7.0 combat should go back to the shb recipe - burst rotations aren't enjoyable

[Satarn]

yeah, lets bring back those buttons that do nothing until the boss is 20% or lower XD

Still better than having a bunch of hotkeys dedicated to single target copies of already existing AoE skills and vice-versa, while better things are removed due to "button bloat" - which is the amazing "innovation" SHB brought us (and EW continued with great hits like shlolha 2).

Yea, finishers were kinda awkward on bosses, but at least they were pretty fun in open world, on dungeon trash and raid adds - especially with the likes of Mercy Stroke and Sole Survivor giving you a decent chunk of health back. Were they a good thing to remove in order to make space for new skills? Sure, probably, but it's not like we've got anything creative and engaging in return.

[Ransu]

Still better than having a bunch of hotkeys dedicated to single target copies of already existing AoE skills and vice-versa, while better things are removed due to "button bloat" - which is the amazing "innovation" SHB brought us (and EW continued with great hits like shlolha 2).

Yea, finishers were kinda awkward on bosses, but at least they were pretty fun in open world, on dungeon trash and raid adds - especially with the likes of Mercy Stroke and Sole Survivor giving you a decent chunk of health back. Were they a good thing to remove in order to make space for new skills? Sure, probably, but it's not like we've got anything creative and engaging in return.

They were super fun to use in open world and in dungeons. Other MMO's would give classes with finishers something that would proc it outside of the HP % requirement. Not sure why they couldn't do that here instead of just out right removing them.

[Rilifane]

I don't tend to focus heavily on DPS in this game, but if you mean the idea of forcing everyone and everything to align to and revolve around the 2 min windows, perfect and complicated openers (and sometimes counter-intuitive, like PLD with the cursed FoF business) to ensure you line up with everyone for the rest of the fight, and where drift is highly detrimental and destructive to the entire affair...?

If you're talking about that being bad, I 100% agree.

I can't imagine who saw that on the Dev team and was like "Yeah, we need to force this on everyone and make the difference between doing this right and doing this not right 30% of players' damage" or whatnot. From a design perspective, that's just ridiculously insane.

It was a dumb idea in so many ways.
It made balancing more difficult, it made rotations less enjoyable, it took away so much potential for group skill expression and odd strats in endgame fights, it made even the slightest mistakes infinitely more punishing than before and impossible to realign things without transitions. But as so often, they shot themselves in the foot with their obsession with rigidity. The moment you make something the standard by design, anything slightly deviating from it will have a much bigger impact than if it was one of several options.
The more rigid something is by design, the less forgiving it is. Always. And they went the route of the least forgiving class design and made it harder for them to balance and less enjoyable for us as players.

So I wonder... who was this change for?

[Kalaam]

I think at first this might have made design and balancing easier for the devs, and jobs simpler so more appealing to newcomers. And in a way, it still is. outside of savage difficulty this is not an issue, at least until you grow tired of your rotaion being very static

[Valence]

The SHB recipe was a disaster and is what brought all the current problems to the forefront.

All of the rphys identity was butchered in SHB, not in EW. Lost their uniqueness in party wide mitigation, lost their MP and party resource buffs.

Everything has been refocused extensively on pure damage shenanigans only. Everything has been simplified by removing entire chunks of gameplay, without adding anything new to replace them. We're only living through the aftermath of this trend.

[Zarkovitch]

Sorry but SHB raid buff alignment was gross. EW is basically SHB but replace the raid window to start,6 mins raid buffs for start, 2mins, 4 mins, 6mins raid buffs. And plus EW is the casual SHB. Expect the next expansion to be way more casual than the other one. Maybe the next expansion will having 1 min burst windows.

[Rika007]

The SHB recipe was a disaster and is what brought all the current problems to the forefront.

All of the rphys identity was butchered in SHB, not in EW. Lost their uniqueness in party wide mitigation, lost their MP and party resource buffs.

Everything has been refocused extensively on pure damage shenanigans only. Everything has been simplified by removing entire chunks of gameplay, without adding anything new to replace them. We're only living through the aftermath of this trend.

Thank god people are actually remembering and seeing this. Endwalker burst design is just Shadowbringers design evolved.

Now if the argument was to go back to Stormblood? Sure I would be down. Some would prefer Heavensward, but many are forgetting there was a LOT of janky crap that existed back in 3.0 that 4.0 did a fantastic job of solving. Keep a few QoL and intelligent changes (like the removal of piercing debuff) along with 4.0's design? That would be far better.

