The end of Raidbuff - A solution for futur job Design

Let’s face it — raid buffs are probably one of the biggest obstacles when it comes to job balancing and encounter design in FFXIV. It’s also part of the reason why not every player is satisfied with how their job feels.

The fact that nearly all compositions are centered around 120s raid buffs, with almost no flexibility for different timing windows due to the homogenization of oGCD cooldowns, creates a rigid system. I truly believe that moving away from strict timed raid buffs could open the door to an entirely new era of job design, where each job could thrive with a stronger, more unique identity, without having to sync around strict burst windows or delay their GCDs to fit into a party plan.

What the end of timed raid buffs could bring:

Quote:

---

- A healthier space for persistent buff jobs like BRD (songs) or DNC (partner mechanics), and maybe even a return of passive debuff mechanics (physical/magical resistance, etc.) that aren’t tied to precise oGCD timings.

- More diversity in job rotations, especially for tanks — who currently feel very similar rotation-wise — or even healers, if SE ever decides to give them more engaging DPS tools.

- It would free up design space for jobs that feel overloaded during 60s/120s windows, where too much is happening at once.

- And of course, it would simplify encounter design, where SE wouldn't have to constantly accommodate burst windows or make mechanics that are "raid buff friendly".

---

One example I’ve always wanted to explore is a composition that doesn’t rely on any burst windows at all:

Any Tank / WHM - SGE / SAM - VPR - BLM - MCH

I get that, under the current balance, this comp isn’t considered optimal — but it’s a setup where no one has to worry about raid buffs or strict timers. You just press your buttons as they come up. That kind of gameplay can feel both relaxing and satisfying, especially for those who value consistency and individual flow over burst alignment.
As it stands, there’s practically no way to build a team without at least one raid buff to manage. I’m not saying we should remove all raid buffs — but introducing more viable job options that don’t rely on raid buff windows could let players build comps that feel different, and allow for a more diverse set of playstyles.

So yeah — what do you think? Would FFXIV benefit from moving away from the strict raid buff meta, or do you think it's too deeply embedded in the game's identity to change?

There is a whole lot more wrong with the job and encounter design,
But yes getting rid of the forced 2 min Raidbuff would be a majore step into the right direction.
When I started this game as Conjurer I was miffed when I realized I did not get any new attack but my 8th slightly different healingspell.
Then I leveld Thaumaturge and realized there is no situation based decision making but static rotation.
And then I learned that endgame Raids are all build an planned around a 120 second radbuff turning it into a choreographed performance...
Let's just say I thought it one of the dumbest design decisions I ever heared.

The two minute meta, and the SE's strict adherence to it, is the root of some of the biggest problems plaguing current job design. I would argue among the biggest issues the entire game currently has. Aligning every rotation, and every raid buff, to the same timer creates stagnation in job design.

I don't think we need to remove raid buffs entirely either in order to solve this. There are significantly more interesting ways to go about fixing this problem.

Reduce the overall number of party buffs
Abilities like Arcane Circle and Brotherhood don't need to have a party-wide damage buff associated with them. Their additional effects are enough to make the player want to hit the button on cooldown. Turn some party buffs into personal buffs, like Battle Litany, and increase their effect.

Make variable cooldown timers and create different types of buffs
Give us buffs that are on a 20 second cooldown, and some ultra-powerful ones that are on a 5 minute cooldown. Allow for the chance to lower the cooldown of a specific personal buff. For example "Critical strikes reduce the cooldown of x buff by 1 second". Give us different types of buffs instead of just straight damage %. Crit rate (I know this exists) or crit damage increase, skill/spell speed increase, cooldown reduction. Just anything other than +% damage.

I don't think the 2 minute meta is too deeply embedded in the game's identity to change. Sure it would require a lot of work on every single job, but the 2 minute meta wasn't always a thing. We went through an entire game rework and 2 expansions before the devs decided to start homogenizing raid buffs. Abolishing the this would also have the side-effect of solving a lot of other issues plaguing jobs at the moment. Things like Reaper's gauge negativity wouldn't be a thing because there wouldn't a strict timer to adhere to. Jobs with incredibly tight rotations would have that completely alleviated.

IMO there are only positives to blowing this whole thing up and bringing back some variety in buffs and rotations.

