Purpose of Mana For Most Jobs?

[Sjol]

circling back to my original point what's even the justification that it's on the oath gauge? It feels like the only reason it's there is because they can't think of putting anything intresting on PLD's gauge.

My guess is they felt like all the jobs needed a gauge of some kind. The Oath Gauge could probably be represented by cooldowns instead. That said, if every other job has a gauge, it becomes part of the player expectation and understanding of the game. Having the one odd-man-out job does become a problem. That said, I also think there's some jobs that don't really need gauges, but have them kind of shoehorned in. It's definitely an area for improvement.

[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.

[hagare]

to have xD

[Valence]

MP used to make perfect sense and was actually a huge gate to survival and fight stamina over time. It's somewhat funny to see people discussing it like it's hard to find uses for or balance it properly, when it used to do just that.

[Sjol]

MP used to make perfect sense and was actually a huge gate to survival and fight stamina over time. It's somewhat funny to see people discussing it like it's hard to find uses for or balance it properly, when it used to do just that.

And it could be used that way, but it seems that SE doesn't really want to use mana as a sustain system outside of rezzers. I know other games have used mana as sustain adding interesting choices to healing, e.g., by making big heals mana inefficient. It could definitely have a place, but SE doesn't seem to be using that strategy, especially with so much healing being oGCD.