Why is everyone anxious about a PLD Rework?

[Gserpent]

I preferred the state of certain jobs back then, too, but... the fixation on raid buffs was exactly as prevalent then as now. It's just that certain jobs screwed over others' rDPS more.

Right, I'm not saying it was perfect, just better. I would straight up roll the entire fucking game back to Shadowbringers and restart from there. Classes were mostly fine. Add the new EW buttons where it makes sense to, do some of the changes like swapping from timers to charges to avoid screwing over people that have to play with latency, etc. And then look into dialing back those raid buffs even more. Because obsessive focus on raid buffs got us to where we are now. It was a mistake, and it was an obvious one in hindsight.

[ForsakenRoe]

Right, I'm not saying it was perfect, just better. I would straight up roll the entire fucking game back to Shadowbringers and restart from there. Classes were mostly fine. Add the new EW buttons where it makes sense to, do some of the changes like swapping from timers to charges to avoid screwing over people that have to play with latency, etc. And then look into dialing back those raid buffs even more. Because obsessive focus on raid buffs got us to where we are now. It was a mistake, and it was an obvious one in hindsight.

It's gonna be great when they announce the new job(s) at Fanfest, because there's only two ways it can go now: either they don't have a raidbuff and are considered a 'selfish DPS' like SAM or BLM, or they do and we immediately know it's a 2min. Exciting. 'Wow Geomancer is the new caster, I wonder what the CD is on it's raidbuff'. I'm pretty sure I'd be more excited for the former, just because I don't really care for raidbuffs as a design, like I really do not see why RPR needed to have the 3%, instead of just the 'Plentiful Harvest' interaction. The only job I'd see 'raidbuff lol' on and say 'yep that makes 100% sense and I cannot envision it being any other way' would be BLU due to how oddball it's moveset was in older games, but we all know where that poor job ended up.

Yo SE, when's BLU getting raised to level 80, so we can all spend exactly two days playing it to the new cap, learning all the skills, and then forgetting it exists for another few years?

[Shurrikhan]

Right, I'm not saying it was perfect, just better.

On what basis relevant to (playing around) raid buffs, though? Or is this all tangential to / separate from the earlier chain of topics?

I'd agree that Shadowbringer was by and large better, though I still think the likes of Brotherhood and Embolden affecting ALL damage is probably better than their arbitrarily not. (For those not to simply negatively affect MNK and RDM, each, or force set comps between them, they'd both have to be sort of innately desirable -- worth taking even without perfect synergy.)

Similarly, I think that Endwalker RDM is better designed, on the whole, than Shadowbringers RDM, and EW PLD slightly better than ShB PLD, even if I vastly preferred late-Shadowbringers SAM to modern SAM (though I'd still have liked slight adjustments to TG and how Meditate contributes towards Shoha).

And then look into dialing back those raid buffs even more. Because obsessive focus on raid buffs got us to where we are now. It was a mistake, and it was an obvious one in hindsight.

Raid buffs were arguably bigger back in Stormblood, when we stacked Chain, Expanded Balance, Foes, Hypercharge, Litany, and Contagion/Trick Attack/Brotherhood, etc. The multiplicity of it was bigger, too.

I'm not convinced Endwalker has made the community any more obsessed with raid buffs; rather, I suspect this is the state we'd have seen even if the game went unchanged, this many years later, even from Stormblood's designs. I think this trend has more to do with that sort of "Game Two" community-driven experience/perception than it does with those actual design changes. Because these habits were handed down from on high in either case, that raid buffs are a bit more accessible now hasn't actually had, I suspect, that big an impact on the space they take up in our heads. I suspect it's more akin to the neglected brain tumor than increasingly violent concussions, so to speak.

I suspect that view from "hindsight" is more a matter of "resulting," or conflating results with bad decisions regardless of whether the results stemmed from it.

Take that with a grain of salt, though; I can't conclusively prove it either way. And there's a fair bit to dig into regarding how rapidly an idea spreads (collectively) or grows (per individual) from the experience of actually doing something being that tiny bit less complicated (and therefore seemingly clearer).