I think this is something that will definitely need to be done to get away from buff stacking metas like the game has had since forever (this isn't an EW 2min meta new thing at all, before it was Trick Attack). Jobs that aren't especially buffers in nature like MNK, DRG, etc, don't need those buffs. They're just a button that's there to press on cooldown.
Buffers like BRD and DNC however need to keep them, be valued for them, and also have more involved mechanics around them beyond pressing them on cooldown (Foe Requiem was the goat).
For example in pvp you have a select amount of buffers, and those are SCH and BRD only (DNC only buffs one person with more tools). It works well enough because this prevents buff stacking to break the balance outright.

On the other hand it goes without saying that removing this for half the job roster will remove one of the two remaining team based battle mechanics (the other being healing/mitigation), and this will show that the current pve model is desperately in need of more systems that prevent us from just playing a solo game with 7 players you never interact with since everything is about standing in the right spot individually.

Yeah this wouldn't be as simple as you think.

I mean, on a very macro-level, you can have three degrees of "buff-related" your class design can be:
* No buffs at all, except some self-stuff to indicate resource availabilities and combo-effects, more as a UI element. Far as I know few if any MMORPGs go this route, as this massively curbs design space in a really bad way.
* Some buffs of all types, but they're a special thing. <-- we are here. This has upsides in that individual buffs can feel meaningful, plus you can play with all kinds of buff types and modes, and they can all feel distinct. The downside is that they end up being a lynchpin of your design, as we can see from the 120s meta. Even if you break up the CDs, this'd always get optimized, and if anything lead to buffs being held or entire classes being excluded from some setups because they cannot sync up with everyone else in the group.
* All the buffs, all the time. This is usually done like how GW2 approaches it: Buffs are of a shared type, and various classes have different ways to apply what is ultimately the same buff (and hence doesn't stack). You're expected to have ~all buffs at ~all times. This is effectively trivializing buffs, but unlike the first option it keeps quite a lot of the design space around, even if the impact is very small and all flavor is lost.

There's no truly good solution. Every approach has downsides. You can mitigate each of those, but it's important to recognize that a different approach is not strictly better, it's just different. It has equivalent downsides of its own.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Valence

I think this is something that will definitely need to be done to get away from buff stacking metas like the game has had since forever (this isn't an EW 2min meta new thing at all, before it was Trick Attack).

---

The major difference with the old Trick Attack was that while it was up every 60 seconds your own job burst was not, if you even had any in the first place.
You wanted to put as much damage as possible into the buff window but your burst didn't just automatically align with it and you certainly also didn't want to drift your major cooldowns out of the much bigger buff windows.

This meant pooling resources for a sort of "mini-burst" or delaying some shorter cooldowns to take advantage of both the smaller and bigger windows.
It also made the average kill time more of a factor since it determined whether you should take advantage of certain buff windows or rather get an extra usage out of a cooldown.


Old Trick Attack itself wasn't all that interesting, everything around it was.
If you brought the 60 second Trick back in the current environment it wouldn't even move the needle since almost every job is now a 60 second burst job anyway.

Which is why raiders complained enough and SE changed it to 2min because some jobs weren't meta and whined because they couldn't play inside Trick Attack as much as others. That's why I'm saying having raid buffs become literal cornerstones if the whole gameplay where everyone wants to stack as much as possible else their gameplay or job is suboptimal doesn't lead to great things. Jobs may have been way more flavourful with different damage profiles back then, it didn't prevent raid buffs to already be a problem.

Don't get me wrong, I'd go back to the old design in a heartbeat, just without Trick Attack as a cornerstone to it so people would be less shackled by it.

I would love a culling of most raid buffs. Let jobs have all sorts of varied and wacky playstyles without having to line up with an arbitrary buff window.

A simple solution would be to make raidbuffs additive instead of multiplicative. Of course it would require changing buffs that are naturally multiplicative - for example one increasing damage with one increasing crit, they naturally synergise into multiplication.

But yeah aside from that, make all buffs count from the base damage instead of the unholy mix of all of them.

Of course, you would still want to stack them as most jobs either have burst at 2 minutes or can prepare for 2 minute to burst, but it would make non buff party compositions viable.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by ThurinTurambar

Of course, you would still want to stack them as most jobs either have burst at 2 minutes or can prepare for 2 minute to burst, but it would make non buff party compositions viable.

