Quote Originally Posted by BillyKaplan View Post
Most of what people have said so far still rings like it needs to burn too many cooldowns just to maintain my mp. Lightspeed is anemergency button in my book and the mp cost cut on it ties in with what it should be used for, but it feels wrong to use it just for the sake of MP management. Burning Essential Dignity to get the cooldown on it down feels wasteful as well.
And nothing brought up in this thread negates the main point that AST's mp management is still locked heavily behind RNG, and many points brought up here are basically 'well if you get lucky it will all work out well'.

At the end of the day, the reality of the matter is that when I run BLM, it's the ASTs I have to Mana Shift before any other healer (used to be SCHs, but they changed them since), and that's in dungeons, raids, or the extremes I go into.
It depends .. if you are talking about a 2 healer setup and need to mana shift an ast, who is using CDs and such, it means they are HARD CARRYING and you should be doing that regardless. (or people are dying repeatedly) I also did run a DF once where a whm never used assize, so yeah it is CD management. I been in many situations where I am the only one raising people, sometimes the one doing most of the healing + raises while the other healer is being a DPS bot mostly.