Using items during battle

[Chiz]

While I'm all for using items and trying new ideas that can help in combat, I don't think the game's current implementation of items makes this a viable solution. I also don't want this game to force you to become a walking apothecary just to perform basic actions like self-healing, self-buffing, self-statusing when there was already a viable solution in-place with the Armoury system pre-1.18. Having to carry a variety of meds will only make the already bad inventory management system worst.

Here's the biggest problems I have with the current item system:

1) Amount restored per potion is relatively weak. An Ether restores 50MP, A potion restores ~200HP. slightly more for HQ versions. I don't think anyone is going to be farming Ahriman for +3 pots for that +25 MP or whatever you get for +3, and I really doubt Alchemists would put the effort in to HQ when they can make and sell +3 glue for 1m a pop.

2) Long cooldowns per use. I think its 2-3 minutes before you can use another potion of the same type. If this was cut down to 1 minute, or the effectiveness of potions was increased, it might be more viable and worthwhile to carry and use potions.

3) Clunky method of using items, with far too many button presses for minimal benefit. I'd much rather spam a macro for Cure, or Second Wind II, or Siphon MP II for far better benefit/gain. You can get around this a bit by making a macro to pop a pot using /item "name" <target>, but I'm not even sure I would burn a macro slot for 50mp. Improvements to the inventory UI would also help here, like perhaps adding inventory Quickslots for MP and HP potions that were always visible and could be either clicked or hot-keyed.

Adding more powerful potion recipes or increasing benefit of each potion as you suggested would certainly help, but I really don't want to get back to a situation where any potion worth a damn costs a lot of gil, is [rare] tagged limiting # you can carry, and can only be dropped from NMs/chests like Vile Elixirs in XI.