On the Tyranny of Burst Windows

It's also pretty insane just how much damage is concentrated in those burst windows, you can watch the boss's health drop like a rock during openers but once raid buffs wear off it slows waaaaaaay down. And if you die and get desynced from raid buffs, the death is already bad enough but your choice is delaying cooldowns to realign with 2 minutes which means possibly losing a use or permanently being out of raid buff windows the rest of the fight which feels really bad. Death should be punishing but that gets to be too much.

Give it a few patches or an expansion, I'm sure they'll prune them all away like everything else in this game.

It is weird. I dunno if I would go as far as to remove all party damage buffs but certainly removing or toning down the perfect alignments and crazy multiplicative effects they have on damage. It's straight up strange to me that high end players end up doing stuff like making sure they have the exact perfect GCD speed tuned to the hundreths of a second to make sure they can hit all their buffs the literal millisecond they come off cooldown so that they can all still be synced up with each other even 8 minutes into a fight. Even the ability to know exactly what skill you'll be using at any given second, even hundreds of seconds into the future because of how planned out and deterministic rotations are, is weird.

I generally don't mind jobs having burst windows but yeah recently I feel that many have been forcibly shaped to fit in the 120s mold and as a result their personal rotations are lacking. Too many rotations are essentially dead air between burst windows. Frankly though I don't see this changing, too much effort has been invested into this design to change course now.

While I did like TA a lot on NIN and the frequency of it.
Part of me does kinda dislike party buffs too and would kinda want it to be personal buffs instead.
I do think it's a bit restrictive in terms of design and does have some negative impacts.

I am not saying that I feel super strongly about it and I am definitely not saying that Jobs like DNC for example shouldn't have it.
I guess that perhaps I think that too many Jobs have it.
Why does every melee except for SAM need to have it?
I wonder what the game and the Job design would look like if we only had a handful of Jobs that had party buffs instead of almost everyone.

In a way it makes it less special for those who have it too.
Mug is just a less fun Brotherhood and Arcane Circle.
Brotherhood gives Chakra and Arcane Circle gives Plentiful Harvest, both are more fun than the Ninki from Mug and TA is only like two extra GCD's with 5% buff.
The buffs for MNK and RPR makes their rotations more strictly looped while also diminishing the uniqueness of NIN.
I am actually kinda upset about it, it feels like NIN lost our niche of a 60s buff.
I am not talking about balance and numbers but in regards to gameplay it's just the same now with Mug but boring.
TA is still there but it's personal which makes it not utility it's kinda ridiculous how far NIN has fallen in regards to utility looking back I mean both MNK and RPR have defensive utility on top of the DMG... NIN has nothing.

I'd just rather have like NIN, DNC, BRD and RDM be the utility/ buff dps and a more varied utility toolset too.
And less restrictive and so harshly looped mechanics and rotations for the rest.

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Originally Posted by SeverianLyonesse

I didn't advocate for removing all forms of group synergy, so I'm getting the impression you didn't read the whole post before replying. Just the group synergy revolving around party damage buffs.

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What form of group synergy besides damage buffs do we have left? The answer already is - "none".

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Originally Posted by PangTong

Frankly though I don't see this changing, too much effort has been invested into this design to change course now.

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Also a good point, doing an overhaul for possibly a ton of classes wouldn't be a small feat and who knows if Yoshi even thinks it would be worth it. Still worth bringing up and discussing though.

It really looks like raid dmg buffs are well on their way to becoming role actions. I know a lot of people like to consider it teamwork and alignment when their 5% buff and burst lines up with others' but to me it makes me feel like just another cog in the machine and makes saying "I bring a dmg buff" very inconsequential and more of an expectation of you rather than a bonus. Like interviewing for a construction site and saying, "I have hands".

It's true that at this point a damage buff is the only form of "utility" that most classes bring with the most notable exceptions bring RDM rezes and SCH expedience. I started playing in ShB but from I know once upon a time classes had other utility like AoE Esuna, the ability to give others MP, etc. But they were pruned because of imbalance I guess? I understand that homogenization is by far the easiest and most effective way to solve imbalance, but it comes at a big cost which seems more impactful to some than others. I want nothing more than SE to keep experimenting with things like Expedience, and I know they have the creativity for it because they have shown it in the past, AND in PvP today. They just need to put in the effort to balance it rather than sterilize when things look ugly.

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Originally Posted by Azuri

What form of group synergy besides damage buffs do we have left? The answer already is - "none".

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Ignoring the fact that most mechanics require group cooperation, we still have:

* Damage reduction buffs (Tanks, Healers, Pranged, RDM)
* Healing increase buffs (Healers, MNK)
* Partner abilities (DRG, DNC)
* Shields (Tanks, SGE)
* Speed buffs (SCH)

Again, I have to reiterate that it is specifically the party-wide *damage* buffs that are parasitic because the more buffs are implemented around that 120 second window, the more entire job rotations are contorted around that. Defensive, healing, movement buffs do not directly affect rotation design the way that party damage buffs do. They may affect encounter design, which is a separate issue, but damage buffs are largely what is responsible for the "homogenization of jobs" people are complaining about.

This does get at the heart of the design issue, right now with the current design of having all jobs with a 2 or one minute burst window means a lot of things are already predetermined for a job before anything else about it. That means any damage buffs it gets will be on this cool down, at least one if not more high damage abilities will also be on this cool down and their rotation and other skills will be on cooldowns designed to work up to or within this window. That does not leave a lot of room for creativity when a jobs rotation is pretty much already set by time constraints imposed by burst windows.

I just came here to say I agree with you.

I don't have much to add except a comment about FF11. I feel like they wanted something close to what skillchains were and this was their solution to make party play look important. I'd like things besides damage to start mattering again.