---

That's only the case right now, because they literally all have to be designed to have a 2-minute burst or their aDPS falls off a cliff.
As Valence said, if we're no longer shackled to the party buff window every 2 minutes then rotations no longer need to revolve around it. We could have 60 second bursts, 90 second bursts, 120 or jobs that completely rely on sustained dps again.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Absurdity

As Valence said, if we're no longer shackled to the party buff window every 2 minutes then rotations no longer need to revolve around it. We could have 60 second bursts, 90 second bursts, 120 or jobs that completely rely on sustained dps again.

---

What prevents people from intentionally delaying their, say, 105s cycle to line up with 3 other people in their group who cycle at 110s, 115s and 120s?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Carighan

What prevents people from intentionally delaying their, say, 105s cycle to line up with 3 other people in their group who cycle at 110s, 115s and 120s?

---

Because then it would not be mathematically needed to do the best DPS anymore. They can still do it, but it would not be required.

The reason we have this "everything converges around big damage cooldowns that occur once every 120s" gameplay is because of the multiplicative damage calculation which rewards buff stacking with more damage. People delayed their cooldowns so they could align with trick attack back in the day, since that meant an overall noticeable increase in DPS. Which is an important metric in a game where the goal is to reduce enemy hitpoints to zero, so much so that people complained to Square Enix about this. Thats how we arrived at today, where every class is builder-spender on a 120s timer.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by ovIm

Because then it would not be mathematically needed to do the best DPS anymore. They can still do it, but it would not be required.

---

What if delaying mathes out to be optimal DPS? Meaning to do maximum damage you'd be required to do that?

The point I made in my first post is that you can't really prevent this if you want to stick with this overall type of buff-centric design. You can fudge the numbers to the point where it becomes optimal not to align all the buffs, but... you could already do that now. But you don't. Hence some jobs delay their burst by a few GCDs while others do not, based on the per-job variance in lead-in time to the burst. Because right now it mathes so that aligning everything is optimal. But that's not a problem that'd be fixed by the proposed change really. It would still exist, just in a more crass fashion. Or maybe not, if you play the numbers right, but then it's important to realize that it was messing with potencies and hence the value of buff-alignment that did that, not the mechanical overall change.

Or if you go the way of an extra crass route and remove buffs (whole, leaving them on a handful of jobs like Dancer or Bard would usually make the problem worse unless you do it say that the PRanged jobs bring the buffs but you are hard-capped to only have 1 of them in the group, no exceptions), then we'd still math whether it's optimal to delay a rotation here or an effect there to align potting windows around boss abilities, or around debuffs, or around multiplicative effects where Monks or Reapers feed from other's GCDs.

It's not a problem you can solve at the root while just cutting a head of the hydra off. You need to get rid of the entire hydra if you want to keep the same goal.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Carighan

What prevents people from intentionally delaying their, say, 105s cycle to line up with 3 other people in their group who cycle at 110s, 115s and 120s?

---

That will then be entirely dependent on kill time, as it used to be.
In almost all cases it is a damage loss to delay cooldowns so they fit into a bigger buff window if that means you lose out on a usage over the entire fight.

Best example being Warrior between 4.2 and 6.0. Most party buffs did not align with it's 90 second cooldown IR but if delaying it meant you would lose out on a use towards the end of the fight it would pretty much always be the worse choice.

Obviously 115 and 120 seconds are so close to each other that you'd most likely always want to align them, but even the difference between 105 and 120 seconds is long enough that you could end up losing damage overall if you delayed your cooldowns.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Absurdity

That will then be entirely dependent on kill time, as it used to be.

---

But then why not just make all those cycles equal so to avoid the unexplained and unintuitive "sometimes you have to delay based on kill time and context and you better read up on that on The Balance you know"?

... that's how we got here, mind you:

1. Raid buffs and cycle times are different.
2. "Oh, we can optimize damage by delaying and aligning."
3. Everyone does (2) but it's neither explained nor visible, so might as well bake it into the base class definitions to fix that.
4. Everyone is aligned around a single, shared, cycle.

If we now add (1) as (5) at the bottom, wouldn't the cycle just repeat?

Yeah, the thing is, raiders themselves made this game design. It's not like this was something planned by devs.

