It's time to ask again: what's MP for?

[Kranel_San]

Bring back the RPG in Final Fantasy again.

[Azurarok]

is this about making phys ranged a meaningful role that's not caster but easy?

[Mikey_R]

I feel like the only job where I seriously notice MP is Red Mage. After doing my rotation for long enough, I realize I need to press Lucid. I can't think of any other jobs where that's the case. Maybe occasionally healers, but they all have actions that restore MP naturally if you don't press Lucid.

Every single Caster (Except Black Mage) and Healer has to use Lucid Dreaming to stay MP Positive, though it takes longer for a caster to bottom out that it does a healer, even before we consider the MP costs of GCD healing.

However, I think the bigger question is, what do people actually want to change? SB, every healer/caster had Lucid Dreaming, it is just that the timings about getting the optimal use out of it was tighter.

We can talk about how ranged physicals could be MP batteries, but you cannot guarantee on having an MP battery, so should MP management take it into consideration or not?

Even Mana Shift wasn't really utilised, unless it was the Black Mage casting it, for the sole reason that Black Mage effectively had infinite MP, but in the current system, it wouldn't work as well as you would need to cast an extra Blizzard 4.

What if a job had another side combo/rotation that restored MP? isn't that basically Black Mage at that point? The dreaded homogenisation rears its ugly head, so that's out of the question.

So what sort of system do people actually want.

[Absurdity]

I don't think there would be any particular issue with making MP management relevant if there was a failsafe to prevent mistakes from completely bricking the job unless you carry around super ethers.

Like if there was a GCD button that recovers some MP per use, so there's still consequences for messing up but you also don't become useless for an extended period of time (like MNKs in HW were 2/3 into a long fight without getting Goad).

If only there was a support role that could restore MP (and TP lol) for the entire party...oh wait.

However, I think the bigger question is, what do people actually want to change? SB, every healer/caster had Lucid Dreaming, it is just that the timings about getting the optimal use out of it was tighter.

As someone who played a low piety Astro in Stormblood, the timing wasn't just tighter. I needed to make sure Lucid aligns with buff extensions or actually make use of the dreaded Ewer to stay MP positive.

We can talk about how ranged physicals could be MP batteries, but you cannot guarantee on having an MP battery, so should MP management take it into consideration or not?

You are almost guaranteed to have a phys ranged in the few pieces of content where you are likely to run out of MP.

I also don't think it's the end of the world if bad MP management just results in a failure state.
We had that before and it didn't burn the game to the ground.

is this about making phys ranged a meaningful role that's not caster but easy?

Not exactly, but it would certainly help if the "support" role had more support than "I make you do a bit more damage every 120 seconds".

[Valence]

To the people that mentioned difficulty, that's not about adding difficulty or removing difficulty, that's where the devs chose to put difficulty, which is a bit of a nuance.

[Mikey_R]

You are almost guaranteed to have a phys ranged in the few pieces of content where you are likely to run out of MP.

I also don't think it's the end of the world if bad MP management just results in a failure state.
We had that before and it didn't burn the game to the ground.

Someone can correct me if I am wrong, didn't play many casters back then, but as long as you kept on top of your Lucid Dreaming, you didn't need the MP Battery to maintain MP, unless you were helping healers/RDM/SMN with the MP cost of raising, or extending Bard's Foe's Requiem.

Which is the point I was making. Should a job be able to fully manage MP themselves? If not, what considerations need to be made for such a system to be implemented? If there was a role that provided MP, should it be for use to allow the caster to do their rotation or should it be for those times where MP drain is higher due to raising? This is also with the consideration that whilst the chance is highly likely that you will get an MP battery, that still isn't a guarantee. I still remember cases where the healers were struggling with MP due to the number of deaths, but there was no Bard or Machinist to help with the MP problem. So, whilst it is unlikely, it can still happen.

These things aren't necessarily a black and white issue, different people are going to have different opinions on what they want, what these thresholds would be etc. But this is also where the interesting discussions happen and out of it comes ideas in how to flesh things out.

