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

My opinion ?
In one word: WEIRD

We have positionals but only on certain jobs. Some jobs have alsmost no skill ceilling other still have. We have a lot of healing but the necessity for it is missing.
We have ranged tax on certain jobs but others dont have that. We have mana but almost no mana-mangement (hey to all BLM out there).
We have a lot of stats but in the end its crit - dh - det as if we could delete the rest ?
We have BLU... dont know... it exist, i guess.
We have AST but its lore is ignored.
We have WAR wich is at the moment all the jobs at once (DPS+healer+Tank) for some reason.... also i do wanna know how the love story in the old WAR Jobquest ends SE!!!!!!

I could go on but who cares.... my answer is weird and sometimes unsatisfactory.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

The only mutual exclusion between the two, though, was accepting drift in buff-less comps in order to get a bit more bonus GCD potency out of your own damage amp window (FoF, etc.) at risk of getting fewer affected GCDs (and any oGCD CDs also held) within the fight.

In all other senses, optimizing for raid buffs is just an addition to optimizing sustained damage, not a replacement for it.

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When you force more and more of a jobs total potency output into a smaller and smaller window of time, that small window becomes so heavily weighted against the remaining rotation that it diminishes the importance of the gameplay outside of it, and makes rng mechanics like crit/dh more influential.

Currently, you can mismanage your filler for 8 minutes straight on PLD, and as long as you crit more of your blades than the next guy, still do more damage. I don't find that rewarding.

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Originally Posted by LittleImp

When you force more and more of a jobs total potency output into a smaller and smaller window of time, that small window becomes so heavily weighted against the remaining rotation that it diminishes the importance of the gameplay outside of it, and makes rng mechanics like crit/dh more influential.

Currently, you can mismanage your filler for 8 minutes straight on PLD, and as long as you crit more of your blades than the next guy, still do more damage. I don't find that rewarding.

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Okay, that's fair. I do think the Blades make an excessive difference, yes.

That said, that has far more to do with they're being literally up to 1,125 effective potency opposite PLD's 350 average ppgcd from its combo-ing.

When the buffs were accentuating the difference between Royal Authority and Goring Blade vs. Rage of Halone, for instance... that wasn't an issue, despite still wanting to play around those raid buffs.

The issue is less the buffs themselves, than the burst ppgcd exploiters. Even without the raid buffs, the 25% FoF bonus onto 900 base potency... is going to devalue everything else.

The.
2min.
Meta.
Must.
Die.

I keep trying to think about dozens of ways to improve the complexity of my favorite jobs while still making them accessible, but there's very little to think in the way of player skill expression if everything needs to fit in a collective burst window.

The challenge is not putting your brains to think. XIV just, quoting Zenos, wants to give a "test of your reflexes" - and your memory, at that, to press your keys at the right time, or else? You guessed it - won't fit in the next 2min burst window, possibly for the rest of the encounter. No wonder why many people regard PVP as a good form of skill expression, because in fact, it is the main thing over there, even though we have 1/4 of the number of actions available in pve.

The more I think about this, the more I keep getting frustrated at the way XIV structures combat.

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Originally Posted by Hyperia

For healers, I’d rather have a more interesting healing and buffing setup rather than a more complex DPS rotation. When we have to have a more complex DPS setup to keep us busy, that means the design for our purpose in the raid is flawed.

I’d rather have more buffs for DPS, mitigations, smart heals, maybe a 5 second window skip death option instead of rescue, etc. I don’t want to be a green mage, give healers more purpose, show some creativity.

Heavens forbid healers get a LB1 and 2 that actually do something…

Sadly, all we will get is more “safe plays”, it seems all of the creativity left us between ARR and HW.

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Unrealistic, they would have to rework every single fight and instance in the game. The healers need dps rotations instead, because they were designed to do damage from the ground up.

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Originally Posted by GoatOfWar

because they were designed to do damage from the ground up.

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Originally healers were given dps spells for one reason and one reason alone. And that reason was for solo play and the msq.

They were never intended to contribute dps in parties.

