2-minute meta

[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.

[Absurdity]

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.

Lining up party buffs with everyone else was a fun part of optimising a fight...when you had to actually think about it.
What jobs does our group have? What are our available cooldowns and their timers? What is our killtime? Would delaying these buffs by 30 seconds here end up in a dps increase?

The problem is that SE decided to do the job for us by making everything line up automatically and when "optimising" means "just press it on cooldown" for every job it becomes incredibly boring to execute, not to mention very restrictive on top of that.
Having all buffs and burst windows automatically happen every 2 minutes also means that fights are now balanced around this. It isn't optimisation anymore, it is the baseline.