Your Opinion on the Current State of Job Identity/Balance in 6.4?

I do find it weird how WAR is currently an Omni-job of all content, and every single one of its skills has some additional effect that makes it better than the other tanks.

Other 3 just get a flat 30% mit, War gets that plus damage reflection,
DRK/GNB get a flat magic mit only for their raid wide mitigation, PLD gets a shield/heal. WAR gets a Shield/Heal/Regen/Shield Buff for absorbing other mits
Other 3 tanks can shield others instead of themselves, WAR gets to do it while also healing itself

Inner Release grants guaranteed Crit/DH, Knockback resist, immunity to some debuffs, and extra time on your damage buff mechanic,
Delirium lets you regen 1/5 of an edge of shadow.

And it gets the best invuln to boot.
Someone needs to tell the job balance team to stop.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Absurdity

I would still have a problem with it, because it barely changes anything. Most jobs are already designed to do their burst every 1 minute, they just have a slightly bigger burst every 2 minutes. So changing some party buffs to be 1 minute would still result in you playing the exact same way you do now, the damage spikes just get a bit lower.

---

Oh you're 100% right. I'd also still have a problem with that but at the very least it would make dying less punishing and help balance just a tad. Ideally we'd nix half of the raid buffs in the game and go back to 1/2/3 min buffs with a 30/90sec here and there.

I am happy with BLM, MNK, DRK, GNB...the only job that i am not happy with is RDM.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SargeTheSeagull

Oh you're 100% right. I'd also still have a problem with that but at the very least it would make dying less punishing and help balance just a tad. Ideally we'd nix half of the raid buffs in the game and go back to 1/2/3 min buffs with a 30/90sec here and there.

---

Splitting up the raid buffs wouldn't have an impact on the relative penalties of death, to be clear. They'd still be used on cool down in order to get as many uses and potential sync-ups as possible within the fight. The main difference would merely be that the shorter the CD, the more likely a death is to delay its activation, punishing self and especially the party.

Now, nerfing the raid buffs themselves certainly would help, but then you have the problem of each individually no longer mattering, to the point it's never worth going even a GCD out of one's way to exploit (e.g., high potency CD or DoT) a given buff (see Searing Light or Arcane Circle, for instance). If our hardest-hitting actions were squished back towards our average ppgcd/ppm, shortening the duration of raid buffs (or applying gradual falloff a la old Embolden) could help, but it'd still be a pretty half-hearted way to mitigate the total contribution of collective raid-buffs without making them individually non-mechanics (never worth adjusting gameplay around).

A mere extreme and very spitball approach, on the other hand, would be something like making raid buffs largely redundant to one another and putting raid buffs on a shared resource cost to provide alternatives to stacking them, be that via shared cooldowns, some manner of debuff preventing application of further buffs, or even via the Limit Break Gauge (revised slightly accordingly) so that raid buffs can be strong enough to individually supply gameplay but don't collectively double down on the punishment for death. In that case, though, they'd function like myriad forms of WoW's Heroism/Bloodlust, where the particular button is useless on each buffer whose buff isn't the best fit to the given situation (just like LB). So, pick of poisons.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Splitting up the raid buffs wouldn't have an impact on the relative penalties of death, to be clear. They'd still be used on cool down in order to get as many uses and potential sync-ups as possible within the fight. The main difference would merely be that the shorter the CD, the more likely a death is to delay its activation, punishing self and especially the party.

---

I assume that they're referring to how screwed someone is if the timing of their death wipes out one of their 2-minute burst sync-ups, or the resources accumulated for it, since so much potency magnification occurs in those windows. In that sense, if you still had a round of 60s buffs coming up, you could at least try to rebuild resources and hit those, vs. right now, where you just end up in a pure deadzone (minus maybe a stray AST card) until the next 2m mark.

If you made no other change, it would still have the same amplitude at the 2m mark since the 1m's would just line up again there, but you'd have shallower valleys in-between those peaks and your 60s dumps would be more valuable, which would work to spread out the total damage distribution a bit and give you some "consolation prizes" in between the 2m dumps.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Eorzean_username

...

---

This happens anyways. I can think of several jobs that have a 60s personal burst with a bigger 120s window that aligns with burst. There are some inequalities in terms of the opening burst vs. the subsequent two minute windows, because some jobs are more traditionally timer driven and others actually require you to pool resources, although hopefully these get addressed next expansion. What's really interesting is when you can reallocate resources from your 60 second window into your 120 second window for the purposes of tincture or a mechanic like Everburn from last tier.

As for the fight design itself, mechanic checks are deliberately designed to align with burst windows. This is sensible really, and lends itself to some entertaining optimization challenges. It's especially interesting when you also have 'placeholder GCDs' that you can use to offset the timing of a cast or positional to work around little variations in mechanics timings (i.e. if I get debuff X, I use a placeholder to alter my GCD timing, but if I get debuff Y, I don't). They've deliberately given some fairly soft checks this last tier, so it's really more about understanding mechanics than anything else.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Lyth

This happens anyways. I can think of several jobs that have a 60s personal burst with a bigger 120s window that aligns with burst.

---

I'd go so far as to say that's pretty much part of the "bog standard" design right now, due to needing not to overcap on cooldowns / charges / gauge, and most actions and Gauge gens being normalised to ~30s multiples. Off the top of my head:

PLD
WAR
DRK
GNB
DRG
RPR
MNK
SAM
NIN
MCH
DNC
SMN

You could also add in RDM if it doesn't have to spend Gauge for earlier mechanic mobility, or Healers if you want to count "refreshing dot" as "personal burst" (lol).

——————————————————

But all of that, right now, is "naked" at the odd intervals in EW, and then "anabolically-enhanced" at the even intervals.

If some of the buffs were shifted to be at odd intervals also, it would nudge the odd-minute troughs upwards, so players could pull a bit more out of realigning themselves with an odd burst.

——————————————————

Interesting note about forgiving Enrage timers, though. At some point, do concerns about "clean" DPS output + coordinating burst become essentially a vanity exercise if there's no real pressure to do it in order to clear an encounter?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Eorzean_username

Interesting note about forgiving Enrage timers, though. At some point, do concerns about "clean" DPS output + coordinating burst become essentially a vanity exercise if there's no real pressure to do it in order to clear an encounter?

---

It's not all or nothing. If you can execute mechanics cleanly and consistently while executing your burst, you will clear at a lower ilvl. There are still 'attendance check' mechanics that raid-wipe you, but the DPS loss serves as a softer penalty. This average ilvl rises over the weeks through drops and tomes, which allows for less precise execution and a softer check over time.

Optimization around burst windows has always been a big part of this game. Even the openers that people studied in Heavensward were built around Trick timings. Standardizing the raid buffs' 'least common multiple' doesn't eliminate this or make it easier, it just makes it more intuitive and PF friendly. You could move it down to 1 minute (i.e. have a mix of one and two minute raid buffs), but then you need to be having major mechanics occur every minute rather than every two, or else the one minute bursts are just freebies. The pacing of fights would be very different. Hard to predict whether that design approach would be a good or a bad thing for the playerbase as a whole, though.