Paladin doesn't suck, 2 minute rotations just ruined combat

[FireMage]

ad hominem

1: appealing to feelings or prejudices rather than intellect

2: marked by or being an attack on an opponent's character rather than by an answer to the contentions made

I keep my fflogs private. :^) I already pointed out how syncing raid buffs inherently is not a bad thing, nor is it completely new since EW, only that every job with nearly every raid buff being synced to 120s is not enjoyable or good design, and why. I have also admitted how I was also one of the player base pushing for it, and how much I regret it now that we have it.

Again, not an ad homimem, correlation. Bads don't understand balance, I didn't make the rules. And you've done no such thing in regards to showing how it isn't good design, when it objectively is. It. Is. Good. For. Balance.

[Lyth]

...

I think that somewhere along the way, stating that 'the two-minute meta is destroying the game' has become perceived as a clever and insightful thing to say, but players have stopped actually thinking about why they might agree or disagree with that statement. I'm having an increasingly harder time actually linking your arguments back to this claim. I'm not even sure that you know why you're defending the sentiment at this point.

Pretty much all Heavensward/Stormblood openers were designed around when Trick happened. So playing around party buffs isn't a new thing, even if you didn't understand why your opener was designed the way it was. Holding resources or timing buffs to occur during your highest potency GCDs is an even older concept.

Target dummy rotations have never really been the main challenge in this game. The main reason why you're going to mess up your burst window alignment is because of a death, rather than pressing the wrong button (or at least I hope that's the case, by this point in the expansion). If you want a rotational challenge, then you probably need a job designed around procs and branching decisions around those. Outside of that type of design, on most jobs you'll probably be able to narrate out GCD sequences to specific mechanics once you understand the puzzle pieces of a fight. In fact, I think you'll get more interesting gameplay out of variable/branching fight patterns than you would out of changing anything up on job design, but that's a different discussion altogether.

[Shurrikhan]

Can someone translate this please?

You claimed that we should just remove all raid buffs... because "^" (carrot / up arrow).

Normally, I would think that would mean you were pointing to a prior post or, at a stretch, to the OP. But neither the prior post nor the OP give rationales that would warrant the removal of raid-buffs.

On the off chance you were pointing to the post immediately prior to yours, which was mine, I explained why my reasoning given (that all raid-buffs push players towards a single rhythm of CDs to buff damage and damage to exploit those buffs, regardless of whether that be a 2-minute interval or not / we've done this since NIN anyways) doesn't mean that you have to get rid of raid buffs.

Instead, it simply means that you have to design fights within a particular balance of allowing for multiple compositions (no "need X comp to avoid wiping") while still including reasons to take non-meta jobs (i.e., jobs that are outside of just whatever rhythm creates the best total DPS in dummy fight scenarios) through minor DPS checks that do not match those meta comps' CD rhythm.

[RyuDragnier]

It isn't necessarily about being hard, but about it being fun or well designed. Remember less than 10 total PLDs/WARs worldwide could clear P8s week 1, and a lot of that I believe is due to this 2 minute design. DPS disparity has reached up to 15% in some cases. So not only are things less balanced than in Creator/SB/SHB, but most people (myself included) find them to be much less enjoyable.

You're forgetting fight design. PLD shined in fights where uptime was hard to get. This entire tier uptime is 100%, so it has fallen behind. It's not the 2 minute cooldown causing it, it's the devs having made the fights with 100% uptime in mind. Hell, they're actually reconsidering the ranged tax for this very reason.

[Eisi]

You claimed that we should just remove all raid buffs... because "^" (carrot / up arrow).

Normally, I would think that would mean you were pointing to a prior post or, at a stretch, to the OP. But neither the prior post nor the OP give rationales that would warrant the removal of raid-buffs.

On the off chance you were pointing to the post immediately prior to yours, which was mine, I explained why my reasoning given (that all raid-buffs push players towards a single rhythm of CDs to buff damage and damage to exploit those buffs, regardless of whether that be a 2-minute interval or not / we've done this since NIN anyways) doesn't mean that you have to get rid of raid buffs.

Instead, it simply means that you have to design fights within a particular balance of allowing for multiple compositions (no "need X comp to avoid wiping") while still including reasons to take non-meta jobs (i.e., jobs that are outside of just whatever rhythm creates the best total DPS in dummy fight scenarios) through minor DPS checks that do not match those meta comps' CD rhythm.

Yeah, but wouldn't it be much cooler if jobs or fights didn't have to be designed around those windows?

