why would wizard with Manastaff spend 200 EP on 1 Mana instead of 2 ST ?

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by Plane

...
it also looks like pg 9 of ITL changed the ST recovery to time-based (1 per 15 minutes of rest if it's fatigue, sort of along the lines of the 1 per 10m FP recovery in gURPS) instead of the vague ~instantly back to full ST at the end of combat~ that the 70s/80s version used.

I'm not sure what you're thinking of about instant ST recovery, unless you mean Melee/Wizard, which just assume that there are however many days or weeks of rest are needed to heal up between battles. Original TFT/ITL was the same about 15 minute per point fatigue recovery.

Originally Posted by Plane

the benefit of First Aid explais why I see the Physicker skill in playthroughs, being able to cure 2 ST of injury per 5 minutes would be very useful. That's 6x as fast as you recover exhaustion ST, almost seems broken.

I'm not sure if this is a "per injury" cap though, like they can cancel out an unlimited amount of ST loss from damage doing merely 1 or 2 hits, but if it's a 3-hit wound they can only treat it 1 time for 2 ST and the other 1 ST loss has to recover via other means like the 1 per 2 days of rest, healing pot, or having a Master Physicker come along and upgrade the treatment?

As others wrote, Physickers can't heal fatigue at all. Only wounds, and injury greater than they heal will need to be healed by rest (1 / 2 days) or healing potion (expensive, rare, fragile, always in demand).

Originally Posted by Plane

Pg 10's "immediate action" seems like it should have some kind of timeline since combat could take varying lengths, maybe something like "you can survive 15 minutes" but perhaps subtract however many ST someone is in the negative from those minutes?

Yes. ITL says people fully die after 1 hour at negative ST, but the official rules go for simplicity, and a GM can always add house rules or make rulings. There's an old article in Interplay about "Physicker Revival" that I'd rather use than the Legacy death rule, where there are rolls involved and the amount of damage matters, etc.