Quote Originally Posted by RegentP View Post
What should Melee do with MP?, I have a few ideas about how I could incorporate MNK, NIN, and DRG MP usage to 4.0 but what is it you feel these 3 Classes need most.
MNK used to use it to sustain their 'Fists of <element>', and NIN could easily have gone a route of using MP for its Ninjutsu and needing to use different poisons to drain MP vs. TP/HP, but I can't really see anything as playing into DRG apart from an alternate means of Blood of the Dragon (which would then be massively buffed by Ballad) or its jumps more generally. Or, at least, I can't imagine any other obvious uses. I feel like mana could be used to further manipulate a more flexible version of certain internal mechanics (chi/chakra/greased lightning on PGL/Monk, for instance), but it's not like what we have hasn't been working just fine for the stat systems and distinct job boundaries we have now.

Quote Originally Posted by Alberel View Post
The same question could be asked of why casters have TP bars. The resource bars are for your character, not your job. Everyone has the same resource pools and make use of different ones depending on their current job.
Especially when there's no need for a double full-length sprint in combat. Short of that, one will always regain the whole to 60% of Sprint's duration over the previous Sprint, making the TP restriction irrelevant to casters. I guess the question is simply whether or not your character should be making use of all its resources on every job or not--or, more aptly, whether there's any advantage to doing so, in terms of both raid contribution and smoothing out certain mechanics via a more analog resource (though it would then of course come at additional opportunity cost for mana-spending cross-class skills).