It was a noticeable player habit.

Devs fed into player habit.

Now players are moaning again.

Not everyone is going to be happy. The moment we go back unaligned buffs, raiders will just be aligning them again.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Carighan

What if delaying mathes out to be optimal DPS? Meaning to do maximum damage you'd be required to do that?

---

I... what? I am trying to read your point but you make no sense to me in the context of this thread.
The issue is that buff stacking has taken over both job and fight design because of how the game works mathematically. Removing the mathematical need to stack buffs frees up options for player ingenuity, like what you are saying, delaying something depending on the phase because its worth it.
The issue is not players delaying their burst or working to sync up.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by EdenElsewhere

Yeah, the thing is, raiders themselves made this game design. It's not like this was something planned by devs.
...
Not everyone is going to be happy. The moment we go back unaligned buffs, raiders will just be aligning them again.

---

Devs indirectly caused all that by making buff stacking mathematically superior to everything else. Thats what a good game designer would have seen and understood, and I highly doubt CS3 does not have one of those laying around. When the synching up issue arose, they could have gone with a different route that was not pushing every class into the same damage type mold.
And no, the moment we go back to unaligned buffs, players will then have to see if it is even worth to realign since you may lose uses of your abilities over a fight if you delay too hard.

Does it matter much whether instead of all using it bugs at one we all use them in sequence?

Like, what does it matter? The combat sequence is static either way, unless you first want that changed, static rotation #1 it static rotation #2 has little bearing. Might as well align everything to remove the unintended interactions (which, as said above, is exactly the evolution the game went through, as all other MMOs do).

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Carighan

Does it matter much whether instead of all using it bugs at one we all use them in sequence?

Like, what does it matter? The combat sequence is static either way, unless you first want that changed, static rotation #1 it static rotation #2 has little bearing. Might as well align everything to remove the unintended interactions (which, as said above, is exactly the evolution the game went through, as all other MMOs do).

---

The combat sequence is static because everything has to align, there is no room for variance in the current design paradigm. If the buff stacking, which has shackled job and encounter design, was removed, we could theoretically go back to less static rotations on some classes.

having to decide if we want to align and actively paying attention to it seems to be the more fun / less boring thing instead of just pressing it whenever the cooldown is ready.

it also pushes the skill ceiling up. which is a good rhing in a game.

or am i wrong?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by ovIm

The combat sequence is static because everything has to align, there is no room for variance in the current design paradigm. If the buff stacking, which has shackled job and encounter design, was removed, we could theoretically go back to less static rotations on some classes.

---

Are aren't very experienced with MMORPGs, are you?

(Not meant in a bad way, it just shows. What you're describing is not how this works, and in fact it isn't even MMORPG specific. Even in other games you align burst; say in a MOBA someone CCs and then everyone dumps their burst skills onto the CCed target. You don't just press them ~whenever.)

The goal you're after "I want to make combat rotations less staticky" is good. And in fact IMO it's the biggest thing the devs would need to go after to make combat less samey and boring in FFXIV. But the idea you have "Make buffs not align" would not cause this, in fact it wouldn't move the needle. It'd still be a fully static combat flow for every job, just a different one than the one you do now. This is because neither the encounter nor the job have (with marginal differences on Dancer but not enough to make a difference) no variable/random elements, and hence naturally will have a static, pre-determined, optimal solution for every single encounter. "Encounter" here also includes the teammates around them and their solutions, meaning the group as a whole can find an optimal solution, this will naturally include alignment of big bursts to buff windows, whether personal or shared.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Asari5

having to decide if we want to align and actively paying attention to it seems to be the more fun / less boring thing instead of just pressing it whenever the cooldown is ready.

it also pushes the skill ceiling up. which is a good rhing in a game.

or am i wrong?

---

For me, this is one of FFXIV’s core issues. The skill ceiling today revolves almost entirely around how well you align raid buffs, rather than how well you actually play your job. Over time, jobs are being reworked and simplified in ways that consistently lower their individual skill ceiling—and with every expansion, it feels like this trend only gets worse.

I understand that raid buff alignment involves coordination, and yes, that's part of what makes an MMO engaging. But this system also brings a number of problems—poor netcode, datacenter differences, latency, and ping issues all have a real impact. Plus, the dev team is locked into designing encounters with this fixed system in mind (or sometimes not, which causes even more problems—just look at E4S, P8S, M4S, M8S some ultimate...).