All that's kind of besides the point, though. I imagine we want to focus on potential improvements, rather than just our rationales for why things got so, as we see it, bad?

Let's assume for a moment that the players' (not devs') lessons learned or obsessions formed won't soon be forgotten or dissipated. What kind of gameplay would you like to see that would make playing around raid buffs less prominent? And what would actually change, in practice, between your vision and what's present now?

The biggest sticking point I'm running into when imagining something different to our status quo now is that, unless the encounters are changed to give something else to focus on, nothing would change outside of

1. a bit less punishment for being desynced due to an especially ill-timed death --with any other timing being largely irrelevant, since CDs still cool while dead, outside of the very rare cooldown-reduction per action on Warrior-- and
   
   
2. noticeably less gameplay/complexity on certain jobs that would otherwise have among the least (DRK, WHM, for instance).

On the other hand, I could see kit changes being immensely impactful to the minute-to-minute, moment-to-moment feel of jobs within/despite that fixation on raid buffs. When Samurai's Tsubame-Gaeshi was a one-minute CD, it anchored its macro-rotation; now that it can hold two charges, it instead seems to simply crowd its two-minute burst and then leave SAM with nothing of interest for the next 100 seconds. Imagine if TG had instead just been made a little less punishing of latency / packet loss (such as by not being made unavailable until your next Iaijutsu or opportunity therefor). That, I imagine, would provide the same flexibility (or better) that the two charges provide, but without overly siphoning from its moment-to-moment or minute-to-minute play in favor of its full raid burst.

[ForsakenRoe]

All that's kind of besides the point, though. I imagine we want to focus on potential improvements, rather than just our rationales for why things got so, as we see it, bad?

I'm not entirely sure how it'd affect the gameplay, or what it'd do to the metagame or whatever, because I've not put much thought into it beyond 'huh I wonder what'd happen if X': What if raidbuffs were additive instead of multiplicative? (alternately, what if raidbuffs affected only the base potency of a skill, and not it's 'boosted by a different raidbuff' potency)

Thinking it through and typing as I go, as it stands, we generate 'bonus potency' out of nowhere by having our raidbuffs aligned. 1.05^3 is not the same as 1.05 x 3, it's slightly bigger (100 becomes 115.7625, vs additive making it 115 flat). Having the buffs be additive would mean that, if someone were to misalign their Mug from the party's other raidbuffs, it wouldn't 'lose' potency per se, as it'd boost the base potency by the same amount regardless of what else is going on. But you'd still want to keep them aligned due to the actual base potencies of skills. Drifting Mug would mean you don't get the GNB's Double Down in there, for example. It'd still be punishing to drift, but less so I think? The main reason it'd still be punishing to drift would be because SE has a one-minded focus on the 2min meta, and making sure that jobs BLOW THE FUCK UP on that 2min window. Why does DRK need 2 charges of 600p, 4 uses of 500p, 3 Bloodspillers and a partridge in a pear tree at it's 2min window? IDK and at this point I'm not sure SE does either.

Anyway yeh, I'd try making the raidbuffs additive for an expansion and see what happens. Heck by making them additive, maybe it'd show people 'hey having things on staggered timers isn't actually a bad thing'. And then we can complete the master plan: making BLU into a tank with 5 different raidbuff timers to juggle

[Shurrikhan]

I'm not entirely sure how it'd affect the gameplay, or what it'd do to the metagame or whatever, because I've not put much thought into it beyond 'huh I wonder what'd happen if X': What if raidbuffs were additive instead of multiplicative?

I think this was talked a lot about in Stormblood, but to a singular conclusion: To make raidbuffs additive, they'd all have to affect the same parameter.

Else, things like Damage, Attack Speed, Critical Hit Rate, and Critical Hit Bonus would all be multiplicative among one another, while Damage + Damage would not, Crit Rate + Crit Rate would not, etc., which then just creates the perfect Frankenstein's Monster of both raid-buff-fixation and set-comp-mongering.