[Shurrikhan]

Its mostly down to buff stacking. The more you can stack, the more value attacks become in that same window. So everything gets focussed into that window.

This can only be broken if stacking is no longer effective. Some buffs can still stack (damage, armor, healing), but it prevents 4 damage buffs at the same time being effective. To achieve this, there are multiple ways:
- Strongest effect wins, the rest is ignored (SCH and SGE shields achieve this effect already and is not an issue)
- Weakened stacking. Instead of 2x a 5% buff, the 2nd 5% buff (sorted by strongest effect, or by apply moment) is weakened to for example 2.5%. While it can still be used for a burst window. It depends more on the other roles which method is prefered as an extended 5% duration might still result in more damage. Linear stacking will remain broken.
- Hard buff limits. Stacking can work, but not beyond a certain value. For example if there are 3 party buffs of 5% available, but the limit is 10%, you can overlap 2 of them, but not 3. But the 3rd one on that can also be combined with a personal buff to create a 2nd window, allowing players to pick their prefered window and support more burst rotations.

And even mechanic wise there are methods to act against it (these are not a true solution, but mechanics like this could still weaken burst window vulnerable bosses):
- Randomized damage debuffing. By making bosses apply a lot of debuffs in a randomized pattern that doesnt follow the 2min window. The dps classes might face a debuff during the 2min window, and by that get all the damage bonusses completely negated. This motivates spreading out to negate the effects from this. As these debuffs only affect dps, its not a problem that the bosses can spam this.
- Burst armor. Giving a boss armor when the dps is exceeding a certain value, it can directly negate the burst window by making it counter productive. Forcing players to spread out the burst damage. This can even be part of a dps check where you realy want to maximize the damage. This however might be a bit too anoying and for that reason limited to savages (where such coordination might actualy be a welcome mechanic).

This sounds far worse than what exists now, to be honest. Literally game-breakingly terrible.

Making buffs unable to stack (only a single damage raidbuff active at a time) means they now have to be scheduled into stagger, which means fighting in PuGs / DF over who gets to actually use their skills during a decent window. That would be outright garbage, socially and in terms of gameplay.

Randomly debuffing people to hopefully crush their burst windows? Whhhhyyy? And it wouldn't even be remotely 1-to-1. It'd just absolutely shit on any coherent rotation, and therefore gameplay. Known or created encounter damage-up/down windows (see Ravana) are fine to work around, but wholly random?

"Burst Armor" to specifically "completely negate" good play? What do you have left then? Purposely hamstringing yourself is not fun. Make CDs more flexible (moved to resource cost or given an overclock function*, etc.) and allow for AI manipulation based around relative HPS/DPS/MPS, sure, but... building something with the strict intention of breaking apart previously good play, let alone with zero regard for the obvious scaling issues involved? Hell no.

The only one among them that makes sense is the weakened stacking, and even that you've made so significant a punishment that it might as well be a hard buff limit, which is, again, an utterly terrible idea.

I'd say you might just instead want to make (de)buffs calculate dynamically to force additive-like stacking, instead of multiplicative, but (1) our netcode can't support dynamic buffs (only snapshotted ones), and (2) it wouldn't make a difference, because you'd already be fitting the actual direct-throughput CDs under those CDs and thus have reason to stack multipliers even if the multipliers were not, themselves, synergetic.

____________________

If you want to move away from the 2-minute meta, you simply build job/general capacity and encounter-based reasons to bank skills not to be used immediately upon their coming back off CD. That's it. That is your most effective option.

It doesn't require that we revert to "Can't play A without E, G, H, and J" job dependencies or set comps such that any fellow following out of the meta gets you, too, barred from PFs. It doesn't require that we now purposely avoid synergies and have to squabble over who's actually allowed to benefit from their buffs. It doesn't require that we make the bosses immune to all dps above a certain value.

It's just a matter of powerful heal, tank, and dps checks that don't align perfectly with striking dummy CD milestones, of encounter-applied vulnerability windows, and of decisions to be made between completing as quickly as possible the dangerous phases/situations vs. more greatly taking advantage of what follows, etc.




Also, let's not pretend ShB macrorotational design was different from Endwalker's except in that it was less polished and a couple of dumb job adjustments hadn't yet hit (see BRD, GNB). If you want something actually different in terms of sync, you'd have to go back to Stormblood. And it wouldn't be all positives even then.

[rxantos]

They are making each job too equal to the other jobs.
I know why they are doing it. So is easier to balance. But in doing so they are making the game BORING.

Homogenization is great for PvP. But not so great for PvE.