If job performance weren’t so tightly tied to strict buff windows, fights could be more dynamic, and boss design could be more creative. Job kits could be more flexible, and the skill ceiling wouldn’t disappear—instead, it could shift toward personnal expression of adaptability, decision-making, and mastery, rather than just timing.

Last Min EDIT : Oh yeah also, it would ease dev job regarding the job balance

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by CalvinDescoles

For me, this is one of FFXIV’s core issues. The skill ceiling today revolves almost entirely around how well you align raid buffs, rather than how well you actually play your job.

---

More specifically, playing well means aligning your buffs. You play well, because you align your buffs.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Carighan

More specifically, playing well means aligning your buffs. You play well, because you align your buffs.

---

You're right, but that (well, at least for my taste) is very uninteresting. Suddenly it is a game about remembering to press that 60s ability on the right off global "slot" or you'll delay x, that can delay y and push z out of the burst window. While not forgetting to hoard your personal reources at near capacity to dump when?... Yeah, the burst windows.

It's symptomatic that every new job is basically a gimmick + a handful of 30/60/120s abilities meant to fill in the burst windows.

I mean, removing the 120s meta is not guarantee that we'll get interesting jobs again. But I feel it would be at least one less obstacle.

XIV has become "a game about remembering" tbh. Encounter design, job design, almost everything. Only side content like deep dungeons or pvp do differently.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Raikai

You're right, but that (well, at least for my taste) is very uninteresting. Suddenly it is a game about remembering to press that 60s ability on the right off global "slot" or you'll delay x, that can delay y and push z out of the burst window. While not forgetting to hoard your personal reources at near capacity to dump when?... Yeah, the burst windows.

It's symptomatic that every new job is basically a gimmick + a handful of 30/60/120s abilities meant to fill in the burst windows.

I mean, removing the 120s meta is not guarantee that we'll get interesting jobs again. But I feel it would be at least one less obstacle.

---

I mean, even that is more interesting than having nothing to align to. And it's not as if it's absurdly powerful. With how "selfish" jobs like SAM and VPR are tuned atm (generally top 3 for total contribution, including the true lead), having too many raid-buffers would be a loss to total party damage.

Syncing to raidbuffs is helpful, for sure, but the "multiplicity" (which is really just what it takes to make stacked raid-buffs nearly keep up with the higher pre-buff effective-potency offered by "selfish" jobs that thereby basically has that raidbuff's worth of damage baked in baseline, especially when more of that damage is concentrated into CDs) isn't allowing you enough excess DPS to afford an extra death or two. Apart from MCH being far behind BRD and DNC just due to tuning issues, raidbuff-fixation would be extremely optional if not for the fact that there's only 1 "selfish" comp even possible --SAM/VPR/BLM/MCH-- and that its requisite MCH is presently weak, putting it behind a comp with at least the inclusion Standard/Technical Finish.

"Use on CD" doesn't become any less dull just because you're no longer punished for not using them when others use their CDs. The latter is only a grain more complexity, but it is still more. If you want other things to hold CDs for, so be it, but that will still ultimately be "hold for X".

The only interesting "freedom" we'd be capable of is from having more than one thing worth holding for (we already do via deaths, but that's conditional upon player mistakes and shouldn't be treated as design), such as burst DPS checks that always remain relevant (e.g., because of scaled direct and DoT damage based on how long <thing> takes to die, with enough healing required before, during, and after that one doesn't just Sacred Soil + Panhaima/Macrocosmos and laugh) but can eventually at least become less oppressive, vulnerability windows that you can choicefully push (e.g., happens on mob X of Y getting reduced below Z% health), etc.

That is to say, unless encounter designs give choice in how to leverage varying party capacities (based on composition and, possibly, player skills both), there's never going to be any more meaningful choice, only more or less stricture/difficulty/skill-expression (even if in "banal" ways).

Quote:

---

I mean, removing the 120s meta is not guarantee that we'll get interesting jobs again. But I feel it would be at least one less obstacle.

---

A "120s meta" is not particularly even an obstacle to job design so long as we don't have any meaningful content outside of 8-mans. Without it, we can just assume that a job that can't exploit raidbuffs as well should have higher overall personal damage such that it's in-context/in-practice damage is roughly the same as everyone else's in-context/in-practice damage.

