How Could We Make Meaningful Use of MP?

[Acidblood]

Okay so to be clear, you are saying that using MP to cast certain buffs/debuffs would then give reason to reduce the cooldown of the skill? Because I am not seeing how giving some skills an MP cost would allow them to be cancellable, unless you just mean they could be recasted and therefore have their timer reset.

The design of those abilities would to be altered so they could be toggled off (think SCH Aetherpact) ... the reduced cooldowns are to allow flexibility, as MP would now limit how often / for how long they could be used (i.e. their uptime). Note: Remaining cooldowns / activation costs are to prevent abuse (e.g. rapidly toggling the ability on and off to line up with individual big hits).

It might also worth thinking about making the songs last as long as you have MP rather than on a timer as they have been so far. Make it like Foe Requiem used to be as that was somewhat of an interesting way of doing it

That would be how Troubadour works... I didn't want to alter BRDs personal gameplay too much though, with the exception of making the song cooldowns shorter so the BRD has more choice about which song to play when, but still requiring some planning / fight knowledge.