Quote Originally Posted by Jojoya View Post
That's why I bring it up as an issue of player agency. Feeling like you have control over when you choose to blow your cooldowns is fun and very satisfying for many even if the reality is they would probably use them at specific times regardless. Now they feel like that choice has been taken away from them.

Games need to feel fun. There's a lot more fun when you're deciding what to do than when someone else has made the choice for you.
Cool. Then there was at least a better illusion before, perhaps because you'd need to memorize more situations or track more things to make the best choice.

That said, you generally did not hold for buffs anything that wasn't bankable. The buffs were pre-scheduled and you simply played as you would unless you had something specifically as bankable as Mirage Dive or gauge spenders.

Yes, we have more margin on gauge spenders now, but to the point also that what could barely be held for a 90s before can be held for a 120s now, providing the same degree of agency.


Again, I do think it was slightly better back then than now in terms of party coordination rewarded; I just think people mis-weigh the factors that were involved in moving from A to B, which have a lot less overall to do with the buffs' CDs themselves than the availability of the skill which exploit those raid buffs.

My advice, then, is, rather than just rallying around this complexly arrived-at and variously-defined state of the "2-minute meta" (as if we weren't equally fixated on raid-buffs before and 2-minute comps weren't already meta)...

...instead determine what actually instills those net-favorable feelings of agency, because you're probably not actually going to find an overall net increase in that control if going back to Stormblood (where most had very, very little control compared to now over the timing of their actions, even in absolute terms rather than per "obligatory" sync).

And of those parts, look at what you prefer.
  • Maybe you want the relative value of shorter-term optimizations like positionals, minimizing GCDs per Iaijutsu prepped, and never messing up a combo to be greater?
  • Maybe you want the impact of Crit/DHit variance to be slightly less and would therefore prefer your ostensibly multi-hit CDs to actually be multi-hits (though with your guaranteed Crits still applying to each component strike)?
  • Maybe you want a greater number of burst cycles (such as how pre-nerf-Bloodfest caused you to have effectively 4 variations on your minute to minute cycles, instead of just the current 2), or to have a similar effect on how your CDs sync up to raid buffs?
  • Maybe you want to gain or lose some "freely timeable" uses of your CDs based on which other jobs are in your party? (If you don't want that variance [which includes just not wanting to lose agency from having previously freely timeable CDs given obligatory timings], either the buffs CDs must be equal or the outliers must be single-target AND you must not be worth buffing.)