What I think could help Make Gameplay More enjoyable.

[Avrintera]

I will be using paladin for this example because its the class I play most at top end and Even though I really like the changes they have made I do not like the 2 minute burst style of combat. Even if Paladin is a 1 minute still it doesnt feel as enjoyable to me at least to unlock your burst through pressing a button.

I feel a interesting thing to do would be to remove burst buttons like say req and fof and turn the fof into a trait that increases every 15 levels as you move towards endgame.
Like for example at lvl 15 you do 5% more dmg lvl 30 10% going up in 5% increases untill 30% at lvl 90. This would be for all classes/jobs that do dmg but with dps having a higher base start say at 10% base going to 15% at lvl 15 so they always do more dmg etc.

Now I would remove the req button that unlocks Confiteor and instead have it be built into. Like say how SAM builds to use shoha have PLD after using a divine might stack would build a holy guage like SAM or GNB That when you hit three stacks you can use confiteor which would be around 30s now of course blades and Confiteor would have to have lower potency but would happen more often. I would also like if our 1 2 3 unless get upgrade in 7.0 become the blades combo instead of it all being on confiteors button.

I also think would be a nice addition to their utility side of things is if when you hit that divine might you also got a holy defense stack like how SAGE has two stacks for their guage so one for offence one for utility and have it were Holy Sheltron uses one stack, Intervention uses one stack, and Have clemency move to ogcd but uses one stack as well. This i think would still allow you to help more often say the healers or party if its just healing or more defense needed and make the guage cap at 3 total you can save.

I believe this would make the classes feel more engaging to play and build towards bigger hits then just hitting a button and it unlocks. This would be a huge shift away from burst windows in a sense but make it be more engaging naturally they would have to change alot of jobs around. Like say Bard songs instead of increasing dmg they do other things like say increase healing while song is playing or increase move speed or gcd speed etc.

What do you all think about this type of change were instead of just pressing a button to do more dmg or unlock your burst, jobs would build towards it instead overall and have the more dmg button become a trait that increases over level range instead?

[Boblawblah]

I've always wondered, what percentage of players actually deal with the 2 minute meta in any real sense?

[Avrintera]

I mean you can look up my ff logs if you want but I deal with it all the time since endwalker started XD, I just feel that instead of hit button I do burst now building up to it naturally through doing the rotation correctly feels more interesting and less braindead so to speak without it becoming to much more complicated. I know the normal players will probably barely care or deal with it, but some if they hit shiny button eventually unlock bigger shinny button feels more natural than ahh I need to remeber to hit this button of cooldown every minute/2 minutes to unlock bigger buttons or do more dmg etc.

[PredatoryCatgirl]

I've always wondered, what percentage of players actually deal with the 2 minute meta in any real sense?

Even though I don't play savage, I learned my rotation just because I like being good at my jobs. That said, I drift more than would be acceptable in a savage raid. So I guess in some capacity, but not really.

[Rithy255]

I've always wondered, what percentage of players actually deal with the 2 minute meta in any real sense?

Pretty much everyone considering 2 minute meta is a more bigger issue then it seems on paper.
It Limits Job design to be fully around burst, Paladin? is a great example of a job that was perfectly fine on paper but because 2 minute existed it had to be changed for every type of content

While I dislike 2 minute meta as a concept and gameplay design, it does far more damage by limiting all job design, to be "burst only" Theirs literally never going to be room for a sustained job or a job with a powerful/meaningful offensive cooldown on a 90 second CD.

Job design should be balanced around high end duties (and does get balanced around them), so getting rid of it would benefit high end players but also have positive effects of allowing more designs for even casual players, who may want a job that feels strong throughout a encounter not only super strong in short bursts

[Colt47]

My feeling is that they tried to break down the gameplay and stick it in different areas. What they need to do is make all the things they do a part of the main experience. Take Bazja for example and the flexibility and craziness they had with the additional skills and world encounters: The mechanics that were found there would have made the overworld a ton more interesting than just a thing to traverse, which is all that it has become most of the time, now. They've kept map runs, fates, and hunts in, but they got too big into balancing things perfectly for some reason with overworld content that people currently rapidly out gear.

[Boblawblah]

Pretty much everyone considering 2 minute meta is a more bigger issue then it seems on paper.
It Limits Job design to be fully around burst, Paladin? is a great example of a job that was perfectly fine on paper but because 2 minute existed it had to be changed for every type of content

While I dislike 2 minute meta as a concept and gameplay design, it does far more damage by limiting all job design, to be "burst only" Theirs literally never going to be room for a sustained job or a job with a powerful/meaningful offensive cooldown on a 90 second CD.

