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

[Daralii]

I was a SCH main in ARR. I know how the class played. The only reason SCH could even DPS the way it could was because Eos did the vast majority of the healing back then.

Nothing I said had anything to do with healers leveling in the overlord. I never mentioned nerfing their damage. I said that healers (implied: raid environment) should be healing, not DPSing. I didn't roll a healer to sit there and cast Medica 2 while spam Stone on a boss while healing with OGCDs. The design is absolutely stupid and a ton of people are and have always been unsatisfied with this design.

There are plenty of ways to do this. Give Medica 2 a cool down. Have more unavoidable damage. Nerf healing potency on OGCDs so healers have to spend more GCDs actually healing instead of pressing their DPS button. And addressing your first sentence: make healing spells cost more mana if they aren't going to reduce potency so healers actually have to pay attention to whether they should cast DPS spells or regen MP while strictly healing. Any of these, or some combination of them, would make healers less braindead.

Sage was built around DPS healing. Much like one of the reworks for Disc priest in WoW years ago along with Mistweaver monks.

You're making Kardia sound like much, much more than it is.

[Azurarok]

As far as I've experienced MP only really becomes a problem with healers when using high spellspeed builds without piety. Otherwise when PLD needs to spam Clemency, which only happens in emergencies.

I've been wondering though, would the 'relying on someone else' be so much an issue if we were able to make TP/MP positive/negative builds? At least under the premise that negative builds would be BiS in 8-man but relies on a phys ranged to properly help you refuel

[Shipp]

You're making Kardia sound like much, much more than it is.

By stating that Sage was designed mechanically to be a healer who actually heals by DPSing? I think not.

[Astronis]

I feel like the only job where I seriously notice MP is Red Mage.

I sure notice it on Dark Knight. Especially if I just died. I have a few ethers on hand for emergencies, and it's not for my casters.

[Amarande]

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".

Breaks down in dungeons because you can't be guaranteed you'll have one (part of the reason we see the modern MMO job paradigm where jobs are either super homogenized and/or never touch most of their kit outside the highest level content, is because with matchmade PUG finders it became an issue that was borne out super starkly with the WoW Cataclysm launch dungeon experience).

Alternatively, becomes too OP and mandates you have one (see also recent WoW attempts to integrate the support role and the Dragonflight Augvoker/Exodia debacle).

Unlike the TP users, who completely bricked roughly two-thirds into any long fight through no fault of their own and can only recover through outside intervention.

This may have been kinda intentional, as a vestige of an MMO era (whose most prominent example is probably the Rogue in Classic Era WoW) where you actually weren't SUPPOSED to be spamming out special abilities every GCD. Where there was more time between hitting special buttons and auto attacks had more of a role (and you could also socialize during combat, which is one of the things so many people miss lately).

As such, it's debatable if the traditional "point pool" is even pointful at all nowadays (where you are expected to do a GCD every GCD and the main purpose of resources is to serve as a more flexible take on fixed cooldown timers).

It really isn't just some legacy JRPG staple. It comes directly as a substitute for the way games like DnD limit how many spells you can cast between rests. It is there as a way to limit the casters to force smarter strategical play.

TBQH, in D&D it just ended up flat out weakening casters viz a viz physical fighting, except mainly for a window in the late single digits into the low-mid teen levels. Presumably by design because Gary Gygax actually had out and stated that the male human fighter was the ideal character.

It's time SE stopped catering to people who use this game only as virtual barbie simulator and start catering to the actual PLAYERS who don't just sit in Limsa while whining on forums constantly about how hard everything is in the game.

That would probably finish off the game altogether seeing that apart from hunters (who the servers literally cannot realistically sustain more than a few hundred of per world) and High-End Duty aficionados, there's been barely anything sustained to do in Dawntrail besides social/RP activities ...

I sure notice it on Dark Knight. Especially if I just died. I have a few ethers on hand for emergencies, and it's not for my casters.

