Job balance vs the 2 minute burst window and full uptime

[Aco505]

Here's a hot take: The problem is the existence of raid buffs.

In a world without raid buffs, you can design the outgoing damage profile of each job in isolation from all other jobs, and you can make that damage profile whatever you want, from a relatively constant stream of damage to high/low phases. As long as each job within a role does roughly the same damage over N minutes -- where N can be as long as the expected time to enrage, for example -- then each job is "viable" from a damage standpoint. As long as each job within a role has roughly the same freedom of movement and action ranges, you can wave your hand and assume that they'll all be able to resolve mechanics to maintain uptime, either by moving around any "bursts" in their rotation or by coordinating with the rest of the party. There's room for variety between jobs, individual creativity, and group creativity.

Yes and no. Most jobs (especially DPS) had 120s buffs in ShB with MNK being the main outlier since it mostly worked on 90s timers. MNK was still strong, but it was completely un-synchronized from the whole party except in 6-min windows (and 3-min windows if you happened to have more of those).

So while it's true that removing or minimizing the effect of party buffs would allow design to be more free and less restricted to "everyone must burst a little every 60s and more every 120s" it can also bring back issues that already existed before. The balance is hard to strike, but it affected specific jobs more than others and that can easily come back.

Also, kill and enrage times can harm jobs with 180s cooldowns unless these are properly balanced, since you can lose uses compared to 45/60/120s ones. Of course, this also allows optimization such as holding a 180 for the last 120 or so if a use is not lost for instance, but it's still something to consider.

It does seem they are making jobs similar so that they can balance them easier. Seeing how MNK has got a system similar to SAM now, I could anticipate DRG being made even closer to RPR with the planned changes. I can understand this because we are going to reach double the amount of jobs we had in ARR and it will only get harder to juggle them all, but it's a bit of a shift from the philosophy of every job being unique.

They're not homogenizing the jobs because of 60/120s bursts or any other specific reason, they're doing so because they want to. They could easily keep most if not all jobs unique by tweaking what's necessary. Just to point an example, people in the forums already ask for DRG to lose its unique 5-step combo and to have less oGCDs to be exactly like the other melees or turn LotD into Enshroud 2.0 when that can be easily avoided with other formulas.