Job design should be balanced around high end duties (and does get balanced around them), so getting rid of it would benefit high end players but also have positive effects of allowing more designs for even casual players, who may want a job that feels strong throughout a encounter not only super strong in short bursts

So basically, due to high end balancing, we're sort of forced into more bland job design? That seems..sucky. But if they got rid of it completely, I assume some jobs would become more important than others for high end content and those that were a bit too far out of the meta would get ignored. Makes me wonder if that sort of thing is happening already for the elite players.

[RitsukoSonoda]

Pretty much everyone considering 2 minute meta is a more bigger issue then it seems on paper.
It Limits Job design to be fully around burst, Paladin? is a great example of a job that was perfectly fine on paper but because 2 minute existed it had to be changed for every type of content

While I dislike 2 minute meta as a concept and gameplay design, it does far more damage by limiting all job design, to be "burst only" Theirs literally never going to be room for a sustained job or a job with a powerful/meaningful offensive cooldown on a 90 second CD.

Job design should be balanced around high end duties (and does get balanced around them), so getting rid of it would benefit high end players but also have positive effects of allowing more designs for even casual players, who may want a job that feels strong throughout a encounter not only super strong in short bursts

Thing is the 2 minute meta is just the latest in design choices SE has done to cater to "raiders" that have resulted in an overall negative impact on the bulk of the player base. A mistake other MMO's have made which resulted in most dying out completely. It's not even the entire raid oriented part of the player base these changes are catering to, it's the elitist part of that group and the sheep people that just blindly follow them thinking those elitists make the laws of raiding. And the whole "players weren't using X job as much as Y job" argument is moot because it's always going to happen regardless of what the devs do because someone is going to plant the thought in other people's heads that because X job does 0.0000001 DPS more than the rest during the entire battle, it makes all the other jobs unviable in endgame content.

[Amarande]

So basically, due to high end balancing, we're sort of forced into more bland job design? That seems..sucky. But if they got rid of it completely, I assume some jobs would become more important than others for high end content and those that were a bit too far out of the meta would get ignored. Makes me wonder if that sort of thing is happening already for the elite players.

Pretty much. It's actually a universal disease in multiplayer gaming these days so you can't even really get away from it anymore aside from retreating completely into the loneliness of single player games.

Used to be that games were built and balanced around the bulk of the playerbase, and top players were simply exceptional heroes to be looked up to.

Nowadays, you're expected to be exceptional as a baseline, culture lambasts you for being average or even above-average (a stark example: if you ever look at That Site We Don't Name, and check rankings on casual content vs. Savage, many players that routinely get roasted in Discord for being "bads" when they go in for tougher challenges are actually VERY above average when compared to the max level playerbase at large!). Basically everything is to be built and balanced around the needs of the elite and their content slice, and if you have any kind of a problem with how the gameplay runs for anything and you aren't one of their crowd, you don't have a right to express it. "You're just complaining because you're not good enough is all. If you were better, you wouldn't have that problem."

I think I've played one MP game in recent times where that noticeably wasn't the case. It was a mobile game that was very chill, very accessible even to a decent-but-not-like-it's-your-job player, didn't even cost that much (I think I spent about the price of a regular AAA game all told on it). OF COURSE it shut down after I'd been playing for a few months, because why wouldn't it? LOL

I'm also at a loss as to how to "repair" the culture at scale because it seems to be a pervasive thing about mainstream humanity as a whole lately. IE. Everything must be a go big or go home hustle. It might help if we had more communities that focused around the average working adult gamer, perhaps? But even that is a big ask because the requirements that modern social media puts on running a community on their platform heavily select for nearly everything public to ultimately be run by the hyper-hardcore crowd, and for more laid-back communities to be private invite-only affairs (which in turn become impossible-to-find - which I expect is part of also why MP games give off the vibe they do, as in most of the people you actually want to play with no longer come to the visible watering holes).

And yes, elite players are already starting to be more heavily impacted by the meta. Not sure how well 6.4 handled it but apparently 6.2 was a nightmare ...

[Raikai]

It's true that a 'very open' job design could lead to inevitable exclusion of some jobs in favor of others. This is one extreme... The '2min meta' currently stays in the polar opposite of that.

Couldn't be somewhere not in either end? Even back in Stormblood the game still favored burst windows, but there we had a more diverse array that made jobs feel more unique while groups requiring the awareness of the party composition to properly seize different moments (eg Trick Attack 1min windows).