I wouldn't be surprised if the game is starting to just not take deaths into account at all in content where skill is supposed to matter.

IE you're really not supposed to move forward from deaths so easily like that, you're supposed to wipe and pick up the team jump rope and start over from the beginning (consider how much content in ShB onward has either omega tight DPS checks, or body checks, or a different type of body check ie "if anyone dies during this mechanic they will explode and wipe the raid," or in some content variants restrictions on rezzing/being rezzed at all) ... so why balance jobs around the "just got up" state? That only matters in casual content, right?

[mallleable]

A thing they could do for healers is make it so that something like Swiftcast has little to no cool down. but has a noticeable MP cost.

[Mikey_R]

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?

From my experience, not many will give it a thought, which leads into:

I've been wondering though, would the 'relying on someone else' be so much an issue if we were able to make TP/MP positive/negative builds? At least under the premise that negative builds would be BiS in 8-man but relies on a phys ranged to properly help you refuel

This sort of thinking is fine if you are looking at groups of people that play together, where you can co-ordinate between each other. My MP restoration is coming off of cooldown, go nuts with your spells. However, once you come out of that scenario, the best thing you can do is manage your own MP yourself and just react if the phys ranged used the action or not. Your gameplay might necessarily feel worse to play just because you cannot do your bigger numbers, not to mention how the positive/negative rotations might operate can hinder how your job plays in the overarching rotation. To make a comparison old enmity combos. They done less damage and didn't generate resources to further enhance the overall rotation, which, in turn made them feel really bad to use, which is one of the reasons why the enmity combos were just bad.

To make an example for a caster. Imagine if Red Mage had, say Verblizzard and Verwater as replacements for Verthunder and Veraero. Verblizzard and Verwater does less damage, generates no black/white mana and restored some MP. Yes, I got MP back to allow more casts of the stronger spells, but it has pushed the generation of your main resource back, which means less of the spell blade combo. Now, you could make it so that they still generate black/white mana, but now you are in a situation where the only difference is damage and MP cost, it starts to feel tacked on and not that interesting for a mechanic that goes away if you happen to have a competent MP battery. Which then brings up the point of, your own MP management is now being handled by someone else, so that is a facet of your gameplay that is being taken away, which is the opposite of the intended goal, no?

Now, as with anything, different people have different thoughts, you might be someone who doesn't mind the above, you might have different ideas etc. However, when a simple question is asked, some might be surprised about how many different factors could seemingly come out of nowhere but nonetheless, they are important things to discuss.

And, if it isn't obvious, my opinion is that MP management should be more engaging on jobs, however, getting MP from an outside source would necessarily lessen the experience of playing that job.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

[...]and body checks do not challenge the healers at all, they literally bypass them.

A bit tangential to bring up: another thing is the community's perception over body checks in general. The one from my recent memory was also from P10S = missing the towers. PFs for some reason was so allergic to attempt any form of recovery whenever one or two tower exploded that they simply ran off to force a reset. It also took my casual static at that time to bake it into their minds to keep going even when that happened - it's fine, I and my cohealer can handle the mishap! Let us do our job gdi!

I'm sure there are more mechs out there that behaved like that, but alas.

[Shipp]

That would probably finish off the game altogether seeing that apart from hunters (who the servers literally cannot realistically sustain more than a few hundred of per world) and High-End Duty aficionados, there's been barely anything sustained to do in Dawntrail besides social/RP activities ...

I mean... if the game can't sustain endgamers and entertain them then what's the point? The game needs people doing content, not just playing dress up and afk dancing or playing music in Limsa. That's a very dire situation for the game if that's the only population this game should cater to from now on.

[Selsix]

I feel MP should have a use, but I am also tired of seeing the MP bar on jobs that don't use it considering you can't hide it. Like my mains are RPR/GNB these days, why do I have a useless MP bar clogging up my screen I can't hide?