[Valence]

It depends of the back then. In HW most casters would run dry of MP for different reasons:

- DPS casters like SMN (not BLM obviously) had to manage MP because Ruin 3 costed 1300 MP (unless under Dreadwyrm were it was MP neutral or something because divided by 10). Still a good SMN would use Ruin 3 sparingly but still use it over a player only keeping it for Dreadwyrm, because it was more DPS.
- Healers could run out of MP very fast because they didn't have a lot of OGCD abilities like today and the ones they had were... less potent usually (notably the healer bubbles, SCH didn't do anything else than mitigate for instance). Also tanks and other roles were unable to self sustain as well as today either and required more intervention.

It's in Stormblood that they started alleviating this, and realized that all the MP aids they had in the game (either rphys or manashift) were getting superfluous already, although SB definitely would make a lot of raiders of today wince because rotations were still not always MP neutral, quite literally so.

Either way to answer the question I do think that MP sustain should be a consideration put over scrappy based gameplay rather than just the neutral rotation of an individual job in a vacuum. HW did this pretty well in dungeons for instance, as such that the worse the party performed, the more it would be straining on resources for everybody, especially the healer. That's what made me love playing healer back then in storymode dungeons of all things. Holy was also steep on MP and had to be managed carefully. Having MP support in such a context becomes more of a boon than a binary pass or fail.

[Aidorouge]

Someone can correct me if I am wrong, didn't play many casters back then, but as long as you kept on top of your Lucid Dreaming, you didn't need the MP Battery to maintain MP, unless you were helping healers/RDM/SMN with the MP cost of raising, or extending Bard's Foe's Requiem.

Which is the point I was making. Should a job be able to fully manage MP themselves? If not, what considerations need to be made for such a system to be implemented? If there was a role that provided MP, should it be for use to allow the caster to do their rotation or should it be for those times where MP drain is higher due to raising? This is also with the consideration that whilst the chance is highly likely that you will get an MP battery, that still isn't a guarantee. I still remember cases where the healers were struggling with MP due to the number of deaths, but there was no Bard or Machinist to help with the MP problem. So, whilst it is unlikely, it can still happen.

There's also the issue that even if you have a job that provides a MP battery, how many players will actually use it outside of coordinated hardcore content anyway? I barely use Tactician and Dismantle on MCH as-is because every situation I could have was either:

A. Nobody was going to take enough damage for it to be necessary/the tank-group mits already took care of it.
B. Somebody was going to take too much damage/die anyway for it to help anything.

So what are the odds that even if they gave me one to use that it'll either sit there gathering dust because the content doesn't call for it, or by the time the content does its too late to matter? Physical range already has the lion's share of useless role actions without giving me yet another one.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I'd love to have MP management back once again. Since I'm a ShB baby, I don't have any experience from HW or StB MP management. The only thing I could talk was using Lost Seraph Strike as any healers in Save the Queen while trying to minimize the amount of Ether Kits used. It was definitely fun to figure out how it was possible to not use any in ShB days as a WHM (TA cd at 2m back then), or only 1 per boss at most on other healers. Or learning when to NOT use it because I want to fulfill my primary role when the group struggles. Honorable mention also, the addition of Chainspell (when used not under Ordained). LFoM is debatable as it feels like you -have- to bring ether kits which is more of a binary check than a spectrum. Another thing that all these actions has in common is they're optional. No one would scream at you if you can't be a top DPS as a Glare Machine Gun despite that being not an esoteric knowledge. In fact, you are more likely to ran into players who prefer their WHMs to heal than dps despite their monstrous dps potential.

Yeah, gimme something similar, or adjacent to that. Whether it's to support or to dps.

[IOwn92FCHouses]

The only thing stopping 90% of causals (derogatory) from spamming medica 2 and pretending they did a-ok in content is mana costs. Removing mana will legitimately make the game (even) worse. Sorry, it'll have to remain in place.