Can we make Lucid Dreaming Optional?

[Recon1o6]

I'm in favour of scrapping it in favour of unique mp recovery, its yet another avenue to undo homogenisation and fix healers

unlike most posters im in favour of mp management being something to learn. At minimum, the basic attack (glare/broil/malefic/dosis) should all cost 0 mp to encourage a freshly raised healer to do something productive while lucid is coming off cd. Basic competence is managing your mp, this is hammered home in the conjurer questline. Smart play shoudl allow mp positive and enhanced gameplay

Lucid can be returned to whm as shroud of saints at level 24 and have it get a trait at later levels where it instantly generates a lily or it can consume a lily to generate double mp. Right now whm overcaps lillies in some duties because there is so little damage and the gcd is better spent on refreshing dia and dropping an ogcd heal and struggles with mp between cure 2 and getting lucid since cure 1 is tapering off in usefulness but cure 2 is expensive.

For sch, i concur with selene having an mp restore, and her other ability should be a silence fitting the "Eos to sooth and salve, Selene to Support and Silence" bit of sch's lore that forms the core of the fairies.

As for astro, well this was one of the strong points of the unique cards- despite what parsers like to pander around the ewer was a great card. it could give yourself a decent recovery of mp, the rdm get back on their feet or back into the game after a verraise and you could always burn it for an aoe card later. Not to mention slapping the bole on the tank meant you didn't need to use as much healing on them indirectly saving mp.
It also had another ability called luminiferous aether. Lucid dreaming but with an enmity reducer, very helpful for your tank. Them scrapping LA and then the Ewer was what caused launch ast to be as bad as rdm when it came to bleeding mana.
Astrodyne is already having an mp restore every time you trigger it come 6.0 plus the excellent draw-gain 800mp

LA replacing lucid dreaming. How about grants the effect of noct sect for the duration of its mp restore- give back more access to the shields that were unneccessarily stripped from it for a pure/barrier split that doesn't actually exist. Alternatively have it consume a card drawn or astrodyne seal. Either of those can directly allow smart play to get the full 3 seals.

Sage can easily have an mp steal attached to any of its attacks.

[AnotherPerson]

Will disagree with the removal of Lucid, Lucid dreaming is basically a MP recovery skill for all caster jobs other than Black Mage, which can easily translate between different caster jobs and build muscle memory to use it earlier (healers included). Sure, you can change it, but that's just adding more work for the same MP economy gameplay than what we have currently for balancing issues since now SE would have to redesign all the healer's MP again to accommodate for this difference of gaining an extra 3500 MP over 60 seconds at lower level content as well. How is that not more punishing for new players compared to a skill that comes up frequently enough and just needs one button to use? It's a lot more simpler to just add a new skill or adjust existing ones to cover for the MP imbalance that currently exists between healers instead.

That's not to say these new skills that affect MP management can't be synergistic to the toolkit.

Finally, Lucid Dreaming also acts more akin to a safety net for less experienced players. People would complain that they're not using Lucid Dreaming often enough that they're running out of MP... but I've also seen the number of people who doesn't use Aetherflow or Draw on cooldown - which equally affects their MP economy. Removing Lucid Dreaming actually makes things worse since there's an even heavier emphasis on using your job's skills to do it, and less ways to manage your MP right by drawing experiences of other jobs you played with.

I don't think it's very possible to make Lucid Dreaming "optional" in that sense, because the skill would have to be drastically weakened to put more emphasis on the healer's MP toolkit themselves. In the end, that just moves the problem over to the healer's toolkit themselves. MP will never be crazily high since they also have to balance high-end content like Ultimates to be fairly taxing on MP too.

Plus, as a role skill, it means this skill can also be used in content and instances under level 24, and not strictly in content above it. It's actually a lot more lenient at lower levels as a result when you are level-synced since most newbies would overlevel as a result of Road to 70/ Armoury Bonus / Food buffs / Roulette / MSQ compounding on each other. This is also true with other role actions like Rampart, Reprisal, and Arms Length.

However, I will agree that there is quite a clear imbalance on AST and WHM in MP currently on paper, so hopefully that'll be adjusted. I just don't think removing Lucid Dreaming is the right way to go about it, or rather it's not the core of the MP imbalance problem.