2-minute meta

[Absimiliard]

The whole synergy thing is why certain jobs have historically been gimped for having group utility, while others were allowed to excel due to having none. Oft times the gap between jobs held back by their utility and those with none is larger than the sum total of the extra DPS theoretically gain via buffing the rest of the group.

Gut the synergy. I won't miss it one bit so long as we're given greater job complexity and proper balance.

[Oizen]

What is a 2 minute meta?

A series of changes to jobs that homogenizes all of their cooldowns to come up every 2 minutes.
Basically, almost every offensive skill/buff has a cooldown of 30s,60s, or 120s or has specifically been changed to have that to have a cooldown that lines up with coming up at the 2 minute mark. This results in the optimal strategy for every single job to pool all of their resources during a fight and barf them out all together when everything comes off cooldown, especially raidwide buffs, which increase the damage output of everyones strongest skills.

Then in 2 minutes, you do the exact same thing again, then again at the 6 minute mark, and so on. It results in a lot of jobs feeling incredibly samey, removes a lot of job complexity and simplifies things to a point of where the skill ceiling of almost any job is "Dont let your skills drift, pool resources for the next 2 minute mark".

FFXIV already struggles with its gameplay being Trial and Error, but turning offensive options into this basically makes an entire fight 100% scripted.

[ForteNightshade]

I agree completely except with the part above. We shouldn't encourage the devs to have even less synergy.

It's not that I'm encouraging them but choosing a lesser of two evils. Like I said in my response, I'd prefer they revert back to Shadowbringers or, ideally, Stormblood and build off from there. If it's a choice between the two minute meta and removing party synergy entirely, I'd take the latter in the hopes it would allow them to create better individuality as now they're only balancing raw numbers and not comp variances.

[AngelCheese77]

Thanks for the info!

Yeah this seems kind of dumb. Is this supposed to be something for savage raids? Like a burst window? (Sorry I don’t heavy raid so curious).

A series of changes to jobs that homogenizes all of their cooldowns to come up every 2 minutes.
Basically, almost every offensive skill/buff has a cooldown of 30s,60s, or 120s or has specifically been changed to have that to have a cooldown that lines up with coming up at the 2 minute mark. This results in the optimal strategy for every single job to pool all of their resources during a fight and barf them out all together when everything comes off cooldown, especially raidwide buffs, which increase the damage output of everyones strongest skills.

Then in 2 minutes, you do the exact same thing again, then again at the 6 minute mark, and so on. It results in a lot of jobs feeling incredibly samey, removes a lot of job complexity and simplifies things to a point of where the skill ceiling of almost any job is "Dont let your skills drift, pool resources for the next 2 minute mark".

FFXIV already struggles with its gameplay being Trial and Error, but turning offensive options into this basically makes an entire fight 100% scripted.

[Absurdity]

Thanks for the info!

Yeah this seems kind of dumb. Is this supposed to be something for savage raids? Like a burst window? (Sorry I don’t heavy raid so curious).

It's pretty much for all content, almost all jobs are designed in a way where simply pressing all of your big buttons on cooldown is already 90% of playing optimally, since doing that automatically makes everything line up with party-wide buffs every 2 minutes.

[Absimiliard]

A moment of silence for our PLD brothers and sisters, whose job was one of the more recent casualties of the two-minute burst meta.

[Ransu]

I feel like this is another troll thread, but you know what? I'll bite.

Its one of several of OP's alts.

[TaleraRistain]

Troll thread or not, I'll comment.

The two minute meta is awful. It makes gameplay both incredibly rigid and boring at the same time because most jobs have practically nothing to do because they have to all funnel into exactly two minute intervals. The few 90s abilities now feel... hollow as they just can't of exist but don't often factor into your burst. Salt and Darkness, Bunshin and Riddle of Wind could all be deleted without changing a thing about each respective job. Hell, they had to change Bloodfest from 90 to 120 because it caused issues with Gunbreaker's damage in burst windows.

Worse then the above is every job feels too similar nowadays. Spacing out buffs allowed for some sense of individuality due to having to take into consideration what timers your comp played into. One minute Trick Attack meant Dark Knights could plan their Floods within those intervals instead of aimlessly dumping gauge to avoid overcap. Speaking of Ninja, it's been among the hardest hit. The job has virtually nothing to do outside of two minute bursts except spam 123 and the very occasional Bhavacakra.

The final insult to injury is this new shift didn't even accomplish the intended goal. Casual players still press their buffs on a whim because they don't really care to align everything. What's hilariously ironic is this actually made things worse for inexperienced players despite it supposedly being easier for them. A death nowadays is significantly worse than ever before. You have no way to mitigate your loses going into a two minute window. God forbid you die during said window. Now everything is completely misaligned and you've not only punished with weakness but have de-synced your buffs from the raid. So either you sit on them for potentially over a whole minute, losing even more damage, or you screw your team for the remainder of the fight.

If the dev team is set on making buffs easier to manage. The solution would be to make them almost entirely independent from the party (i.e. like Large Charge, Huton and etc). Yes, this heavily removes party synergy but that is a far better alternative than the mess they've come up with for Endwalker. My preference would be to revert the whole thing back to Shadowbringers or even Stormblood and let jobs run on different timers.

Well said.

I don't do content where this is a concern but it's always sounded dreadfully constrained to me to have to line up buffs perfectly and as you mentioned, what do you do outside them? It seems like it would allow a lot more flexibility and ability to respond to mechanics if buffs were independent of the party.

[boopadoop]

+2 to dislike the 2min meta, my friend overwhelmingly despises it. it makes it harder to recover from mistakes and makes "drifting" your skills more punishing? it also feels like all the classes are kind of re-skins of each other instead of having a unique mechanic or way of performing, which is definitely not what at least a lot of NA players want it seems like, and i get that too. i don't mind some similarities for familiarity's sake when things change or it's been a while but things could be more unique and weird. as long as one class doesn't do significantly less dps than another i dont think people will care if it's weird but fun. be weird. try new things. it's ok if people don't like it overwhelmingly and you have to change it, but you won't know until you try

anyway 2min meta sucks

[Deceptus]

The whole synergy thing is why certain jobs have historically been gimped for having group utility, while others were allowed to excel due to having none. Oft times the gap between jobs held back by their utility and those with none is larger than the sum total of the extra DPS theoretically gain via buffing the rest of the group.

Gut the synergy. I won't miss it one bit so long as we're given greater job complexity and proper balance.

Real talk: If DPS lost a LOT of their utility they'd be a lot easier to balance because the Dev's wouldn't have to be concerned so much about meta comps. If every DPS was selfish they could be normalized.

Give all that utility to Healers so they have something to do. THEY should be the buffers / debuffers.