Shadowbringers RDM Wishlist

[Archwizard]

RDM is ONLY using spells that cost 360 MP, 480 MP for each dualcast and 600 MP after each melee combo, with no mana recovery part of their rotation. They can be expected to Mana shift and Raise. So yeah, they need something in their kit to fix the MP costs (either through a regen or a Thin Air like ability).

... and we can be assured that in the current circumstances, a Thin Air-like ability would be primarily saved for Verraising, since that's the fastest drain on RDM's MP if we can LD the main rotation.

So, either we use the compromise of gaining a cost-reduction CD for our primary rotation (which would most likely be used right before the Verfinisher if it lasts into the main combo) while also removing the MP cost from Verraise outright and putting it on a cooldown like Jonny said -- bearing in mind our costs are already a fraction of what other casters have and it seems part of the intent of the melee combo is to give us scant seconds to recover MP (... before our biggest cost) -- or we advocate some form of direct MP recovery purely to sustain the rotation, allowing us to save Lucid Dreaming for emergencies such as Verraise spam or death recovery.

I find the latter solution both simpler and more elegant. Besides, Mana Shift's recovery is based on the MP consumed, so a cost-reduction skill would either have no benefit or weaken the skill.

Given the rough example number of 4-5 minutes without Lucid Dreaming or downtime, we expend about 20-25% of our MP per minute of combat assuming 1) we don't Mana Shift or Verraise and 2) our average MP expenditure doesn't jump up in Shadowbringers.
Now on the one-hand, we could aim to break even during the course of our rotation. Napkin math says this could mean increasing our base Refresh rate by about 1-1.25% of our max MP every tick, or (assuming 40 seconds to the melee combo with an extra combo every other Manafication, coming out to 7 combos every 4 minutes or 1.75 combos/min) about 11.5-14.3% of our MP every melee combo -- bearing in mind that while SMN gets 10% back per minute with Aetherflow, they also can choose to sacrifice DPS in a pinch using Energy Drain to recover an additional ~9% per cast.
On the other hand, we don't necessarily need to break even, we just need to reasonably last through the encounter. At half those numbers, we theoretically double our uptime without LD, and at two-thirds the sample we triple that uptime -- and that's all assuming the fight has no downtime of its own for base MP recovery, which virtually no encounter longer than 5 minutes is lacking in.

[Mansion]

Snip.

Yes, I'm assuming we are keeping Lucid Dreaming too, so we can either pair it up with a "Thin Air", or have those two options when things go bad.

I'm more keen to have a MP recovery within the RDM kit and not necessarily in the rotation (my original suggestion was our unenchanted melee combo), based on the fact that we would keep Lucid Dreaming. They could do as you suggest and implement it within the rotation too.
Every way could work really, either have it as another CD that you can use onfly for MP refresh (as Lucid Dreaming's agro drop can save lives sometimes), have more MP, have less MP-expensive spells... just anything that gives us MP back on top of Lucid.

[Archwizard]

I'm more keen to have a MP recovery within the RDM kit and not necessarily in the rotation (my original suggestion was our unenchanted melee combo), based on the fact that we would keep Lucid Dreaming. They could do as you suggest and implement it within the rotation too.

Which is why I've lately been favoring an MP recovery that is based on the damage of our melee skills.

Having MP recovery based purely on our unenchanted melee gives us MP on demand but encourages bad play, not to mention there are times when we are locked out of the unenchanted melee.
Having MP recovery based purely on our Enchanted melee gives us the ability to upkeep our rotation and guarantees it won't be a consumer in ShB, but requires a massive MP investment before we can go about recovery (which is inconvenient in Verraising/MShifting and impossible after reviving).
Having it based on both however, with a higher value on our Enchanted melee, gives us the best of both worlds -- the ability to recover a sliver on-demand just to get started, while still encouraging our Enchanted melee combo for primary upkeep. A full Enchanted combo has a potency of 970 (before Verfinisher, which has an MP cost itself), while an unenchanted combo is 510; giving about 1.18-1.47% MP per 100 potency would allow the main combo to break even over the course of a fight, and our unenchanted combo to give 6-7.5% MP per use for when LD isn't available.
Even making it so the unenchanted combo recovers 4-5% MP per use would allow the main combo to sustain us through a standard boss duration assuming we live the whole time and don't need to Verraise or MShift, and give us enough MP to kickstart our rotation instead of waiting around for 20 sec after reviving. And in such small numbers, we still maintain penalties to Verraise spam since we would have to hit the combo 3-4 times before we can cast from 0, while still being relatively comparable to SMN in terms of recovery. (And if that's too much, they can always put a short CD on our melee skills, which I half-expect to happen anyway with the removal of TP.)

All these numbers assume that our ShB rotation doesn't accelerate the rate of our melee, of course, which I find unlikely but possibly evened out by increased MP expenditure anyway.

I personally favor saving LD for emergencies since as you said, the aggro drop can be equally as important as the MP gain. (Granting, I would also much rather have the enmity drop be folded into Diversion...)