Melee DPS and MP

[Connor]

I get wanting them to do something like this; it’s annoying having a bar stuck on your screen that has no relation to the job.

That said, MP really only seems to exist now to limit caster raise spam and for Black Mage’s mechanics (since the core is about moving between fire/ice for mp management). Ranged DPS have no use for MP in any way, Summoner only ever runs out of MP if it’s spamming Raise, and I believe the same applies to Red Mage. Black Mage has always had infinite MP.

Personally, I do like there being variety between a playstyle where you have to manage your MP, and ones where you manage job gauge resources instead. It could risk making jobs feel weird to play or restrictive if they had an MP cost for things like weaponskills.

Even in terms of healers, the vast majority (all) of your healing is done by oGCD instant abilities with no MP costs. Unless you’re going crazy with Raises, you’re never going to run out of MP unless you go out of your way to spam something expensive like Adloquium or Aspected Helios.

So even on jobs that do use MP, it’s management consists entirely of ‘use Lucid Dreaming off cooldown’. The entire mechanic may as well not be there (except for BLM) and in terms of how the jobs play very little - if anything - would actually change. I honestly can’t think of any situations as a healer where I’ve had to say ‘ok I should use Physick instead of Adloquium because it’s cheaper MP’, because the answer is always ‘use neither and just use Lustrate because it’s better for DPS’. And this applies to all three healers. ‘Why would I ever use [healing spell] when I can use [healing ability] instantly and for free’? The result is that healer jobs, where you’d expect some degree of MP management, can just ignore their MP bars and focus on maximising DPS output over any kind of efficiency management (choosing the right heal for the right time etc).

This applies less in extreme cases where a large amount of raises are needed, but I’ve honestly found that pretty rare outside of 24-man content in the first week or two after release