulunami

If you could stack enough Piety on Bard so that MP regained is equal to MP loss from songs, you would have infinite MP. That means you could have infinite Foe Requiem uptime. On Bard, you have an opportunity cost of buffing caster damage, restoring MP, or restore TP. If you could have 100 percent uptime for all songs, that would provide overwhelmingly strong utility.

I wish SE would make up their mind and decide whether or not Bard is a support job or a damage-dealing job. They keep removing utility away from Bard and giving more utility to pure DPS jobs or tanks. Imagine if Bard had the old Rain of Death, Battle Litany, Shadewalker, or AST buffs.

Bard is just a badly created support job with an equally abhorrent battle design.

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Bard is dps and supporter in one classe and thats good how it is. You lose mana for the reason that you don't have 100% uptime of songs otherwise it would be way to much with playing the songs all fight long.