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People are people. They'll find reasons to complain regardless. If something doesn't get replaced by something more powerful (as is the case with Elemental Staves), people complain about stagnation. If new items aren't clearly better but simply offer alternatives, people complain that it's all sidegrades. If new items clearly obsolete old ones, people complain about there being an arms (tied to the purchase of a new expansion) and that all of their hard work in the past has been wasted.

There is no way in hell they would be adding the merits suggested in the OP. Nor should they.

Yes. As someone who's soloed damn near every nm that's possible to solo, i can assure, it wouldn't make nearly as big a difference as you might think. Honestly, soloing doesn't really require very much mp. Bind is 8 mp for 20-40 seconds. Utsu is zero mp. Slow is 15/45 mp for 2-3 mins. Para is 6 mp for average 1-2 mins? ss is 29 mp every 2-5 mins (or less, depends on the fight obviously). Unless you're taking some ridiculous amounts of damage (even suzaku's firaga spam is fairly easily manageable with decent fr/mdb gear, and i doubt there are any other soloable mobs that would deal more damage than suzy) and need to spam cures, mp is hardly even a factor. Even with just 4/tic refresh, the only times i ever ran low on mp is when i didn't accurately consider how much mp i had, and how much time was left on vert, and i nuked more than i should have.

The only real difference an extra 3/tic refresh would have on soloing, is it would speed it up, as well as allow less skilled/geared players to successfully solo harder nms.

Oh, it would make nw solo much more realistic for rdm. As it is, with a very good nuke build, rdm can already pull it off, but it does still require a fair bit of luck with portals. With 8/tic refresh, rdm could probably beat it about as often as a good blm does now (which can be upwards of 50% of the time i'd estimate).

3/tic refresh would however make a big difference for blm solo. To go back to the nw example, a good blm could easily win every single time without fail, regardless of how unlucky they got with portals with 4/tic refresh. It would definitely open up a few more possibilities for them as well.

Edited, Oct 22nd 2009 3:57pm by ThePsychoticOne