My take on what can be changed for FFXIV

[Lyth]

What skill expression lies in holding your abilities for the same burst windows though?

Coordinating around burst windows have always been important, dating back to NIN's introduction and TA. Essentially every opener that you have learnt from HW onwards has been designed around the timing of raid buffs. Jobs which are less burst-focused and that have buff windows that don't sync up well with the others usually end up at a disadvantage, and we've seen many examples of that historically, especially in Stormblood.

By syncing up all the burst windows in a more transparent way while having individual jobs bring relatively smaller buffs, they've made the design around this a lot more transparent to casual players. The game itself hasn't changed, there's just an increasing awareness at lower skill levels of how players have been optimizing for about 8 years or so.

The other effect of this is that the fight designers have more opportunities to challenge you around buff timings. You may have noticed that most important mechanics coincidentally happen during those buff windows. That's deliberate. So now you have 'rest' periods where you can have a breather, coupled with more mechanically-intensive sections that are timed against periods where you want to focus on your burst. It's no longer just free damage.

[Rithy255]

Coordinating around burst windows have always been important, dating back to NIN's introduction and TA. Essentially every opener that you have learnt from HW onwards has been designed around the timing of raid buffs. Jobs which are less burst-focused and that have buff windows that don't sync up well with the others usually end up at a disadvantage, and we've seen many examples of that historically, especially in Stormblood.

By syncing up all the burst windows in a more transparent way while having individual jobs bring relatively smaller buffs, they've made the design around this a lot more transparent to casual players. The game itself hasn't changed, there's just an increasing awareness at lower skill levels of how players have been optimizing for about 8 years or so.

The other effect of this is that the fight designers have more opportunities to challenge you around buff timings. You may have noticed that most important mechanics coincidentally happen during those buff windows. That's deliberate. So now you have 'rest' periods where you can have a breather, coupled with more mechanically-intensive sections that are timed against periods where you want to focus on your burst. It's no longer just free damage.

Shame that Ninjas TA is a selfish buff now and mug was made into a 2 minute burst, despite TA synching into bursts anyway.

I'm sorry but theirs zero skill expression in being "busy once every two minutes" and knowing exactly when the right time to burst is, Its a very 1 dimensional way of balancing jobs and fights, I'd take more diverse Jobs any day over having "intense burst moments" most jobs bursts are just weaving some things or clicking their high damage skills and not even weaving much.

I rather a Job be fun all the time then be super fun 20% of the time and you're taking a breather 80% of the other time, EXT+ Fights and abilities shouldn't be balanced around casual players, casual players don't care about optimising Damage rotations into burst windows in the first place.

My personal beliefs in job balance is that Fun and Varity should go over pushing every job into the same Box, the gameplay shouldn't be only fight design exclusive, Job design and Variety is very important and burst meta pushes another way of making the jobs closer and closer, I really rather jobs be unique then "balanced" Ideally I want both as every step SHB/EW made was to everything more of the same, Fight design is even starting to accommodate jobs such as melee DPS with massive hit boxes, instead of embracing that downtime for melee's and optimising uptime is what makes them unique in the first place.