Moreover, their not being multiplicative, due to the sheer volume of bankable potency that'd be placed under whichever is best, still wouldn't make staggering them anything but self-sabotage. The difference between even 1.2^4 [2.074] and 1*(.2*4) [1.8] is miniscule compared to leaving so many oGCDs out of even the lesser bonus just to retain greater percentile value from each buff (the ammo for which is already spent). They're always going to used to the best product possible of "use-on-CD" and "stack all the things" unless you give players elements of encounters significant enough to purposely hold, and thereby desync, CDs for.

[ForsakenRoe]

As I said, not much thought was put in (typed while waiting for respawn in PVP). But Speed doesnt exist as a raidbuff (only personal) since everyone complained about Arrow, and Crit Bonus doesn't exist, only Rate (which then becomes flat bonus damage if Rate hits 100%). And most buffs are just flat damage, to my knowledge only Litany and Chain are 'increase crit rate of team' buffs, well I suppose there's that one song on BRD too but that's super passive. Maybe tuning the raidbuffs so that it's incentivized to bring a good balance of 'crit buffers' and 'flat damage buffers' could be interesting? A Crit buffer, a Damage buffer, a Selfish DPS to take advantage, and idk a BRD to be the 'allrounder' buffing in a variety of ways, but not by as much, until 2min where they're Flat damage (Coda) and DHit buff (Battle Voice). Does anyone else buff DHit?

[Gserpent]

Let's assume for a moment that the players' (not devs') lessons learned or obsessions formed won't soon be forgotten or dissipated. What kind of gameplay would you like to see that would make playing around raid buffs less prominent? And what would actually change, in practice, between your vision and what's present now?

That's easy - no more raid buffs. Period. You might have your own personal buffs, but when and where you use your buffs is entirely up to you, and your knowledge of the encounter. Involving raid buffs is clearly too much trouble to keep it in, even if it's against class fantasy to remove them (really, only Bard and Dancer have always been "buffing jobs", the others have often had buffs but it wasn't their core focus.)

The reason for this is simple - it completely unchains fight design and dramatically increases skill ceiling across the board, without touching kits *at all* aside from adjusting potency and buff values to account for them only affecting you rather than everyone. It's not a coincidence that a lot of major mechanics are specifically timed to happen around a 2 minute marker in fights (typically within 10-20 sec on either side of the line.) So this leads to not only player DPS but even arguably the fights themselves being more generic and boilerplate than they have to be - simply because you know that every 2 minutes is when players have to actually pay attention to push lots of buttons, so you need to put something in that stresses their ability to do that easily.

When your DPS is up to you and you alone, the ceiling is improved. It *might* be possible to incorporate buffing classes, but maybe only if they buff a single specific player and not the entire group - it's *probably* easier to manage power creep that way, and it also makes fight knowledge/optimization relevant for those buffing classes. Different classes will have different damage styles, occurring at different times, and potentially adjusted to compensate for fight mechanics. You would determine who you buff with your bard song or dances or cards based on that information, and it will vary somewhat from group to group because it's less likely that every fucking Dark Knight plays exactly the same (because now it's not decided for you, when you hit your damage buttons.)

As long as the *floor* is low and accessible, and normals and Ex's continue to be tuned and balanced accordingly to be basically impossible to fail and very generous with recovery opportunities, respectively, then you can do things that add layers and depth to hard-mode content. I think Square-Enix needs to stop treating their players like morons, and I also think that *hard-mode content should come with the expectation that you will need to put some fucking effort into learning how to properly play your class and adapt it to the fight's mechanics.* I think this dumbing down of gameplay was done to try and encourage more people to play savage, given how much effort they put into those encounters, but it's costing the game too much from a design standpoint. It needs to be walked back. Especially since raid kits and dungeon kits are the same, and if you're forcing everyone to fit into square holes for the sake of DPS balance in hard mode raids, you're fucking over players who want more cool things they can do in dungeons. Let tanks and healers pick from a selection of skills that serve to let them do more damage in a variety of ways, let DPS pick skills that let them soak some hits or sustain through some hits (maybe even with rewards for timing them correctly, like a 3 sec buff that gives you a fat bonus if you take damage during it.) Sounds messy, but it would be a way to make non-raid content a little more fun and less goddamned boring without messing with raid tuning. I think I'd just rework the entire fucking skills system from the ground up if I was going to go to that kind of trouble, though, and not just try to staple things onto a turd...