The problem stems from the fact that incoming damage is so low. Which again is deliberate by the devs because they don't want to overwhelm or stress healers or push people away from the role.

Encounter design is the games real issue.. tank self sustain isn't too high. Incoming damage is to low...

Healers are bored because incoming damage and stuff is so low that it takes no healing damage is far to scripted and predictable.

Ranged dps is busted because encounters are designed around unavoidable damage from raid wides.which means that ranged roles have to trade there power for survival.

So instead of the convention design where melee hit hard but have enough armor to take a few hits.

Casters hit even harder than melee at the cost of reduced mobility. There survival coming from magic barriers and control spells like binds and sleeps. Casting these spells costs dps.

Then you have physical ranged the old school glass cannons. Hit super hard. Are super mobile but are super squishy..

Melee should typically be among the weaker of the dps jobs as a trade for there survival and mobility.

Xiv encounter design breaks this paradigm though and everything loses its strength in exchange for extra survival. Burning a game where damage is the only thing that matters. Melee reign supreme because ranged gains nothing to compensate its lack of dps

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Originally Posted by Dzian

Originally healers were given dps spells for one reason and one reason alone. And that reason was for solo play and the msq.

They were never intended to contribute dps in parties.

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I don't believe this was ever the case honestly. Back in ARR, even when enemies actually hit worth a damn, it was still advantageous for Healers to DPS in most group content, It was almost grieving not to really. Add to that, some skills had secondary CC utility, such as Stone 1 granting a Heavy, Holy's stun, Shadowflare's Slow, etc. It's really hard to say this argument was ever true, regardless of the Devs intentions because they were just much more useful in group content then they ever were solo. Not like the Devs haven't been called out numerous times for inaccuracies in regards to game design. Then there's also the fact they added Aero 3 in HW, and the argument really loses any credibility it could've had really.

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Originally Posted by Dzian

Originally healers were given dps spells for one reason and one reason alone. And that reason was for solo play and the msq.

They were never intended to contribute dps in parties.

The problem stems from the fact that incoming damage is so low. Which again is deliberate by the devs because they don't want to overwhelm or stress healers or push people away from the role.

Encounter design is the games real issue.. tank self sustain isn't too high. Incoming damage is to low...

Healers are bored because incoming damage and stuff is so low that it takes no healing damage is far to scripted and predictable.

Ranged dps is busted because encounters are designed around unavoidable damage from raid wides.which means that ranged roles have to trade there power for survival.

So instead of the convention design where melee hit hard but have enough armor to take a few hits.

Casters hit even harder than melee at the cost of reduced mobility. There survival coming from magic barriers and control spells like binds and sleeps. Casting these spells costs dps.

Then you have physical ranged the old school glass cannons. Hit super hard. Are super mobile but are super squishy..

Melee should typically be among the weaker of the dps jobs as a trade for there survival and mobility.

Xiv encounter design breaks this paradigm though and everything loses its strength in exchange for extra survival. Burning a game where damage is the only thing that matters. Melee reign supreme because ranged gains nothing to compensate its lack of dps

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If it were true that healers were only given dps spells for solo play they'd still have them.
However, they do still spend most of their time doing damage despite 95% of their spells being heals.
Again, they were designed from the ground up to do damage. You were never spamcasting heals in FF. Healers have always dealt damage most of the time, and they still do. That's the way the entire game has been designed.
The amount of damage spells they have doesn't change the way they are intended to be played. But having those extra damage spells would make them infinitely more engaging.
We have always dealt damage way more often than we had to heal, the only difference is that they dumbed down the way this damage is applied more and more with each expansion.

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Originally Posted by Silver-Strider

I don't believe this was ever the case honestly. Back in ARR, even when enemies actually hit worth a damn, it was still advantageous for Healers to DPS in most group content, It was almost grieving not to really. Add to that, some skills had secondary CC utility, such as Stone 1 granting a Heavy, Holy's stun, Shadowflare's Slow, etc. It's really hard to say this argument was ever true, regardless of the Devs intentions because they were just much more useful in group content then they ever were solo. Not like the Devs haven't been called out numerous times for inaccuracies in regards to game design. Then there's also the fact they added Aero 3 in HW, and the argument really loses any credibility it could've had really.

