Quote Originally Posted by Kabooa View Post
To be quite honest, I don't think any of FF14 has any room for MP management.
MP hasn't mattered for a while, no, but I don't see why that would indicate that XIV, conceptually, has "no room for" MP management, even if present circumstances haven't left room for player agency via that mechanic.

there might as well not be any MP costs on damage spells.
While I agree with this, if not for an awkward further way of punishing Spell Speed, there is already, effectively, no MP cost on damage spells. They're net-MP-positive, though the passive MP generation in that equation includes a button's worth of bloat (Lucid Dreaming) that can lead to some rather wonkily uneven punishment for death.

Consider: If damage spells truly cost nothing, and MP gen was adjusted accordingly, you'd just have, in effect, less MP gen during true downtime (nothing to do whatsoever, such as between fights in dungeons) and lower maximal healing resource.

Now, just as far as personal preference goes, I'd rather go the opposite way, making MP an actual mechanic (rather than simply removing it for its being a pretense on 80% of jobs).
  • Remove Lucid Dreaming, as it's mere variable death punishment in ways that provide no further agency (outside the very rare occasion that you're some 5s from its CD refreshing and know you won't survive to claim its benefits).
  • Have it tick per-player instead of on a global tick, matching player GCD speed.
  • Give MP-consuming actions scaling costs. The less MP one has, the less those actions cost but the less potent they become. Players cannot be starved out of action, but they can certainly be badly starved out of power. It's damn near impossible to drop below 50% MP as anything but a healer, though, without having died. (A rez, for instance, might always consume just 30% of your current MP, though to a minimum of 10% of maximum, but would thereby restore an ally with that much more/less health and mana based on MP thus consumed.)
  • Replace Weakness and Brink of Death altogether with just... MP's potency-and-cost scaling. Having rezzed with almost no MP, they're badly potency-starved. This also gives more relevance to rez caps in general as, the lower healer MP gets, the longer, effectively, the penalty lasts.
  • Return to variable MP maximums, rather than a consistent 10000 MP. Players would still regain MP as a percentage, but that in turn curtails non-healers' rezzing capacity without having to rely on CDs or the like.
  • Finally, if we wish, we can give MP cost to healing abilities, giving more reason (burst healing aside) to perhaps hold onto them and to, from the time, actually use GCD heals.