Quote Originally Posted by Nav_Fae View Post
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Ill take a crack at it then. The problem with the 2min meta is threefold.

A) While trying to make the game easier for people by having everyone buff at the same time, you're inadvertently making it harder by requiring pretty close to perfect play during those burst windows. With how rigid and linear rotations are in the game right now, you have literally zero chance of realigning yourself with the universal buff window without dropping a full usage of said raidbuff which feels like poo and is overall a bigger loss. So Option 1: Be late compared to everyone and feel bad or Option 2: Lose a usage and feel bad. Let's now talk about deaths. In a game that allegedly targets the casual players, they sure do penalize you to hell and back for dying. No only do you lose all your resources, buffs etc, your buff alignment is now FUBAR for the rest of the fight and there's not much you can do about that; which leads me to point number 2.

B) Back when we had staggered buff timers, there was ample opportunity for recovery in the event you screw up or die. "Oh, did I die just before my 2 minute burst? Oh well. I can pump during brotherhood (Was 90)" "Oh, did I screw something up and lose my Littany/Battle Voice window? I can send it during the next trick (was 60)". So for something that was supposed to be "too confusing" for people, it gave ample room to make the most value out of a bad situation whereas now, See point A.

C)Like you guys mentioned, concentration of damage. As it is now, damage is very heavily centered on your two minute windows with everyone's heavy hitting skills whizzing around. This does two things. 1) It overemphasizes the need to crit/dhit during those windows because of the multiplicative nature of raid buffs. Your run can live or die based on how your crit rng pans out during a buff window if optimization is your game. 2) It hampers fight design pretty heavily as to accommodate everyone in a party using their (generally pretty high apm) bursts. This leads to two general outcomes. Either the boss is sitting there twiddling its thumbs while eight people are running around punching it in the face or you have to do mechanics while playing the piano on your keyboard. Option 1 is really boring and puts me to sleep. Option 2 is really fun for me, but I also understand how it can be overwhelming for newer players so I would bet a small fortune that one of the main reasons SE has been dumbing all the jobs down to the point it's essentially smacking two rocks together is to allow people to do mechanics while pushing their buttons. This is also obviously undesirable. When we had the staggered buff windows, Losing out on a few buttons during a heavy mechanic window wasn't that big a deal because you could either hold until the next buff window which seldom was more than a minute away or you can lose whatever you lose and make up for it later since the damage profile was much flatter than it is now.