Purpose of Mana For Most Jobs?

[Sjol]

MP represents your aetheric reserves, and at this point in the story it's clear that there's basically no job that doesn't rely on aether to function. In a perfect world, this would mean that every job would be designed to use MP as a core gauge in it's gameplay - each interacting with it in some manner thematic for that job.

In practice, it's easier to just design jobs from scratch with their own bespoke mechanics and resources, instead of trying to balance them around a single resource shared by everyone. This means MP has become vestigial over time, much like TP, with only the healers and small number of other jobs using it.

There's no doubt that it's a flavour fail, what we have is just a compromise needed to presumably streamline design development for the game. The answer is as simple as that.

PvP had an interesting use of it, and I was happy they could make it work, but MP has very specific mechanics which are hard to make use of. Even BLM had to basically rewrite their mechanics through Astral and Umbral states. I do think that MP only works well when lots of things pull from it as a shared pool or it's limited to a single cross-job shared concept like how they did with PvP.

I think MP works for healers, especially when attached to heavy penalty spells like Raise. I think it can sort of work for casters, but even there it's not really used much. Of the Ranged Magic Jobs, outside of BLM I don't even really think about MP as much as number of Fire IV casts. It has a little more play at lower-levels, but max-level BLM definitely doesn't make you think about MP as its normal mechanic.

[Eraden]

PvP had an interesting use of it, and I was happy they could make it work, but MP has very specific mechanics which are hard to make use of. Even BLM had to basically rewrite their mechanics through Astral and Umbral states. I do think that MP only works well when lots of things pull from it as a shared pool or it's limited to a single cross-job shared concept like how they did with PvP.

I think MP works for healers, especially when attached to heavy penalty spells like Raise. I think it can sort of work for casters, but even there it's not really used much. Of the Ranged Magic Jobs, outside of BLM I don't even really think about MP as much as number of Fire IV casts. It has a little more play at lower-levels, but max-level BLM definitely doesn't make you think about MP as its normal mechanic.

Is TRUE! Mao worries abouts timings rather than Mana, so Mao can gets max amount Fire IVs off during rotation. Is why Spell Speed so importants to BLMs.