Your Opinion on the Current State of Job Identity/Balance in 6.4?

[Remish]

The.
2min.
Meta.
Must.
Die.

I keep trying to think about dozens of ways to improve the complexity of my favorite jobs while still making them accessible, but there's very little to think in the way of player skill expression if everything needs to fit in a collective burst window.

The challenge is not putting your brains to think. XIV just, quoting Zenos, wants to give a "test of your reflexes" - and your memory, at that, to press your keys at the right time, or else? You guessed it - won't fit in the next 2min burst window, possibly for the rest of the encounter. No wonder why many people regard PVP as a good form of skill expression, because in fact, it is the main thing over there, even though we have 1/4 of the number of actions available in pve.

The more I think about this, the more I keep getting frustrated at the way XIV structures combat.

It wouldn't at all surprise me if SE took it the extra mile and went to a 90 second meta or 1min meta in 7.0

[SargeTheSeagull]

It wouldn't at all surprise me if SE took it the extra mile and went to a 90 second meta or 1min meta in 7.0

Honestly had they put half of the raid buffs on 1 minute and the other half of two minutes most people, myself largely included, wouldn't have THAT much of a problem. Less than ideal mind you but still. I had a ninja in my asphodelos static and none of us minded the raid buff situation because we had to line up with trick every minute. As soon as that changed in 6.1 is when people started having a problem with the 2 min meta.

[Absurdity]

Honestly had they put half of the raid buffs on 1 minute and the other half of two minutes most people, myself largely included, wouldn't have THAT much of a problem. Less than ideal mind you but still. I had a ninja in my asphodelos static and none of us minded the raid buff situation because we had to line up with trick every minute. As soon as that changed in 6.1 is when people started having a problem with the 2 min meta.

I would still have a problem with it, because it barely changes anything. Most jobs are already designed to do their burst every 1 minute, they just have a slightly bigger burst every 2 minutes. So changing some party buffs to be 1 minute would still result in you playing the exact same way you do now, the damage spikes just get a bit lower.

[Shurrikhan]

I would still have a problem with it, because it barely changes anything. Most jobs are already designed to do their burst every 1 minute, they just have a slightly bigger burst every 2 minutes. So changing some party buffs to be 1 minute would still result in you playing the exact same way you do now, the damage spikes just get a bit lower.

^ This. ^

___________

It's the fact that nigh everything can be saved for the 2-minute bursts (from, for instance, giving 60s CDs two charges) that leads to the time between 2-minute bursts feeling so empty, not merely the fact that the raid buffs all occur per 120 seconds...

...and it's the sheer amount of potency (relative to sustain / average ppgcd / individual rotational, positional, or uptime optimization rewards) that can be put out in 15 seconds per 2 minutes that causes the problems with the Crit/DHit damage variance between parses with identical actions, far more so than the effect of stacked raid buffs.

(Remember, we used to have things like ~30% damage multipliers [e.g., DRG's old Blood for Blood] stacking atop 10% Trick Attacks, 10% Foe Requiem, 10% Contagion, 10% crit Litany, and 10% AoE Balance [late HW], etc.; buff multiplicity was far more impactful in the past, before the "2 minute meta". What we didn't have back then, though, was attacks hitting for some 3x our average potency-per-GCD.)

[SargeTheSeagull]

I would still have a problem with it, because it barely changes anything. Most jobs are already designed to do their burst every 1 minute, they just have a slightly bigger burst every 2 minutes. So changing some party buffs to be 1 minute would still result in you playing the exact same way you do now, the damage spikes just get a bit lower.

Oh you're 100% right. I'd also still have a problem with that but at the very least it would make dying less punishing and help balance just a tad. Ideally we'd nix half of the raid buffs in the game and go back to 1/2/3 min buffs with a 30/90sec here and there.

[Shurrikhan]

Oh you're 100% right. I'd also still have a problem with that but at the very least it would make dying less punishing and help balance just a tad. Ideally we'd nix half of the raid buffs in the game and go back to 1/2/3 min buffs with a 30/90sec here and there.

Splitting up the raid buffs wouldn't have an impact on the relative penalties of death, to be clear. They'd still be used on cool down in order to get as many uses and potential sync-ups as possible within the fight. The main difference would merely be that the shorter the CD, the more likely a death is to delay its activation, punishing self and especially the party.

Now, nerfing the raid buffs themselves certainly would help, but then you have the problem of each individually no longer mattering, to the point it's never worth going even a GCD out of one's way to exploit (e.g., high potency CD or DoT) a given buff (see Searing Light or Arcane Circle, for instance). If our hardest-hitting actions were squished back towards our average ppgcd/ppm, shortening the duration of raid buffs (or applying gradual falloff a la old Embolden) could help, but it'd still be a pretty half-hearted way to mitigate the total contribution of collective raid-buffs without making them individually non-mechanics (never worth adjusting gameplay around).

A mere extreme and very spitball approach, on the other hand, would be something like making raid buffs largely redundant to one another and putting raid buffs on a shared resource cost to provide alternatives to stacking them, be that via shared cooldowns, some manner of debuff preventing application of further buffs, or even via the Limit Break Gauge (revised slightly accordingly) so that raid buffs can be strong enough to individually supply gameplay but don't collectively double down on the punishment for death. In that case, though, they'd function like myriad forms of WoW's Heroism/Bloodlust, where the particular button is useless on each buffer whose buff isn't the best fit to the given situation (just like LB). So, pick of poisons.