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On top of that from a game design perspective it makes no sense. Healing is not useful past a certain point while dealing damage is always useful, as players optimize their gameplay they'll remove the less useful things (unecessary healing) for things that always have value, which is damage, so, if your game has fixed healer slots (meaning that you can't change the amount of healers you bring per encounter), those healers will always gravitate towards dpsing as they get better.

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Originally Posted by Silver-Strider

ISnip

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I don't really disagree with this honestly. However I think the issue here is what used to be seen as a disconnect between the people designing the jobs and the people designing the content..

Its like the job designers always envisioned whm to be a pure healer type roll. But then the content designers designed content around a scholar being able to heal. So all that pure healing power went to waste.

Same thing with many of the old dps jobs especially in the older days where all the content was designed around aoe. But Jon's were designed to be single target damage dealers and the levels at which they had access to aoe skills didn't make sense.

Tanks again. Pld was designed to be a low dps high survival tank. War designed to be a lower survival more offensive tank.. but content designers made sure a warrior could survive. So the extra mitigation a pld bought was again wasted...

But things have never really hit hard even in the earliest days people were wall to wall pulling hell even more so because there weren't gates blocking you.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

The.
2min.
Meta.
Must.
Die.

I keep trying to think about dozens of ways to improve the complexity of my favorite jobs while still making them accessible, but there's very little to think in the way of player skill expression if everything needs to fit in a collective burst window.

The challenge is not putting your brains to think. XIV just, quoting Zenos, wants to give a "test of your reflexes" - and your memory, at that, to press your keys at the right time, or else? You guessed it - won't fit in the next 2min burst window, possibly for the rest of the encounter. No wonder why many people regard PVP as a good form of skill expression, because in fact, it is the main thing over there, even though we have 1/4 of the number of actions available in pve.

The more I think about this, the more I keep getting frustrated at the way XIV structures combat.

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It wouldn't at all surprise me if SE took it the extra mile and went to a 90 second meta or 1min meta in 7.0

am rdm, am happy

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Originally Posted by GoatOfWar

If it were true that healers were only given dps spells for solo play they'd still have them.
However, they do still spend most of their time doing damage despite 95% of their spells being heals.
Again, they were designed from the ground up to do damage. You were never spamcasting heals in FF. Healers have always dealt damage most of the time, and they still do. That's the way the entire game has been designed.
The amount of damage spells they have doesn't change the way they are intended to be played. But having those extra damage spells would make them infinitely more engaging.
We have always dealt damage way more often than we had to heal, the only difference is that they dumbed down the way this damage is applied more and more with each expansion.

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Agree the only thing they changed it going from multiple buttons of dps to just 1-2 (and we actually lost a "dps" stance(cleric stance) role ability that would actually have made leveling/MSQ duties less tedious and slow >_>)
if I remember correctly it was also kind of needed to dps as a healer in Alex savage at least back then if you dint want to hit enrage it was kind of expected for you to also dps when you could in general.

2 minute meta straight up ruinied the combat in this game. What they did to Monk is unforgivable and can someone please tell me why is Cover still a thing. Get that Clemency outta here too, it's also muck.

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Originally Posted by Asako

2 minute meta straight up ruinied the combat in this game. What they did to Monk is unforgivable and can someone please tell me why is Cover still a thing. Get that Clemency outta here too, it's also muck.

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I'm a little confused by this...

Your first sentence amounts to "simplifications bad". (The comment on Monks is a bit nebulous, in that optimal EW Monk play isn't really any less complex once it's going than was optimal Monk play in Shadowbringers, and certainly has more going on than did late Shadowbringer's Monk.)

But then you end that with wanting to see the game simplified, rather than outlying utilities (Cover, Clemency) again being given any suitable context?

