MP Regen

[Anonymoose]

My defense of MPR comes from all areas except how it pertains to doing my job, as backwards as that may sound. There are two places consideration could be placed:

(A) The Battlefield: As I stated earlier, instant restorative abilities are necessary for melee, they can't stop fighting for any reason. A mage can afford to, whereas if it's on a Leve and things are going well, or during a large fight where another mage would likely have it covered for the time it took to refill.

(B) Movement: This is why I think MPR is an absolute necessity. When a group is moving quickly between groups of mobs, be it in a random party or on a level, a melee regenerates to full between sets, going into each battle restored. A mage, however, would be entering a new fight in the same state they left the last - which I think puts it at a disadvantage. Those who compare MP management to FFXI are leaving out the part where running around without kneeling between battles would screw a melee over just as badly as a mage.

I don't think it's so much hand-holding, but an attempt to make this game much more fast-paced than we're used to. It's not just the regens and cooldowns taking less time, it's also the battles, the movement, and the progression. HP now comes from being passive, a kneelheal you can move with - and kneelheal restored MP as well. Speed is of the essence; sandbox MMOs are out of vogue, but trying to find a balance between repetition and driven content doesn't have to be inherently negative because it negates a timesink, which somehow, people confuse with difficulty.

MP management skills can still be forced on us, but it doesn't have to come from taking away any ability that doesn't require us to stand there and do nothing for so long that if we wanted to do anything else we'd fail at it. I'm very nervous about demanding that until the alternatives have been absolutely exhausted.

As for Mages being able to solo open field NMs... RDM? As long as a mage can avoid being decked in the face enough to die, it can win. It's always been that way. Even to compare with FFXI, the solution wasn't to nerf the job, change MP, or buff mobs -- it was to balance gravity's recast beyond it's effectiveness by just enough to ensure the mob got in enough hits that if you were solo, you were dead - and people were too busy bitching over the rest to get any movement going on that - which is exactly what I'm hesitant to allow to happen here.