Quote Originally Posted by SargeTheSeagull View Post
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.