Insofar as making classes more active, you could accomplish that simply by reducing cooldowns of oGCD abilities across the board. Instead of 450 potency every 30 sec, change it to 225 every 15 sec. Same potency per minute, but now it's an extra button to push every 6th GCD (so every other combo) instead of every 12th... which *also* happens to raise the skill ceiling very so slightly by introducing more opportunities to drift, and possibly less tolerance for drifting. Given the speed of the combat system, I think 15 is about as low as you'd want it. You could also do a skill with two charges on a 30 sec cooldown, etc. There's multiple ways you can add "more buttons to push for more excited monkey brain," but they're currently doing none of them.

Square-Enix, your players are not nearly so fucking stupid as you seem to think they are. But most of them *are* misinformed, because you lazy jackasses can't bother to put useful tutorials or teaching tools into the game. Why's it gotta be the players' job to create and spread third-party information when y'all could just fucking do it yourselves?

[Shurrikhan]

That's easy - no more raid buffs. Period. You might have your own personal buffs, but when and where you use your buffs is entirely up to you, and your knowledge of the encounter. Involving raid buffs is clearly too much trouble to keep it in, even if it's against class fantasy to remove them (really, only Bard and Dancer have always been "buffing jobs", the others have often had buffs but it wasn't their core focus.)

The reason for this is simple - it completely unchains fight design and dramatically increases skill ceiling across the board, without touching kits *at all* aside from adjusting potency and buff values to account for them only affecting you rather than everyone. It's not a coincidence that a lot of major mechanics are specifically timed to happen around a 2 minute marker in fights (typically within 10-20 sec on either side of the line.)

I'd have to argue in return, though removing raid buffs would not unchain fight design, because it still would be chained to the remaining CDs (just with a slightly greater emphasis on some jobs being screwed over more than others) and increasing skill ceiling independently of individual kit designs... isn't a bad thing. If anything, though raid buffs aren't any exemplar I'd follow, that I expect the game would be more fun if it had more such cross-player interactions.

That said, I do think you overestimate its impact. Apart from on jobs like MNK, almost nothing changes between optimizing damage alone and optimizing damage under raid buffs; at most, a GCD's worth of oGCDs are delayed slightly further.

When your DPS is up to you and you alone, the ceiling is improved.

They're not zero-sum, though, and gameplay wasn't changed much at all.

As long as the *floor* is low and accessible, and normals and Ex's continue to be tuned and balanced accordingly to be basically impossible to fail and very generous with recovery opportunities, respectively, then you can do things that add layers and depth to hard-mode content.

Wouldn't raid-buffs pass muster under that warrant? On nearly every job, the floor is low and accessible, and no one needs to operate any differently over the presence of raid buffs until Ultimate -- short of maybe double-Solar/Lunar/Optimal Drift stuff for the rare overtuned Savage fight.

Insofar as making classes more active, you could accomplish that simply by reducing cooldowns of oGCD abilities across the board. Instead of 450 potency every 30 sec, change it to 225 every 15 sec.

Completely agreed.

[ForteNightshade]

It's every bit as emotional as your response just now. This community is incapable of thinking for itself. Someone made a video about how the 'two minute meta' is 'destroying the game'? Guess what this forum is going to be talking for about for months, despite the fact that raid buffs have been central to optimization for years. WF cleared with a particular comp? The reason players are struggling with their week 52 clear right now with 7x Echo is because they're not using that exact same comp. Literally unplayable. The more people who stop parroting and start questioning, the more we'll see this cycle break.