Granted, I'd really love to see 4-man Extreme/Savage-level content that's more interesting and more mainstreamed than Criterion Dungeons, which then might require that raidbuffs split themselves (double the effect but add the clause "Effect is split proportionately when affecting more than 4 allies, thereby falling to as little as 50% when affecting 8 players"), but even then the same applies.

So long as you tune them fairly, burst vs. sustain essentially fall down to a decision between "100% value vs. tight DPS checks and 90% value vs. overall enrage" vs. "80% value vs. tight DPS checks and 100% value vs. overall enrage", with compositions gradually able to take more and more sustained jobs while still surviving checks and/or burst jobs needing to waste less and less time holding CDs as all gear up.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Raikai

I mean, removing the 120s meta is not guarantee that we'll get interesting jobs again. But I feel it would be at least one less obstacle.

---

Oh yes, of course. I kinda prefer a different route there, but I agree on that ultimate goal and that at some point the 120s meta has to be removed along the way for sure.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

I mean, even that is more interesting than having nothing to align to.

---

I mean, if we use jobs as they are and just remove the 120s raid buff element, I'd agree. But in my head, for that to really work through, jobs would also need to be revamped to offer kits that encourage thinking and deep engagement (in-itself mechanics and interactions), which is a huge undertaking, of course, and probably need an expansion with no new jobs at all for it to happen.

Plus there could be some other buffing variables, like a Dancer/Astrologian buffing a single person every 30s, or a Bard overlaying the party in set intervals. Maybe a Machinist debuffing the enemy every 20s for a couple of seconds - things that not only would enforce the support aspect of 'support jobs' outside of the 120s meta, but also promote you to adjust on the go based on your party composition or if you get to be the recipient for single buffs.

I'd agree with you that we need more content engaging enough for other aspects of the jobs kit to have some meaning. For example, everybody's AoE kits feel like an afterthough because of the very few chances you have to use it outside of 4-man trash that isn't that challenging to begin with. I'd love to see the other 'grazes' to be useful as aiming - to my surprise in the Occult Crescent they don't even work!

I'd revise buffs by making their optimum use time variable instead of fixed. So enemies might have a vulnerable state where they take more damage and you'd want to save buffs for this state. The vulnerable state would not be scripted to occur at known times but instead have to be triggered by the party in some way, so they'd have to deal enough damage or reflect an attack or something along those lines. More DPS phases could have the same effect where the party needs burst damage to succeed at something but doesn't know when the burst will be needed. Buff themselves aren't the problem, it's their rigid implementation.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Raikai

I mean, if we use jobs as they are and just remove the 120s raid buff element, I'd agree. But in my head, for that to really work through, jobs would also need to be revamped to offer kits that encourage thinking and deep engagement (in-itself mechanics and interactions), which is a huge undertaking, of course, and probably need an expansion with no new jobs at all for it to happen.

---

Yeah basically it'd be a fairly big undertaking.

One big element is that for jobs that'll be based on a random pattern (meaning you have a nontrivial resource or proc you get randomly enough to not have a semi-reliable pattern to its usage) you can have big buffs, even party buffs, but due the extremely unreliable nature of the underlying resource system, this is fine. It can't be aligned. Not in a meaningful manner.

Another way of doing this is if a job is inherently resource-fluctuating, and has a small-ish party or single buff they constantly toggle on or off based on their resource state. Compare Revenants in GW2, particularly their Herald spec. They cannot keep their slew of party buffs going on for long. But they'll be constantly re-enabling it since they get their resource back just as quick.

hahahahahahahahahahahahaha

quickly scanned the discussion here. dont think anyone suggested this and i dont know how well it would fare but i thought this change might give more flexibility to the strict 2min buff usage atleast.

- give us 2 charge of raid buff and increase the cd from 2 min to 4min.

one thing I liked about charge system the dev start implementing for certain ability gives leeway to use the 2nd charge anytime before overcap.
with 2 charge and 4min cd. the party have choice to blow their 2 raid buff in the opener or use 2nd raid buff anywhere before they overcap (4min window after opener raid buff) or 8min if they blow all 2 at the begining.

this can help allevaite the restrictive must use raidbuff at 2min window or lose usage due to kill time and also provide party to optimize on their own.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Komaru_Tatoro

quickly scanned the discussion here. dont think anyone suggested this and i dont know how well it would fare but i thought this change might give more flexibility to the strict 2min buff usage atleast.

