More thoughts on party buffs

One of the problems with how raid buffs work in EW is that because raid buffs are
1. So numerous
2. So impactful and
3. All on 2 minute cooldowns,
that any mechanic that causes anyone to lose uptime is an enormous deal. If you’re a dragoon and there’s a mechanic that makes you disengage for 5 seconds (or if you just die) in any two minute window your, and by extension your party’s, damage is massively effected. ESPECIALLY if other melee and tanks need to disengage for a few GCD’s in that window. The devs thought of this and decided the solution was to make every buff radius and each boss's hitbox enormous. This presents another issue: Now melees and tanks never lose uptime and can punch a boss whose body is 50 feet away which is downright immersion breaking. This also feeds into the issue of ranged physicals dealing less damage than melees for seemingly no reason anymore. This used to be balanced by the fact that melees would lose uptime to handle mechanics. This can't happen anymore because losing uptime on a boss causes rotations to get desync'd with buff windows which inordinately impact a party's DPS. This also impacts fight design. Now the devs have two options: 1. Have no mechanics going on during buff windows so players don't have to worry about desyncing. 2. Have a mechanic happen during buff windows so keeping buffs/rotations in sync is a skill check. There's nothing inherently wrong with either of these, aside from making fights very predicable and same-feeling. The other way this impacts fights is that downtime is now a HUGE issue. If a boss goes untargetable for more than a few seconds, jobs that rely on using skills to generate resources now can't get anything ready for a buff window.

On just the game feel side, the core issue with the 2 minute meta isn't "wahh, i have to hit battle voice every 2 minutes." It's more like "I have to spend a minute and 45 seconds pooling resources (in most cases means just doing my 1-2-3 combo) then I mash every button I have for 15 seconds, rinse and repeat". And this is the case on effectively every job.

That wouldn't be that much of an issue except that buffs that are maintained by doing your rotations (SAM's damage and haste buffs, Huton, storm's eye) as well as resource management in general (kenki, RDM mana, MP, ninki, aetherflow) have become so easy that they don't require hardly any headspace anymore. On the surface that could be a good thing, it means you're more able to pay attention to fight mechanics. That, however, is a double edged sword. If you're doing a fast, hectic fight, with tons to pay attention to like Barb EX or P4S then current job design works well. You're so occupied by the fight that the fact that you don't have to think a ton about your job isn't an issue. Contrast that with Rubicante EX or P7S (or most normal/MSQ content). Those are slow and don't require a ton of thought, causing more of your attention to drift to your job meaning now you're really noticing that all you're doing is pressing 1-2-3 (or if you're a healer just 111111).

Until the devs prune or rework party buffs this will be an issue. Why? If job damage profiles were more diverse and less burst focused this would allow greater diversity in playstyles, it would make fight design less boring and it would make balancing, ironically, more straightforward since they wouldn't have to account for over a dozen different multiplicative raid buffs. For the record, almost nothing would make me happier than the devs removing/reworking virtually all raid buffs. (that and making healers fun again) I’d keep the buffs that are core to a given job's identity (DNC, BRD, AST), and for buffs that generate resources for the user (arcane circle, brotherhood) I'd remove their damage increases and make them strictly resource generators. And obviously, put them on different cooldowns.

TLDR: Raid buffs themselves aren't the issue. The number of them, them all being on the same cooldown, the impact of them, and the devs taking easy solutions to feedback are the issues.

Another thing I'll add is that despite how powerful these buffs are when combined into one big wombo combo, taken individually they actually lack any real impact. Your average console playing AST in a 24 man isn't going to feel diddly squat from the current cards and they never will without a parser on hand to quantify it.

Compare anything we have now to a Resto Shaman in WoW dropping a WF totem for their pet warrior in tow. Over the course of a full encounter, did the non enhance WF totem add up to more than the 2min buff windows we see now in XIV? I strongly suspect not. Did that WF totem feel glorious when the warrior strung together a string of procs and melted the face off that PLD they were smacking? Absolutely, it was deliciously satisfying.

Thus perhaps one avenue for SE to consider is to take steps to limit multiplicative buffs but in turn give individual buffs more teeth. Perhaps even implement some kind of ceiling with diminishing returns so that it becomes more optimal to stagger and rotate buffs rather than just smashing them all into the same tiny RSI inducing burst window?

This is kinda how I feel as well. Like I don't hate that that raid buffs, and bursts have been standardized, it's just a design constraint that provides rotational structure like the heroes' journey or pop music, but it does pose balance problems both in terms of numbers, and job usability. But those can fixed by adjusting cooldowns of skills, and potencies. To me the real meat of the problem lies in improving job feel which requires looking at each job individually. Solutions for improving the moment to moment game play for like GNB would not be appropriate for SCH.

The PVP versions of jobs get a lot of praise, but the funny thing is that they would technically conform to the "2 minute meta" as most of them are on 20-30 second loops (on a dummy). But they feel great because job mechanics are always present, and they make use of that time incredibly efficiently. Strong thematic job mechanics can coexists with standardized rotation structure, but finding them requires work, and imagination.