Hot Take Inside: Remove raidwide buffs (2m) to explore new job design

[Rika007]

The point I guess I'm trying to make is that all this complexity can be attained alone simply by removing raidbuffs.

You're missing a pretty big problem with this though. Many players would outright quit their jobs if you do this. Do you actually think Dancers would keep playing Dancer if you just outright removed the party buffing support of Technical step? Or Bards would stay Bards if you removed the songs, Battle Voice and Radiant Finale? You would keep a few hardcore diehards sure, but the allure of these jobs is their support kits. All you have to do is look at Shadowbringers Bard and all the players who pitched a massive fit over the loss of Foe's Requiem and Refresh. It's the identity of the job. You are looking to create rotational complexity at the cost of cutting out years of job identity that many players have fell in love with. It would piss off far more players then it would actually make happy. Again not even touching that players of other jobs who aren't that support oriented but still have raid buffs would also not be happy either...

Don't touch our raid buffs. There are far more interesting ways to deal with downtime and stale rotations in this game. We shouldnt be removing team interplay and organized burst windows. As a follow up aside the idea of a class based game that doesn't have a class that empower all of it's comrades just sounds weird to me. There should always be a few classes that full fill the fantasy of that role. If you think maybe the amount of them should be cut down, then sure by all means maybe that can be pursued (but then you have to find out which jobs to remove them from), but the idea of removing all raidwide buffs just feels like the biggest overcorrection ever.

Side note, but a few people now have suggested "just add personal buffs!" for a solution to the downtime issue... is that really something people enjoy? I actively avoid jobs with personal buff because I find they just don't feel exciting...

At the end of the day, I dunno. I think I'd rather take a bit of imbalance for a much more exciting game. I know the playerbase tends to overreact to balance (see: people still locking MCH out of parties...); but we've also had jobs like MCH which are terminally undertuned (and NIN, which was incredibly weak until 6.08) which are still able to clear the content just fine. Does it make it right that these jobs are weak? No, of course not. They can and should be buffed. But I'd take Ninja being bottom of the pack for another patch or two if we got Trick back, and a few patches more if some of the other buffs went on more interesting timers, too.

Hell, even if it's just one-minute and two-minute cooldowns, that's still an improvement over right now.

Personally speaking? Heck yes I love personal buffs. Monk is currently one of my favorite jobs to play because I love the way that the interplay of Riddle of fire and Perfect balance cooldown timer creates a sort of 'mini' burst at the 1 minute mark. I was really excited when Endwalker media tour showed Bard having raging strikes still on a cooldown of 60 seconds, it made me think of some fun options for stacking bloodletters and Apex/Blasting to really get a good hit out during a moment the job kinda slows down. I was very let down when they moved Raging to the 2 minute zone. Personal buffs being the only thing a job brings is very boring, but when they are used as an addition to the full kit, it becomes a fun way to augment the rotation.

As for your question on balance, I can agree, but we already know the player base in itself will not. FF14 as a game may have the best balance of any class based game I've ever seen but players are never happy. Keeping at least a more consistent burst timing for at least the most major cooldowns allows the dev team to keep a pretty good balance area. That being said though, it is no excuse for rotations degrading to the lowest common denominator. These things are not mutually exclusive. We can have fun rotations across the board and still line up with burst windows for the jobs.

Retro edit follow up: I also don't in anyway disagree with you though. I dont disagree that enforcing a 2 minute rotation has had some unintended hits as well, and I would like to see the devs correct them, my point is more that you can still keep identity of jobs without abandoning the 2 minute time cycle. Trick Attack/Mug (cause lets face it, in the end they do the same thing, just now less often and with a different ability) could have remained on the 1 minute cycle and still also lined up. I'd prefer to see individual buffs, buffs that improve singular party, and a few shorter party wides thrown here and there, and keep the heavy hitting ones all at the 2 min.

I also don't want to abandon the positives of some of these changes though. Getting Battle Voice in line, Dragon Sight, Presence of Mind, Bard and Warrior's entire burst cycle... The problem when you have only a few things outside the cycle that everything else aligns with, they aren't creative exceptions, they become undertuned outliers unless the power of said abilities are made so obscene that they just become busted (like Battle Litany due to the power of crit in this game. Even though Bards Battle voice was also a 3 minute and added more DH then BL added CH, the power of crit made Litany so strong that even off the cycle it made the job meta). 2 minutes is just a very solid base line to keep jobs tuned properly.