Quote Originally Posted by CKNovel View Post
snip
The reason why people might consider it a "bane" is because the nature of the meta dictates a correct style of play; to play any other way would mean sacrificing massive amounts of potential damage. With how buffs are now, your typical two-minute window can stack up to a 47% increase in damage, which is utterly insane! You're dealing your full damage and then half again, essentially. That's huge. Because of that huge damage window, any job which has massive spike damage (NIN, DRK -- who am I kidding, every job now lol) is going to be able to take much better advantage of this buff window and subsequently deal much more damage. Your alternative is simply to buff sustain DPS jobs to all high hell to make them equivalent regardless -- which still doesn't make them equivalent, because jobs with DPS on cooldown are losing very little DPS during downtime, whereas sustained DPS jobs are losing much more damage. In addition, buffing sustained jobs leads to them being vastly stronger in non-raid scenarios, such as dungeons, criterion, deep dungeons, etc etc.



Ultimately, it's a frail solution; if you're not going the break the 47% buff stacking meta every two minutes, it's better for the health of the game overall to have every job burst well at two minutes. (Except Black Mage, of course. They would never mutilate Black Mage.) Much as people like me want to believe, balance does matter for conditions outside of your typical 8/8 raid. We've seen this already with how absurdly overpowered MCH is in POTD -- it's been buffed almost every patch, and it was already the strongest class to run POTD on.



It is because this sort of buff stacking enforces a very specific type of playstyle that ends up feeling incredibly samey (and is, as far as I can tell, not even necessarily popular) that people call it the bane of EW job design.



If we want sustained DPS playstyles to exist, the two-minute meta simply has to go. There is no other way around it. When buff stacking is much weaker (say, 10% instead of a whopping 47%), but more frequent, sustained DPS jobs can thrive much better, because the potential damage they're losing from not being able to burst during buff windows is much less. Though we were seeing the beginnings of these sorts of problems in Shadowbringers (what with the omnipresent SAM-NIN-DNC-BLM-SCH-AST-GNB-DRK comp), the lesser frequency of effortless aligned buff windows meant that burst overall was less important. If Square Enix is at all interested in preserving multiple types of playstyles (strong burst at 1min, loops with burst at set intervals, sustained DPS, etc etc) then moving back to a SHB-like raid buff environment is really the only way they can reasonably sustain it.

That said, I'm not convinced SE is at all interested in maintaining unique playstyles. Unfortunately, it's burst or nothing, certainly until 7.0, and highly likely forever.