When is it worth to use entchanted reprise?

[Rongway]

I have our potency per mana number at ~9.2 (depending of course on recast), the difference in our numbers being accounted for by you considering the time spent not gaining mana as a cost of the melee combo, while I do not. Admittedly, my calculations for this were built on doing it the same way as in Stormblood, when we only had one melee option to even remotely consider. However, I'd still argue this: it does not make sense to consider the time spent not gaining mana as a cost of the melee combo, because there is no other reasonable thing that you would spend that mana on. You are, in effect, saying that the melee combo is weaker because it is taking away time that could be spent toward building up another melee combo - the logic is somewhat circular. I'd be interested to hear a counterargument, as this would of course totally reframe my work!

You are quite welcome to argue that, and I think that's the popular view of it.

My reasoning is that we calculate the relative potency of the melee combo based on the potency of the spells that could have been cast during that time. Why then wouldn't we also calculate the relative cost of the melee combo based on the mana that could have been generated by those spells? Mana would have been generated during that period; it matters not that the melee combo is the only reasonable thing we have to spend mana on (in a single target scenario).

When examining just the melee combo by itself, reasonable arguments might be made that the cost is really just the 125 net loss from the three weaponskills. However, in almost all contexts where we're examining the worth of a point of mana, it's to compare the melee combo to Moulinet, and now Reprise; and in those contexts it is important that we consider the mana that we could have generated in addition to the mana consumed, because the lost mana generation does meaningfully affect how soon we can execute the next melee combo, or the next Moulinet spam with cooldowns.