I miss Warrior's cone AoE. It felt unique, and made playing it a little more involved since you needed to face the enemies you wanted to effect. Now it's just the same AoE combo that every other tank has.

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Originally Posted by Remish

It wouldn't at all surprise me if SE took it the extra mile and went to a 90 second meta or 1min meta in 7.0

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Honestly had they put half of the raid buffs on 1 minute and the other half of two minutes most people, myself largely included, wouldn't have THAT much of a problem. Less than ideal mind you but still. I had a ninja in my asphodelos static and none of us minded the raid buff situation because we had to line up with trick every minute. As soon as that changed in 6.1 is when people started having a problem with the 2 min meta.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

I'm a little confused by this...

Your first sentence amounts to "simplifications bad". (The comment on Monks is a bit nebulous, in that optimal EW Monk play isn't really any less complex once it's going than was optimal Monk play in Shadowbringers, and certainly has more going on than did late Shadowbringer's Monk.)

But then you end that with wanting to see the game simplified, rather than outlying utilities (Cover, Clemency) again being given any suitable context?

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This sort of line of thinking is really standard in this community for some reason.

NIN main, and NIN feels great to play. The class is very well designed - opener/burst/rotation feel great, the aesthetics hit right (Goka Mekkyaku and Fleeting Raiju are some of my favorite ability animations in the game), and the mudra system captures the Naruto ninjutsu vibe without being too fiddly. NIN is killing it.

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Originally Posted by Oizen

This sort of line of thinking is really standard in this community for some reason.

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It reminds me of the old "Let's buff Piety, Tenacity, and Direct Hit so they're all real choices and each role would have its own best stat. But, let's also remove Skill/Spell Speed from the game, since it's just an annoyance," or "Consolidated combos would remove all the complexity of jobs, because you'd just hit the one button over and over!" all while shutting down any discussion of branching actual, real decisions (where what's optimal would rely on context and foresight) or combo actions being separately usable with actual synergies instead of just being finger-traps.

So many here seem to prefer a pretense of complexity over any actual depth in practice. Le sigh.

What identity? They all look and taste the same.

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Originally Posted by SargeTheSeagull

Honestly had they put half of the raid buffs on 1 minute and the other half of two minutes most people, myself largely included, wouldn't have THAT much of a problem. Less than ideal mind you but still. I had a ninja in my asphodelos static and none of us minded the raid buff situation because we had to line up with trick every minute. As soon as that changed in 6.1 is when people started having a problem with the 2 min meta.

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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.

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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.

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^ This. ^

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It's the fact that nigh everything can be saved for the 2-minute bursts (from, for instance, giving 60s CDs two charges) that leads to the time between 2-minute bursts feeling so empty, not merely the fact that the raid buffs all occur per 120 seconds...

...and it's the sheer amount of potency (relative to sustain / average ppgcd / individual rotational, positional, or uptime optimization rewards) that can be put out in 15 seconds per 2 minutes that causes the problems with the Crit/DHit damage variance between parses with identical actions, far more so than the effect of stacked raid buffs.

(Remember, we used to have things like ~30% damage multipliers [e.g., DRG's old Blood for Blood] stacking atop 10% Trick Attacks, 10% Foe Requiem, 10% Contagion, 10% crit Litany, and 10% AoE Balance [late HW], etc.; buff multiplicity was far more impactful in the past, before the "2 minute meta". What we didn't have back then, though, was attacks hitting for some 3x our average potency-per-GCD.)

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

It reminds me of the old "Let's buff Piety, Tenacity, and Direct Hit so they're all real choices and each role would have its own best stat. But, let's also remove Skill/Spell Speed from the game, since it's just an annoyance," or "Consolidated combos would remove all the complexity of jobs, because you'd just hit the one button over and over!" all while shutting down any discussion of branching actual, real decisions (where what's optimal would rely on context and foresight) or combo actions being separately usable with actual synergies instead of just being finger-traps.

So many here seem to prefer a pretense of complexity over any actual depth in practice. Le sigh.

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I really wish they would just revamp those stats to make them something more interesting.