- give us 2 charge of raid buff and increase the cd from 2 min to 4min.

one thing I liked about charge system the dev start implementing for certain ability gives leeway to use the 2nd charge anytime before overcap.
with 2 charge and 4min cd. the party have choice to blow their 2 raid buff in the opener or use 2nd raid buff anywhere before they overcap (4min window after opener raid buff) or 8min if they blow all 2 at the begining.

this can help allevaite the restrictive must use raidbuff at 2min window or lose usage due to kill time and also provide party to optimize on their own.

---

It wouldn't help much at all. You'd still hold the second raidbuff for when everyone's 2-minute attacks come off CDs, at which point the timing is identical... until you get to minute 6, where you'd still have another 2 minutes until your second charge finishes cooling.

First charge asap - 4 minutes to cool
Second charge at 2 minutes - 2 minutes left on charge 1, an extra 4 minutes for charge 2. C1 cools at 4 min, C2 at 8 min.
6 minutes? No charge.
8 minutes? Charge up.
10 minutes? Nothing again.
12 minutes? Charge up.
Repeats.

This would be because you doubled the recast time and multiple charges don't cool simultaneously (and if they did, you'd want to use each asap, same as with 1 charge).

So you'd ultimately just have less going on while remaining identically constrained, and now needing to imbalance buff parties and buffless parties specifically around short (favoring raidbuff) and long (favoring raidbuff-less) fights.

well the charge system give you flexibility. for example m7s' 8min buff window is during DD. that one not everyone can receive the buff because party is spread and delaying it means the 10min buff window is scuff and might not be availiable if kill time is fast too.

so with charge system, you can afford to delay it for x amount before overcap and does not affect the next charge comes available (unless overcap)

of course ppl can still use it on strict 2min due to how their job rotation works to burst like you mention.

Wouldn't that just make the raid window alignment worse though. Since right now, one of the few ways it can still be an active problem players need to actively handle is if it butts up against fight mechanics when it comes up. And your idea with charges would freeform allow players to pick the idea "empty" spots in a fight for burst, meaning the relative percentage of damage affected by buffs - and hence the importance of buff alignment - gets even worse.

No, you can't use a 4-minute CD every 2 minutes, even if there are two charges (at least after minute 6).

And as Carighan said, the only possible benefit of two charges is to use them off the normal timing, but that means even more importance of one person hitting the first buff at the ideal time, the rest instantly throwing out theirs, and then everyone releasing their banked damage, which --if annoyed by the importance of CDs in windows-- just makes the monkey-bank-monkey-burst all the more crucial, as you can't necessarily know the new schedule without comms. And if that's only every 4 min instead of 2, you'd presumably have to double the modifiers to maintain the same strength, so...

More importantly, if you do have fully flexible raidbuff timings... that timing will still be synced to whenever the greatest amount of raid effective-potency (pre-raidbuffs) can be dumped. If those skills remain the same, then the raidbuff timings will remain the same. If they become more varied, then the optimal time is determined by raid comp, with some jobs matching better with each other than others and therefore being further preferred (with no counterbalance possible for that variance until you make some novel concern to compete with optimal overall-damage synergy).


______________

Last note: With buffless jobs (minus MCH) as strong as they are at present, you could essentially just drop raidbuffs off a couple jobs or buff BLM by half a percent, MCH by ~4%, and non-AST healer damage by ~3% (so, merely up to parity with BRD/DNC, at least in ST) and go for a buffless comp. Heck, of late, VPR/SAM/BLM/WHM tend to outperform the overall damage contribution of raidbuffing competitors until deep farm status anyways.

Given that, I'm not really sure that raidbuffs are... that much of an issue, let alone one that can at all be addressed separately.

If we wanted to make more potency bankable, we certainly could, and perhaps even change raidbuffs over to spenders for a revamped Limit Break system, with LB generation and LB starting point increased per raidbuffer present (perhaps varying job to job) or whatever, but of late I'm just having trouble seeing where the big reward would lie for doing so. Maybe I just need more time to stew on it, though.