One of my favorite moments was when the WF for Unending Coil ran with a DRK at a time when the job was believed by the community at large to be the absolute bottom of the barrel. When questioned about why they picked it over the then dominant WAR, the answer was 'I like playing DRK.'

There is nothing emotional about my response. Your argument goes entirely against the data we have readily available and your only source of evidence is "raiders are emotional". The rest of this is little more than a tirade which has nothing to do with my response. Casual players following a meta they don't properly comprehend has nothing to do with tank balance. Nobody is arguing all tanks (or all jobs) can't clear content. They're arguing about their imbalances. Dark Knight isn't simply doing 50 more DPS and people are whinging. It's dealing almost 400 more aDPS in some fights.

Going back to actual statistics, the argument rDPS is perfectly fine for tanks doesn't hold up when Paladin is actually the strongest rDPS tank in P5S yet Dark Knight has a staggering 61% representation at the speed kill level compared to Paladin's 2%. You can't dismiss this massive a gap with a handwave "raiders are just emotional". These are speed killers whose entire content is based around using the strongest jobs available. There's a reason Dark Knight is overwhelmingly dominate in every single fight over the span of two full raid tiers and an Ultimate. It's simply better in overall capability. Once again, if you want to disagree with FFlogs' metrics then by all means. However, that isn't the same argument.

[Shurrikhan]

As I said, not much thought was put in (typed while waiting for respawn in PVP).

All good; of course. Just mentioning because it was briefly talked to death, coming from even those who had considerably more time to think it over.

But Speed doesnt exist as a raidbuff (only personal) since everyone complained about Arrow, and Crit Bonus doesn't exist, only Rate (which then becomes flat bonus damage if Rate hits 100%). And most buffs are just flat damage, to my knowledge only Litany and Chain are 'increase crit rate of team' buffs, well I suppose there's that one song on BRD too but that's super passive. Maybe tuning the raidbuffs so that it's incentivized to bring a good balance of 'crit buffers' and 'flat damage buffers' could be interesting? A Crit buffer, a Damage buffer, a Selfish DPS to take advantage, and idk a BRD to be the 'allrounder' buffing in a variety of ways, but not by as much, until 2min where they're Flat damage (Coda) and DHit buff (Battle Voice). Does anyone else buff DHit?

My thinking here is...

1. Sure, there aren't that many buff types now, largely because we've never been given a good way to handle tiers of Skill/Spell Speed, but... lack of diversity in the effects of raid buffs has been a soft but consistent complaint over the last few years. Given that, it's worth being a bit more future-proofing, no?

2. The spotlight placed on anti-synergies, especially where new and therefore far more put on display, tends to be outsized. While the difference between additive and multiplicative buffs would be utterly insignificant in practice (even if the varying forms were somehow accounted for), it might not be so insignificant [as in, is at least infinitesimally small] as to have comps say "We already have Embolden, so we don't want Monk or Bard," (since their damage buffs would stack additively while all else, including even Mug's Vulnerability Up, would still be multiplicative).

3. Finally, assuming we could make the rest scale appropriately (e.g., each buff after the first has its value multiplied by [A]/[A+B] where [A] is the sum of present direct or indirect damage multiplication and [B] is the new buff, such that a damage bonus of 5% atop a damage bonus of 5% would be multiplied by .9545, to a net product of 110% damage), that balance, too, would require not only additional computational load but also that each job benefit equally from DHit and Crit to not screw over Crit/DHit buffs when cast later (or jobs with poor Crit/DHit synergies if it's cast late). That... could be a skill ceiling component of interest, but given how immediately the damage will roll after the first drops, it'd likely seem more finnicky than complex. And again, outsized spotlighting on whoever loses out in that.

In short, it seems like a lot of work for no discernable effect. You stack raid buffs because all the oGCD attacks and such are going off at that time; that they happen to benefit from multiplicity is a drop in the ocean by comparison.