Sks and Sps have absolutely no business in being separate entities. And then there's the question (which I don't know the answer), but how to make speed attractive to more jobs, especially non casters?

Why direct hit even exists? It's just a different form of crit. If there's something to take note from WoW, is the mastery stat. Something that interacts directly with your job's kit, which could be potentially interesting.

It would be cool if we had one side of the armor kits dedicated to offensive materia, and the other side to defensive/utility materia - and that could open to stuff like movement speed, leech, damage reduction, etc.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

Sks and Sps have absolutely no business in being separate entities. And then there's the question (which I don't know the answer), but how to make speed attractive to more jobs, especially non casters?

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Well, as you probably know already, the answer in other games is for "Haste" to reduce all action cooldowns, instead of just GCDs.

So hypothetically, the temptation of gaining another usage of many different cooldowns would override concerns about not coordinating with party buff windows, as seen with styles like ShB Trance Rush Summoner.

You could also start tying a lot more systems to be affected by "speed" — such as autoattack-based procs, dot-tick-rate based procs (and allowing Haste to accelerate dot tick rates), etc.

...That said, trying to implement this in XIV is more-or-less a lost cause, especially without dismantling the extreme gains from piling everything into coordinated buff windows (which has, for example, helped to push SpS Summoner further and further into the margins each new gearing tier), and the game's opposite-direction design moves (with, eg, dots being wiped-out), and the game's priding itself on precise and exact encounter timelines, and... etc.

So, I guess the fundamental problem is really that "going faster" as a reward tends to fight XIV's entire design and structure, and become more of a wet-squib or even a punishment.

At this point, can that even be "fixed" ?

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Originally Posted by Eorzean_username

Well, as you probably know already, the answer in other games is for "Haste" to reduce all action cooldowns, instead of just GCDs.

So hypothetically, the temptation of gaining another usage of many different cooldowns would override concerns about not coordinating with party buff windows, as seen with styles like ShB Trance Rush Summoner.

You could also start tying a lot more systems to be affected by "speed" — such as autoattack-based procs, dot-tick-rate based procs (and allowing Haste to accelerate dot tick rates), etc.

...That said, trying to implement this in XIV is more-or-less a lost cause, especially without dismantling the extreme gains from piling everything into coordinated buff windows (which has, for example, helped to push SpS Summoner further and further into the margins each new gearing tier), and the game's opposite-direction design moves (with, eg, dots being wiped-out), and the game's priding itself on precise and exact encounter timelines, and... etc.

So, I guess the fundamental problem is really that "going faster" as a reward tends to fight XIV's entire design and structure, and become more of a wet-squib or even a punishment.

At this point, can that even be "fixed" ?

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Right, that's exactly why I can't think about how haste can work as the commonly known concept from other games. If the 2min meta remains, haste will never be a desirable thing, unless everyone coordinates under similar haste levels... which is quite unrealistic to think about.

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Originally Posted by Banriikku

My opinion ?
In one word: WEIRD

We have positionals but only on certain jobs. Some jobs have almost no skill ceiling other still have. We have a lot of healing but the necessity for it is missing.
We have ranged tax on certain jobs but others dont have that. We have mana but almost no mana-management (hey to all BLM out there).
We have a lot of stats but in the end its crit - dh - det as if we could delete the rest ?
We have BLU... don't know... it exist, i guess.
We have AST but its lore is ignored.
We have WAR which is at the moment all the jobs at once (DPS+healer+Tank) for some reason.... also i do wanna know how the love story in the old WAR Jobquest ends SE!!!!!!

I could go on but who cares.... my answer is weird and sometimes unsatisfactory.

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Best post in the entire thread.

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Originally Posted by Silver-Strider

Easy, you could ignore the entire Lily system and play more or less exactly like HW WHM, just without MP issues thanks to Thin Air.*snip*

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I know that's what I did back then. There was zero reason to use the Lily system in SB. I'm happy that has changed.

Now, in my humble opinion as a slacker who hasn't done (can't do) the really tough stuff, I have to say I'm not in love with healing. EW is the first expansion where I played jobs in other roles and maxed levelled them.

