Last night, I was in an experience points party as a red mage. Since I was the only mage, I used a white mage subjob (since we'd be fighting crabs and crawlers and barwatera, poisona and curaga would be sorely missed otherwise). This meant, subjob-wise, no black mage Conserve MP or summoner Auto-Refresh... so my 555mp had only Refresh and a Dark Staff for recovery (and of course, Convert every 10 minutes). If I ran out of mp, no one could step in to help with curing and such, a fact that was always on my mind.
At first, the ninja wanted Haste. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem. I was a little concerned that I wouldn't be able to afford it. However, ninja have a hard enough time keeping hate as it is, so anything I could do to make this easier for a ninja was a good thing. And by good thing, I mean, I'd rather have the monster eat ninja shadows than develop a penchant for mithra red mage flesh.
After working out a good routine, I was able to keep the ninja hasted (is that even a word?).
But then the dark knight chimes in...
Ah, dark knights... there is an eternal confilct between dark knights and red mages. Usually it's over Refresh (which he demanded too... fortunately, I was able to accomodate him since there weren't any other mages).
But this dark knight was upset because he wanted Haste too.
And that's where I get confused: Damage dealers insisting on Haste, especially when their tank is a ninja.
Aside the fact that I was the only mage, on limited mp, and I was already spending 40mp to keep the ninja hasted (there's that word again), but he wanted me to spend another 40mp so he could deal damage faster? And by dealing damage faster, he would get more hate... and the monster would attack him more, meaning I'd have to cure him more, wasting more mp, and risking my life by getting hate myself from curing so much...
There's nothing but pain in hasting a damage dealer.
Even if we all live through it, I'd still have to spend more time recovering, ruining experience points chains in the process. Ultimately, I feel it's a very bad choice.
So, I had to tell him, "Sorry." I hate having to be the one to say no.
Then later, since other parties were taking up all the crabs and crawlers, we fought some bark spiders instead (can you guess which dungeon I was in, now?
). Now, when I said Haste protects against Slow, I said nothing about Slowga. Slowga is actually a stronger spell effect than Haste, in the same way that Diaga is stronger than Bio. Not only does Slowga remove your Haste effect, but if you cast Haste again to remove the Slow effect, it won't work. Erase would work, but I couldn't cast that as a 55 rdm/whm... I still need 11 levels yet
Besides, I've discovered this from fighting spiders earlier. Their spider web attack renders Haste, cast before or after, useless. Only a summoner with Hastega could help, and we didn't have one.
So it was frustrating when the ninja didn't believe any of this and insisted I keep casting Haste even though I explained it was completely pointless to.
I also hate it when people who've never played my jobs act like they know more about my spells than I do.
So ends my rant. Thank you for listening.
