FATIGUED OF MANNA FATIGUE

MANNA Fatigue is a band-aid fix of a band-aid fix of a band-aid fix. Allow me to clarify. Mage in the earliest form of the game had large MP pools, regenerating at 1 MP a rotation, meaning they always started fights at full resources. To combat this, mage Cyphers became more expensive. While this temporarily resolved the in-combat issue, it only exemplified their out-of-combat utility. You see, when you unlocked a codex, you initially gained a cipher from every codex you had unlocked on every other level. This could result in a mage having over 24 unique ciphers by the time they reach level 25, not including arch abilities and bonus abilities. Because they always had full pools outside of combat, they were always able to use all their utility abilities without repercussions, meaning every party would start combat at full health, fully buffed, AC restored, immune to status effects, and reviving from death the first time they would be Brinked. As such, it was made so that Mage could only progress down one tree at a time, cutting the number of ciphers at the max level by half by level 25. This brought up a new issue: their more limited cypher pool and slow regeneration caused them to suffer in sustainability inside combat. So we gave them faster MP regeneration, which brought back the infinite sustain issue. Finally, MANNA Fatigue was introduced to hard cap the number of ciphers a Mage could cast in a day. 

We were so hesitant to remove Mage’s MP regeneration for several reasons:

1. It was a core identity of the class that many players enjoyed. 
2. It enabled them to have multiple active concentration abilities at minimal cost, a unique feature at the time.
3. Mages did not have the damage at the time to compete with conduit so the regeneration was viewed as a balancing measure.

The list goes on, but long story short, we wish to simplify Mage’s playloop and give its Main Tree a facelift to bring it in line with other classes. Its rocky history has stripped its main tree of any identity so we will inject life back into our favorite Cypher Casters. This, however, will come at a cost. Mage will no longer regenerate MP, many of its 1 MP Cyphers will go up to 2 MP, and several durability abilities will be pushed into the late game, level 15+ portion of its Main Tree. However, they will be gaining a core mechanic (a la Conduit, Berserker, and Dragoon,) a plethora of new abilities within their main tree, and a new passive to make sure they can bring their Cyphers to bear, even against the most brutal of foes.