[Zerohawk]

Alright, where I'm still fairly new to the game. (Heh, been playing it rather lightly since NA release, but with college havn't had time to play much.) This hadn't realy came up much. Most of the partys I have been in consisted of all NAs still getting things down themselves. But now it is becoming an issue.

What is the best way a mage like me (BLM for me, but probably applys to all casters) should guage "Is it alright for me to cast now?" while trying to keep the 'down time' to a minimum by conserving your mana?

[Maxim]

Rule of Thumb for BLMs: Keep your MP consistent with the white mage's.

So, for example, you are doing well at conserving MP if at the end of battle you (BLM) has 70 MP while the WHM has 80 MP. However, you are doing poorly if the gap is too big like 30 MP versus 80 MP.

Also, it's not good if at the end of battle you have way more MP than the WHM. If that's the case then you should spend your extra MP helping the WHM heal (assuming you have completed the sub job quest and currently subbing WHM).

[Zenyx]

Do you generally go off the numbers or the percent? The reason I ask is when I have 389mp and the whm has 209mp total, I would take too much aggro trying to stay close in numbers to their mp (I would need to spend 180 mp right off the bat lol), but percentage wise I could probably comfortably be at 50% when they are at 50% .

This is a real example btw hehe, I didn't make those numbers up to think of a strange situation. That's really my mp and that's really the lvl 30 whm's mp, the whm was an elvaan and also subbed mnk so their mp seemed to be suffering pretty heavily from it.

I generally go percentage wise myself, if you do this it seems like both ppl can get back to full about the same time

[Mylek]

I can think of a couple things that you may already be doing to increase efficiency.

Reduce mp usage due to healing by using status debuffs if nobody else is casting them. Slow and Paralyze are particularily usefull and should be used in every fight.

You can also use smaller heals and cast them more often. Cure1 will be more efficient for healing until your Cure2 starts healing consistantly for 90.

If a whm or rdm is using regen on people taking hits dont heal them completely to full so regen can heal for its full effect.

Rather than casting your strongest magics on an enemy use only their elemental weakness. [except during magic bursts and the use of elemental seal]

Although it is less practical at higher levels, during battle in some situations you can heal and recover one tick of mp or more between casting spells.

I generally go percentage wise myself, if you do this it seems like both ppl can get back to full about the same time

Rate of MP gain while healing is not effected by the total number of MP you have. You should both recover 100mp in about the same amount of time.

[Zenyx]

Rate of MP gain while healing is not effected by the total number of MP you have. You should both recover 100mp in about the same amount of time.

This is not quite correct, the reason is that you gain an extra 1 mp per tick, so sitting longer is more efficient than sitting shorter. To give an extreme example lets say player 1 has 400mp and player 2 has 200mp

The mp regaining will look like this:
p1---p2---total
15---15---15
16---16---31
17---17---48
18---18---66
19---19---85
20---20---105
21---21---126
22---22---148
23---23---171
24---24---195
25---05---220 (p2 done)
26---00---246
27---00---273
28---00---301
29---00---330
30---00---360
31---00---391
09---00---400 (p1 done)

That took 11 ticks for player 2 to regen 200mp and it took 18 ticks for player 1 to regen 400mp, so player 1 regened on average 400/18 = 22mp per tick and player 2 regened 200/11 = 18 mp per tick

So there's a rather large difference in regen capabilites the more mp you have if you do it correctly.