Quote Originally Posted by Ferrinus View Post
I know that Manafont is strong, I'm saying that structurally it's condemned to suffer cooldown drift no matter how strong it is because it's never a right move to cut your astral cycle short to manafont faster. It'd be like deliberately standing in an AoE every 120s in order to wring maximum value out of Manaward. 80s Manafont would be a huge buff to BLM, but it would still drift, because you don't finish an astral cycle every 80s on the dot. Manafont is worth more than two uses of Triplecast combined... but not if you use it every 100s on the dot, because in that case you'd occasionally be bringing yourself up from 4400 MP to 10000 MP, or casting Despair when you still have 8400 MP, or something. You only get the most potency out of Manafont if you let it drift sometimes! So do you want more potency per second, or do you want your HUD to display more simultaneously ticking ability cooldowns?

I think you're right that simply adding a second charge would be the easiest way to preserve the power of DT Manafont while eliminating or at least minimizing cooldown drift. But the cooldown drift is not necessarily a problem in itself because Manafont is not a conventional burst ability.

I'd like to point out that I agree with you that Manafont isn't a burst ability, it's just a damage cooldown, hence you do want to avoid drifting as much as you can since you don't care about aligning it, just maximising the number of uses.

I agree with most of what you've written here, I would just like to state that it's SE that created this problem by massively increasing the power of Manafont, while at the same time removing the tools we could have used to prevent it drifting.