Quote Originally Posted by Mansion View Post
RDM is ONLY using spells that cost 360 MP, 480 MP for each dualcast and 600 MP after each melee combo, with no mana recovery part of their rotation. They can be expected to Mana shift and Raise. So yeah, they need something in their kit to fix the MP costs (either through a regen or a Thin Air like ability).
... and we can be assured that in the current circumstances, a Thin Air-like ability would be primarily saved for Verraising, since that's the fastest drain on RDM's MP if we can LD the main rotation.

So, either we use the compromise of gaining a cost-reduction CD for our primary rotation (which would most likely be used right before the Verfinisher if it lasts into the main combo) while also removing the MP cost from Verraise outright and putting it on a cooldown like Jonny said -- bearing in mind our costs are already a fraction of what other casters have and it seems part of the intent of the melee combo is to give us scant seconds to recover MP (... before our biggest cost) -- or we advocate some form of direct MP recovery purely to sustain the rotation, allowing us to save Lucid Dreaming for emergencies such as Verraise spam or death recovery.

I find the latter solution both simpler and more elegant. Besides, Mana Shift's recovery is based on the MP consumed, so a cost-reduction skill would either have no benefit or weaken the skill.

Given the rough example number of 4-5 minutes without Lucid Dreaming or downtime, we expend about 20-25% of our MP per minute of combat assuming 1) we don't Mana Shift or Verraise and 2) our average MP expenditure doesn't jump up in Shadowbringers.
Now on the one-hand, we could aim to break even during the course of our rotation. Napkin math says this could mean increasing our base Refresh rate by about 1-1.25% of our max MP every tick, or (assuming 40 seconds to the melee combo with an extra combo every other Manafication, coming out to 7 combos every 4 minutes or 1.75 combos/min) about 11.5-14.3% of our MP every melee combo -- bearing in mind that while SMN gets 10% back per minute with Aetherflow, they also can choose to sacrifice DPS in a pinch using Energy Drain to recover an additional ~9% per cast.
On the other hand, we don't necessarily need to break even, we just need to reasonably last through the encounter. At half those numbers, we theoretically double our uptime without LD, and at two-thirds the sample we triple that uptime -- and that's all assuming the fight has no downtime of its own for base MP recovery, which virtually no encounter longer than 5 minutes is lacking in.