Quote Originally Posted by Kosachi View Post
Isnip
Adding to this, the two minute meta is both a problem and a symptom of wider problems with job design. Jobs are becoming more samey for several reasons, one of which is making them fit this unified damage profile: A minute and a half of filler, followed by 30 seconds of dumping everything. Another culprit is inflating potencies on finisher moves. It moves more and more damage into that two minute window, and the multiplicative effect of crits, buffs, potions, etc moves more of your total damage contributions onto those big spiky hits. If you don't crit, whatever you did skillfully outside that two minute burst has a lot less importance. Ironically, in the name of making things more consistent to manage, it's transferred more of everyone's damage profile over to an RNG stat.

The 2 minute meta gets a lot of well-deserved flak, but it's not the source of its own problems. It's a downstream effect from CBU3's sledgehammer approach to stupidifying and homogenizing jobs. Lord knows Heavensward was janky, but instead of pursuing the interesting bits and working on the jank, they worked on deleting jank and smoothbraining the interesting bits. Stripping out RPG elements so everything is just DPS or DPS cost opportunity. "Refining" the hard content recipe down to a lot of stacking and spreading with occasional one-off interesting mechanics. Randomly throwing massive number buffs at jobs to get their play rates up. Every job they've put their "rework" fingers on since then has pushed it hard toward "press the buttons as they light up" pancaked skill ceiling design. I don't specifically want Heavensward combat back; I wish they had leaned in an entirely different design direction than they did after Gordias. It seems like CBU3 decided "welp, our playerbase is too stupid to have interestingly designed classes or content, so anytime we tinker with things after this you'll get back a job that could be macroed to one button".