Two Minute Raid Buffs - The Bane of Endwalker Job Design

[Shurrikhan]

The other side of the talent argument is just having access to those skills as a baseline, but their use has a resource confliction that you can't use them all at the same time.

An example of this being the old Sneak Attack vs Trick Attack - One of them was the solo high potency attack, one of them was the debuff applying attack. Of course, Sneak attack never had the potency to really make an argument for using it, but that sort of exclusionary use means you don't have to deal with talent trees - you just have to know when to use either one.

Which then ultimately brings the question down to:

• How many options is one okay with having, especially relative to how many buttons they actually press?
• Does it feel better to have an option one is not yet comfortable with on hand, quickly available to be used and learned, or to not see it at all and have the penalty for not using it reduced slightly?

[Kabooa]

Which then ultimately brings the question down to:

• How many options is one okay with having, especially relative to how many buttons they actually press?
• Does it feel better to have an option one is not yet comfortable with on hand, quickly available to be used and learned, or to not see it at all and have the penalty for not using it reduced slightly?

As many as can comfortably be fit on the default action bars assuming default controllers. This tends to be between 24-32 buttons, which is why clever button consolidation is important.

As far as how something feels, that's going to depend on the individual. Personally I prefer having 8-12 impactful abilities instead of 24-32 rotational ones. Doubly so if you get some customization of the 8-12.

[Shurrikhan]

..

My assumption was that any answers to either question would be subjective. The nice part about a talent system is that it can allow for one to answer them more to their own liking, so that there's a higher chance of it seeming, to a given player, a good answer.

I'm still a bit doubtful that it would be worth the effort in this game, or that it wouldn't prune the base class to subterranean levels of skill floors (at minimum, tend to create less complexity in its "best output per effort spent" builds even as relevant to Savage), but such systems certainly have their perks.

[Shurrikhan]

To make exciting and fresh again because the 2 minute meta makes everything play the same. It's all flash and no substance.

As compared to neither flash nor substance by just removing all raid buffs?

If you've got something better in mind that would require that removal, I'm all ears. But further removal is not, in itself, replacement, let alone towards anything "exciting and fresh".

[FairyDJ]

I don't play much of anything outside of Unreal so I don't think this matter much. But I do like the idea of aligning 2 minute windows. However, I also think the classes aren't all aligned properly to utilize those 2 minute windows appropriately. This is what is causing a lot of the disparities. They are working on fixing that and trying new things as they go. I feel like we won't see a reprieve until maybe 8.0. TP was also a thing back in ARR and HW so imagine trying to manage tp on top of everything else.

[Shurrikhan]

I don't play much of anything outside of Unreal so I don't think this matter much. But I do like the idea of aligning 2 minute windows. However, I also think the classes aren't all aligned properly to utilize those 2 minute windows appropriately. This is what is causing a lot of the disparities.

It really doesn't have to, though, so long as a minimal-buffs comp could never quite beat out a meta comp overall (except by individual player differences/crit luck/etc.), because you can just let the jobs with less burst also have greater overall damage, thereby actually improving real (or, in-full-account) balance.

Ultimately, what matters is how much one contributes to a group, not how much DPS one does solo, so the community's occasional insistence on jobs' rDPS balance alone (or any other forms of balance thereafter being byproducts of only increasing homogeneity in damage profiles/burstiness/etc.) seems... well, very odd, since rDPS can't even account for any of those synergies for non-buffers or those who would typically have less rDPS than DPS (just like DPS-parity wouldn't be a good measure of parity for buffers or those typically with more rDPS than DPS).