Two Minute Raid Buffs - The Bane of Endwalker Job Design

[aloneatsea]

When was your first clear of any fight ever a genuinely flawless run? A lucky run will get you that clear sooner due to damage variance, sure. But there are always a lot of other controllable factors that you're executing incorrectly, and you clear comfortably when those are fixed. That's why being able to clear and farm are still two different things, and why a lot of week 1 strats get replaced with better ones that offer better uptime. They design the checks with a margin knowing full well that your first clear will be sloppy and luck driven, and nerf the check when players don't live up to the expected clear rates.

You can do whatever you like to the multiplier, but players will still complain about damage variance. Oh, if only I crit all my attacks in a ten minute run. There's nowhere to draw the line.

A Week 1 clear should, by definition, be a "flawless" run. If you are accusing players who have spent 18+ hours optimising a fight in the first week specifically to overcome a DPS check of having poor play, then... I'm not sure what to say to that! I only get the feeling you wish to deny a problem exists in the first place in the face of a fair swathe of evidence, none of which you have refuted beyond waving your hand and saying "people always complain", which while a true statement, does not dismiss the fact that there is a problem.



I was not even speaking to critting a specific number of attacks, you'll note. Only that critting during a certain timeframe is immensely more valuable than critting at any other point. To the point where having a 50% crit rate where you only crit outside of raid buffs will generally deal less damage than a 30% crit rate wherein you crit through your entire buff window. That seems a little strange, does it not?

[Kabooa]

I was not even speaking to critting a specific number of attacks, you'll note. Only that critting during a certain timeframe is immensely more valuable than critting at any other point. To the point where having a 50% crit rate where you only crit outside of raid buffs will generally deal less damage than a 30% crit rate wherein you crit through your entire buff window. That seems a little strange, does it not?

Nah.

You keep waving around 47%, but that's only for the person getting tethered and card'ed.

Everyone else is mostly getting what they've always been getting over the years.

5-10 from Ninja (60s-120s)
3/5 from Caster (120s)
3/5 from Bard/Dancer (120s)
5 from Astro (varies - but for all intents and purposes, 60-120s)
Nothing from tanks
An indeterminable amount of DPS from Chain strategem (120s)
Potentially something from the second melee, assuming it isn't Samurai.

Putting this into perspective, were this Shadowbringers, this means the dance partner (Samurai) is getting approximately 1.05^4 x 1.06 (card) x 1.1 (Partner) = 1.41 multiplier. If it was a Monk, the extra Brotherhood would put them at 1.47

If this were Stormblood, there is no dance partner, so the (Samurai) would be getting 1.1(Trick) x 1.05^2 (Replacing Dance with Hypercharge for ease of math, no Div) x 1.15 (Enhanced Balance) = 1.39 multiplier. If Monk, Brotherhood didn't provide the party with a damage bonus, but would still put the monk at 1.45 since it still buffed them.

Though if we're being honest, if this WAS Stormblood, the actual dps comp was Ninja, Dragoon, Bard, and then a Mach / Caster, because dragoon and ninja were basically autolocked for Piercing and Trick respectively, Bard was autolocked because it was a god damned monster, and everyone else fought for the last slot.

You were still a slave to crit in Stb and Shb. If you didn't crit during the big ole buff windows you lost out. That's how criticals work. Every ability you don't crit is damage you lost.

The one thing that has changed is now everyone has a big dick 1200 potency dump that just so happens to naturally align at 120s, which is where the majority of all buffs were aligned beforehand, as most buffs were 60, 90, or 120s, with select few being 180. The 90s fell into can/can't delay dichotomy.

As a fun bonus experiment, if we put Dancer into Stormblood, then at 2 minutes, the (Likely Black Mage) would have

1.1 (Trick)
1.15 (Enhanced Balance)
1.05 (Tech)
1.1 (Partner)
1.05 (Foe + Bardsong)

x1.46

x.1.53 if it were a Machinist, Summoner.

x1.6 if it were a Red Mage (1.75 technically as its self boost was 20%, but we'll use its "Party boost" instead to illustrate the point)

Of course all of these selections would be a massive rDPS loss, so the actual 4th DPS in this set up would be Dragoon, which means whoever the dance partner is will get the Dragon's Eye for another 5% for x1.53.

Edit: As a bonus round, a Heavensward buff stack looked like:

Nin: Trick 1.1 60s

Astro: at least 60s
EBalance: 1.3
SBalance: 1.1

Sum: 1.1 Magic Garuda cooldown
Bard: 1.1 Magic Foe's Req (MP)

We're not including debuff resistances because while they were the most impactful, they can mostly be considered baseline.

I don't recall if Machinist has Hypercharge in heavensward, so I won't include that possibility.

Again, your party composition in HW probably looked like two tanks, a dragoon, a ninja, astrologian, scholar, and then two DPS depending on what the current gamestate was.

When Balance(the card) was stupid, it was Bard and Machinist, ironically pumping up the Dragoon's RDPS metric so high it would have been the undisputed highest relative DPS in the game bar none considering any state the game has been in.

And with just two buffs in Heavensward, the you either had the party buff at 1.21, or the feed at 1.43

[Lyth]

?

The hard work that you put in to your first clear of anything has literally nothing to do with this conversation. You will always get better with more practice. If you don't think that your actual technical performance outside of gear improves from week 1 to week 8 from repeated exposure and fine tuning, I really don't know what to say to you.

Also, you seem to not understand how expected value in probability works, because you're relying on your emotional response to where crits happen. You can distribute your burst however you like. If you have a constant crit rate it just factors out because of the distributive property. Your average performance remains the same regardless of distribution.