Is lucid dreaming good?

[Jin-]

I need it as a red mage

[Bsrking5]

Actually no. Lucid Dreaming restores gradually up to 3500 MP, Manafont restores 3000 MP instantly. Ergo, they serve different roles. Removing one in favor of the other also means that the devs have to go back and rework Black Mage so as to accommodate the fact that a job skill is now a role skill by giving the Black Mage a new job skill that also relates to Black Mage's MP. OR the alternative being Black Mage just doesn't get a level 30 Job skill if the devs don't want to actually fix the void that is created in this manner.

The better alternative would be to simply buff the potency of Lucid Dreaming so it gradually restores more MP.

This is how I know you aren't thinking about in term of engagement and design. Its MP gains isn't the issue, its how it works with everything else in the jobs. Which is it doesnt have any interaction with anything else basically.

Manafont as it is now can be used a dps gain, or wasted if at full mp(or in ice form) or before ice spells are free to cover a MP mess up.

Its basically the devs saying casters need to take a nap because its too easy, heck thats what the name implies. Thats not very WOL to nap in the middle of battle, thats warrior of darkness talk!

[Esmoire]

No, I don't think it's good, but it's not really a Lucid Dreaming problem. It's an MP problem. MP as a resource could be made more interesting. It is most interesting on jobs like DRK, which more or less treat it like another job gauge but at least it feels exciting to have.

I do think, if anything, maybe Lucid Dreaming should be a trait that activates when you yourself are revived to give you MP over time, but not immediately. I think MP costs should be taken off of really garbage things like Cure 1, and the basic healer attack spells should either not cost MP but perhaps even restore it. Then MP costs should be on some of the oGCD abilities, based on their power, cooldown, etc. Every expansion they keep adding more and more and more free healing which is just stunting the merit of MP, when instead MP could be just like CD time as a lever to balance things.

RDM should just not use it for attack spells and have it for their support stuff or something. It feels stupid to be using Lucid Dreaming just to recuperate the MP I've spent on the offence.

[Bacent]

This kind of feels like a troll post.

[Eloah]

It's an okay skill, but it depends on when it's being used, casual content, hard-core, low-level, high-level, it varies. For instance SCH use to have high MP costs since it had the best MP management, but because of the changes that were made, their MP management is the lowest now, especially at early levels, where Aetherflow use to be. So having Lucid Dreaming supplements that change. AST use to have MP issues, but with the recent card changes it's like they over tuned it. For the most part the skill is acceptable, but if you think about it, it can highlight a few alterations that SE could stand to change. Like what skills should be considered role actions, looking at you Sleep, and an introduction to role traits. Though I'm guessing having job specific traits are easier to code.

[Shougun]

I think they've honestly done a fair bit here.

WAR stands out as a tank with it's above par regenerative mitigation, PLD has it's support knight fantasy (even if clemency is really not used, cover/intervention exist), DRK has TBN & Dark Mind to set it apart and GNB has a really decent mixture.

There are nuances that make some better than others at things at a high end (PLD's lack of inbuilt sustain on it's combos makes it worse at holding a boss) but there is usually give and take where the tank with a weakness gets a strength to help counter this (PLD has situationally the best immunity, amazing flexibility in it's ranged dps phase and works as an OT who only occasionally holds the boss).

I think if they develop these distinct flavors much more we'll wind up with two main tanks and two off tanks even more than what we see now, and then the complaints will just be "why are the main tanks so similar" and the like. Right now at least tanks as a whole still have some variety left kinda.

Now healers.... x_x

Certainly everything in moderation . I want to stress I was talking about role actions though, like not "sentinel vs vengeance" but like Rampart. The tanks are in a pretty nice spot in where you can play any tank you want yet they have a different vibe from each other in terms of play.

On role actions though- Rampart is the exact same name, animation, and stats for all tanks. Sentinel and Vengeance while preeeeettttyyyy similar still differ in some ways (obviously vengeance being better here, but those differences add flare to each job while not being 'unbalance-able'). Other skills like that differ sometimes more (like clemency vs aurora vs nascent flash). I would prefer that all the role actions get parsed into their jobs, even if they end up being preeettttyy similar. That's all.

So like lets say Low Blow, the stun for each tank, rather Paladin just keeps Shield Bash (with some changes for balance), Dark Knight gets Low Blow, Warrior gets Threatening Shout, and Gun Breaker gets Sundog (or something lol). Each stun while roughly offering some similar concepts would have their own twists, sometimes that'd just be name and animation other times it would be more. Like for each you could imagine twists that make them similar in the pinch scenarios that demand closer balance yet in a general aspect have their own sort of flare (like the tank's cures vs the tank's dashes, etc).

