Quote Originally Posted by Galvuu View Post
This isn't aimed at you, more of a general sentiment, but you also definitely don't need the mana tick tracker- you need to be a bit less aggressive at the start, but you can mentally time your ticks fairly well after a while for slower gcds and 75% of the lines don't even need precise tick tracking anyway, esp if Lucid is off cd.
I don't think this scans. If you don't need precision 75% of the time, then you do need precision 25% of the time, and doing something "fairly well" is worse than doing it "automatically". I barely used nonstandard lines (I'd skip B4 and just cast solid F4s->Despair if I knew that Hephaeustus was about to do his mixology mechanic or something) but a high enough Spellspeed actually made it important for me to worry about mana ticks anyway, especially if I wanted to do the Transpose->Firestarter trick consistently. Sometimes I'd shift into ice mode with an enemy those Thunder DoT still had a lot of time on it and no polyglots, which meant that maybe I could, or maybe I couldn't, gain ~0.15 of a Fire III by transposing between Paradox and my next spell. Should I do it? Sometimes I guessed right and sometimes I guessed wrong and sometimes I chickened out of taking the risk and sometimes I actually hung for a second, watching my MP, to see if I could get away with it, which I'm sure cost me DPS on its own. If I'd just installed a simple third-party utility, I could have gotten these questions right every time.

The analogy I would make is to a hypothetical BLM that does not actually show you how many seconds you have left on your Astral or Umbral timer. Could you play without that information? Yes, you'd still develop a pretty good feel for how many things you need to cast relatively quickly. But you'd really be feeling around in the dark if you wanted to do the most basic tricks and optimizations, like using Swift or Triple to cheat out a Despair when you had like 1 second left on the clock.