Quote Originally Posted by Silver-Strider View Post
It's not so much that I've forgotten what life was like before the 2 minute meta but rather that I had hoped that it would be addressed differently.
That's fair. And mostly same here. Sorry if I sounded like I was applying that earlier complaint to everyone. It's not nearly so universal. It's just a whole lot more common that I would like / would have hoped.

Take SB MNK as an example. At the start of the expansion, the job wasn't really all that great and the HW Meta pretty much persisted for the most part.
Even in O1-4S, Monk was alt-meta; it just required a heavily physical-comp for Brotherhood. Quite a while into the next tier, most of the fastest O1-4S clears were by Monk-comps. And Monk could push out high rDPS even back in HW; it just had very few players performing at that level because it was considered too skill- and resource-intensive (needed so much Goad/Paeon/ProRook to not run dry when playing at its more optimal SkS tiers).

I don't bring this up just to nit-pick, to be clear, but rather because a lot of the undue simplifications or meta-minded "streamlining" that we've faced seems to correlate tightly with oversimplified perceptions of states of balance or said meta.

However, by 4.5, the Tornado Kick rotation actually allowed MNK to have some relevance for the 1st time since NIN was introduced.
4.2 brought forward the TK rotation (4.5 only increased Monk's baseline damage buff via FoF from 5% to 6% and reduced the penalty for missed positionals by 20), and it, again, wasn't the first time Monk saw relevance.

There was obvious room for improvement of course but it was still an overall positive change for once. Instead of pursuing that break in the meta, however, SE decided to double down on the meta and just convert every other job to conform to it instead of developing the other jobs to succeed in their own ways.
But what do you mean then by "break in the meta"? Consider that concept just generally at first. Does "a break" there mean that a new top dog arrived? That the difference between the top dog and the second place, third, etc., shrank greatly? That compositional optimizations came to have a lesser impact compared to the sum of individual player performances? What makes it a "break" and why would that be a good thing?

:: In late Stormblood, the meta comp only very, very, very mildly started underperforming hard Monk, RDM, or caster comps (each a composition with 5-7 slots fixed in terms of job choice, less flexible even than the double-Ranged-DRG-SMN/NIN or DRG-BRD-SMN-BLM meta comps). Granted, even before that, virtually every comp could clear every fight just fine. The most costly imbalances were between like-role jobs like MCH and BRD whenever one wasn't using a double-Ranged comp, etc. But that didn't stop perception from often barring jobs.
Across oh so many MMOs, it's been hard for me to find a playerbase more willing to bar choices over so small of performance differences in median/expected performance. Granted, there are pretty good reasons for that, worm-can though it be.
Sure, there were some positives to the changes, such as PoM finally being changed to a 120s buff instead of 150s but on the whole, I felt like it wasn't worth losing everything else that made jobs unique.
What distinguishes those, though? PoM being on the 120s CD meant its optimal use was that much more constrained to a 120s comp (though that was, by then, basically ever comp, so that running a DRG didn't mean you'd want to avoid running WHM, etc.). If that homogeneity of timing is a bad thing, then wouldn't PoM's being put on a 120s CD, instead of being buffed in terms of duration or %Haste, be a bad thing? What's the delineating factor?

Moreover, was swapping from a more comp-minded system where one wanted to trim anything outside the group's main timing (as, say a "90s", "120s", or largely "150s Comp") to a more "play whatever you like" system really what cost jobs that uniqueness? I'd say that's true for a very specific few, perhaps, like Stormblood-era Dragoon, who actually held certain CDs for those alternate-rhythm raid buffs, but more broadly? Would modern NIN really play so different, beyond its choice of opener, if Trick Attack was a 45s CD and the raid buffs went off per 90s (greater frequency of one's "full burst")? If some of those buffs went off per 90 and some per 120s, but you didn't sacrifice the optimal timing of one for a best result among both (via some complex stratagem of CD-holding based on expected fight length, likely only doable in serious pre-mades)?

Those differences on paper add flavor, but I suspect it's the differences less obvious from tooltip and more obvious in actual play instead that make the larger difference, and merely asking for diversified CDs --even ignoring the problem that you either (A) end up with reduced accessibility via set comps and/or reduced maximum raid buff power as to keep set comps' variance in check or (B) end up much more distinguished insiders and outsiders in ways that simple tuning tweaks can't handle-- tends to kick dirt over any attempts to figure out what all those subtler in-practice differences actually are/were. There were after all, a ton of changes that coincided with those CD adjustments, and we don't play CDs -- we play kits, on which the effect of mixed CDs depends on the individual considerations required to optimize them. I suspect, therefore, that that's where the bigger differences are, and we shouldn't conflate those gameplay simplifications, especially where they gutted even jobs' solo complexity, with that overarching choice of set-comps vs. shared raidbuff timings.