This is something that's irked me since 2.X, and I'm wondering if anyone else feels the same.

Currently, Bard and Machinist are the only jobs in the game that make heavy use of their MP with absolutely no innate way of recovering it. They have absolutely no way of increasing the maximum MP due to the way piety scales, and Ethers are out of the question in any serious content because you'll be using stat potions.


I just don't understand...why? At first I assumed it was because they didn't want healers to have infinite MP / dps to have infinite TP. Except...they already do. In almost all content I can think of a healer should not be running out of MP unless the party is dying or certain situations call for heavy use of AoE dps abilities (e.g Holy spam, but even then you'll probably have Assize up anyway if you're desperate for MP). TP management is the same as far as I'm aware; I very rarely see any dps/tank run out of TP and even in the scenario that they do, you can use Goad on demand, for no MP cost, outside of the GCD, with no cast time.

Both classes are already heavily disincentivized from using support abilities because of the dps loss, so I just can't understand why the MP usage for songs/promotion exists as an arbitrary way of limiting them even further.

The only possible explanation I can think of is that they didn't want Foe Requiem to have a 100% uptime, but there's far better ways of ensuring this doesn't happen than just slapping a large MP cost on it and calling it a day.

I just feel like everytime I try and enjoy the game I'm hit with stuff like this that - to be brutally honest - just seems more like bad design than anything else. If anyone can offer an explanation for this design I'm more than willing to listen because I don't want to start disliking the game, but as stuff like this becomes more and more apparent it's hard not to