[Shurrikhan]

Yeah, but wouldn't it be much cooler if jobs or fights didn't have to be designed around those windows?

Not really, no. That'd just remove an interesting aspect of play (however overmuch it might seem at the moment) with... nothing at all.

[Eisi]

Not really, no. That'd just remove an interesting aspect of play (however overmuch it might seem at the moment) with... nothing at all.

So if there existed a job concept which is not feasible with either iteration of raid buffs and which you would personally regard as worth the cost of how exciting you think raid buffs are you would agree with me?

[Mikey_R]

Instead, it simply means that you have to design fights within a particular balance of allowing for multiple compositions (no "need X comp to avoid wiping") while still including reasons to take non-meta jobs (i.e., jobs that are outside of just whatever rhythm creates the best total DPS in dummy fight scenarios) through minor DPS checks that do not match those meta comps' CD rhythm.

Just to play devil's advocate here, but the 60/120s bursts also restrict boss design.

Say you want to have an add that comes out at 20 seconds, or 40 seconds past the minute and it is designed that you need to burst it down. With the 60/120 second design, you cannot do that, this type of add has to come at the 60 second intervals so that the group can kill it, then you have to make it stronger to compensate. If group bursts were different, you only need 1 or 2 to use their burst, which isn't an issue as they line up anyway.

-------

To go back to discussing the 60/120. It has been mentioned that all groups lined up at 6 minutes in past expansions. This was the big burst phase (after fight opening), however, with EW design, that 6 minute burst now comes 3 times as often and is now much stronger due to new actions in EW. Where, in the past you might double your DPS every 6 minutes, you now double it every 2 minutes, which in turn brings up how important these burst phases are in relation to the whole fight.

Also, I don't understand the obsession with 60/120. For sake of argument, let's say we will keep the 120 burst, no problems there, but why do we need to keep to the 60 second burst? No job has a raid buff at 60 seconds, so, in theory, the mini bursts don't have to come out at 60 seconds, they could come out at 40 seconds and still line up with the big 2 minute burst. You could also have a job that doesn't have a mini burst and just has the big burst every 2 minutes, with a more sustained damage output for the rest of the time. This would at least allow the jobs to feel different between the 2 minute bursts.

[Mithron]

I think that somewhere along the way, stating that 'the two-minute meta is destroying the game' has become perceived as a clever and insightful thing to say, but players have stopped actually thinking about why they might agree or disagree with that statement. I'm having an increasingly harder time actually linking your arguments back to this claim. I'm not even sure that you know why you're defending the sentiment at this point.

Pretty much all Heavensward/Stormblood openers were designed around when Trick happened. So playing around party buffs isn't a new thing, even if you didn't understand why your opener was designed the way it was. Holding resources or timing buffs to occur during your highest potency GCDs is an even older concept.

The two-minute meta is destroying the game because every job feels the same to play and is far more rigid than ever before because the game is more than just your opener, while also causing such high disparity that a Savage fight needed to be nerfed in addition to two jobs receiving buffs at the same time because it was that bad.

You're forgetting fight design. PLD shined in fights where uptime was hard to get. This entire tier uptime is 100%, so it has fallen behind. It's not the 2 minute cooldown causing it, it's the devs having made the fights with 100% uptime in mind. Hell, they're actually reconsidering the ranged tax for this very reason.

Fight design is a big deal, but you know what constricts fight design the most? Every job being on a two-minute window. The whole point of this thread was to emphasize the strengths of PLD due to it being unique.

For sake of argument, let's say we will keep the 120 burst, no problems there, but why do we need to keep to the 60 second burst? No job has a raid buff at 60 seconds, so, in theory, the mini bursts don't have to come out at 60 seconds, they could come out at 40 seconds and still line up with the big 2 minute burst.

Because some job buffs (DRK's Delirium, for example) used to be on a 90s cooldown instead of 60, making it feel very different and having different burst windows outside of 120s. Many other jobs had timers around 70 and 80 seconds as well, so your "burst phase" was very different and interesting. Sure they would align with 120s windows sometimes, but not every 120s.

[RyuDragnier]

Just to play devil's advocate here, but the 60/120s bursts also restrict boss design.

*laughs in Asphodelos Savage*

The 2m bursts tended to line up with big mechanics. The tiles in P1S, P2S limit cut, P3S cross-hatch AoE into Wing (that one was hell on your fingers), P4S Pinax. The devs seemed to have purposefully timed things to happen right when the burst windows were starting up. Kinda wish they had done the same this tier, would have loved to experience the hell that would be Cachexia during a burst window.