https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-Job-Diversity


I made a similar thread a few months ago. TLDR; most westerners who frequent the forums and care enough to post are unhappy with the two-minute meta, and wish to see either a reversion to the Shadowbringers raid buff timers (variable 60s, 90s, 120s, 180s buffs) or something completely fresh. A few people also voiced the opinion that they'd like to see raid buffs removed entirely -- though I don't know how this would be achieved without completely butchering jobs such as Dancer. On the JP side, I only frequented the Ninja thread, but players there were unhappy about the changes to Trick and Mug, expressing that they felt it diminished synergy between jobs.

From my perspective, the issues we've seen with balancing re: crit variance and specific jobs being under/overpowered are a direct result of the shift to a strict burst meta. The fact that almost every job in the game received either a minor or major rework in order to conform to this job design paradigm speaks to how unnatural an evolution it is from where we were just an expansion ago. I can't even fathom what benefits Square Enix expected to see out of it; the argument that it's easier for weaker players to play "optimally" falls apart when you realise that a single mistake will cause a player to be completely misaligned buff-wise for the rest of a fight -- which now does matter enough to affect whether or not the group clears! On the higher skill end, it removes optimisation and as a result, gameplay becomes stale due to lack of varied playstyles, and on the lower skill end it makes making rotational mistakes significantly more punishing. You can't even argue it makes things easier for Square Enix as evidently crit variance is making balance pretty hard to achieve -- the debacle with P8S is clear cut evidence of that. Whether or not you had the DPS to clear was based on two things: a meta composition and RNG. In the "play any job" game XIV likes to push itself as, you would require neither of these things to clear.