Maybe that's what Yoshi P intended but it feels bad. I want to enjoy healing but most times it feels like I'm as necessary as training wheels on a motorcycle. I should be feeling challenged when confronting something new, not unneeded. In their effort to not scare away new healers, Square Enix has only ruined the role for the more dedicated players.

Tanking seems imbalanced with Warriors being the better job in everything.

For me endwalker is by far the worst extension in terms of job balancing, the jobs have been homogenized, there is still a significant DPS disparity between the Melee and the rest, except black mage, which is the only exception since 6.4.

The 120s meta is boring,
DPS/tank roles have too much team heal/hot effect it's ridiculous
even if it's a big design mistake, and the players who did it are excellent, it made TOP possible without healers which should never be possible on FF14, and which proves that he has a serious problem with the healers on the game who are far too
unnecessarily assisted by regen/heal effects which affect all the team that no jobs in the DPS/TANK category have claimed from the devs all the more.

the Warrior in the dungeon has almost no need or even no need healer so much this balancing error has healing/regen effects that are exaggerated and that he shouldn't have as many.

The rework of the summoner which has lost all the depth of its gameplay, all the management has disappeared
and the job became a ranged physical DPS with 4 casts/minutes,
the rework had good bases, but square enix made it the most lazy rework of the game and was ultimately totally botched.

He has so much to say about endwalker balancing that we're going to avoid saying them all or we'll end up releasing a complete encyclopedia.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

I really wish they would just revamp those stats to make them something more interesting.

Sks and Sps have absolutely no business in being separate entities. And then there's the question (which I don't know the answer), but how to make speed attractive to more jobs, especially non casters?

Why direct hit even exists? It's just a different form of crit. If there's something to take note from WoW, is the mastery stat. Something that interacts directly with your job's kit, which could be potentially interesting.

It would be cool if we had one side of the armor kits dedicated to offensive materia, and the other side to defensive/utility materia - and that could open to stuff like movement speed, leech, damage reduction, etc.

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Personally, pipedream though it be, I just want to see...

1. weapon types available to each job varied more significantly and functionally (tower shield vs. targe vs. buckler, buster sword vs. montante, greataxe vs. dual axes, longbows vs.shortbows, carbines vs. muskets, piercing vs. blunt vs. slicing fist weapons, light spears vs. heavy lances, grimoires vs. manuals vs. codexes, etc., each having different recast timers on certain/affected skills and particular advantages/disadvantages),
2. Armor Class divisions scrapped (no more Scouting only for NIN / NIN can only use scouting; no more Striking only for MNK & SAM, and MNK & SAM locked to Striking, etc.; anyone can technically pick from anything, though higher Armor Classes [say, "Plate"] would come with increasing penalties opposite their increased Defense, so they'd be a decently costly investment non-optimal for non-tanks), and
3. STR, DEX, MND, and INT actually each be different stats (instead of 4 different names for simply Power) and each primary made useful to every job, though to different soft caps and for different, sometimes niche, purposes.

I'd love to see a more melee-focused RDM be able to run, say, INT=DEX >> STR > MND, for a more Ninjutsu-nuke-based NIN run DEX > INT >> STR >> MND, or one focused more on Armor Crush (revamped so the skill name and animation make sense) be capable of taking fairly high STR, for a MND-high MNK to be capable of off-healing/support, for WAR to be given the occasional option of going low-STR to act as a frenzied, high-speed dps wielding dual axes and getting double Beast Gauge from either one's crits, etc., etc.

Would there still be optimal builds for each fight, just as there are optimal jobs? Of course. But, at least there'd be some damned customization beyond whether to play at the minimum GCD speed for the given job or to play faster as not to get bored but lose some throughput for doing so.

Reaper is a lot of fun and I like playing it

No idea about balance, but it plays like slicing butter or something. It's smooth and fun.

My understanding is most melee classes are like within 10% though so that's pretty good.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by Eorzean_username

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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?

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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?

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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.