Even in the most bland case scenario we're talking tank's ranged attacks (Shield Toss vs Tomahawk vs Unmend vs Lightning Shot). Would you honestly prefer that all the tanks have the same ranged attack (via a role action)? I think most would say no. Even though it's pretty much literally the same spell cross the tanks, it's at least better that the spell fits the job "better". But you could likely imagine some light 'seasoning' to the ranged moves that doesn't do too much beyond some flavor (perhaps some nice niche cases, but designed in such ways that those cases don't destroy the important balance of end game content).

I understand role actions come from the whole ex system we used to have of cross class skills but at this point I find the role system to be the appendage that just lowers identity and being a transparently budget friendly solution to balance (don't have to make new skills). In the truest form of the cross system it was like having a sub job, pretty cool but very hard to balance. At this point it's non-optional sharing, role system is just the low development cost abilities SE gets to hand out. Maybe somewhere in there is the argument that "if it's not called provoke for all jobs you wont know to provoke" but that sounds a bit sad lol- might as well say all tank stances should be called the same else tanks wont know to turn it on to tank. At the point a tank doesn't know to turn on their tank stance because it wasn't called Iron Will on their Warrior I think they were a lost cause to playing their job right anyways. . . . XD.

So to be clear I don't support removing role actions because I just want less things I get to do, no.. I am for removing them so jobs can get spells that better fit their identities, even if it's just very superficial thematics, and in the lucky opportunities that they can add flare to each skill then even better (so a the superifical gain would be ranged tank attacks, meanwhile the more different examples would be like tank dashes or cures).

[ADVSS]

Certainly everything in moderation . I want to stress I was talking about role actions though, like not "sentinel vs vengeance" but like Rampart. The tanks are in a pretty nice spot in where you can play any tank you want yet they have a different vibe from each other in terms of play.

On role actions though- Rampart is the exact same name, animation, and stats for all tanks. Sentinel and Vengeance while preeeeettttyyyy similar still differ in some ways (obviously vengeance being better here, but those differences add flare to each job while not being 'unbalance-able'). Other skills like that differ sometimes more (like clemency vs aurora vs nascent flash). I would prefer that all the role actions get parsed into their jobs, even if they end up being preeettttyy similar. That's all.

So like lets say Low Blow, the stun for each tank, rather Paladin just keeps Shield Bash (with some changes for balance), Dark Knight gets Low Blow, Warrior gets Threatening Shout, and Gun Breaker gets Sundog (or something lol). Each stun while roughly offering some similar concepts would have their own twists, sometimes that'd just be name and animation other times it would be more. Like for each you could imagine twists that make them similar in the pinch scenarios that demand closer balance yet in a general aspect have their own sort of flare (like the tank's cures vs the tank's dashes, etc).

We had exactly this in HW. I honestly dont know why rampart was put in, except for WAR since foresight was their skill, and arguably worse. Shadowskin for drk was basically rampart but looked and sounded cooler. Low blow (drks stun at launch)had a chance to refill on a parry, warrior had brutal swing, and paladin had a gcd stun, and not 2 stuns like they do now, for whatever reason outside oGCD timing is way better for a stun than a gcd in the middle of a combo but they could just make shield bash like low blow and no need for a cross role skill at all. Provoke is literally the only skill they needed to give tanks initially, which forced them to make gld their secondary class for the job. Arms length is pretty good though, it could stay definitely as only pld had bulwark and neither tank had anything like that barring WAR holmgang.

TL;DR - I got no idea why they did what they did for many(not all) cross role skills. They often contradict themselves, by just making more work for themselves For instance, renaming Shield Oath to Iron Will, when they didnt change other tanks stances names or sound effects, while basically making them what they are(removing the damage penalty)

Edit: Correction, Iron Will was the knockback skill, Bulwark just gave a high shield block rate.

[Kewitt]

All depend on whether you want your healers to add to the DPS numbers..

[MOZZYSTAR]

Not sure if others mentioned, but Lucid Dreaming also helps shake off enmity. I don't know if there's any other other skill that lessens enmity for healer/mage classes (though maybe that doesn't matter withtanks being able to get and hold aggro easier now).

[Limonia]

Healers without MP wouldn't really work, or you could spam Raise or AoE heals endlessly. That's something that should be limited I think. So it's fine on healers, because they need something to be able to heal if they have to raise others a lot or get raised themselves and oGCD heals are on CD.

For caster DPS, I would either give them the same treatment as other DPS by removing MP for them, and make raising need some other kind of resource maybe.
Or I would at least remove Lucid Dreaming from them and make BLM's Manafont their new MP CD, because Lucid Dreaming is useless on BLM anyway.

Generally, I would remove MP from the jobs that don't use any, and for those that use it I would like the MP bar to be able to be placed separately from the HP bar as well.