What I think could help Make Gameplay More enjoyable.

[Shurrikhan]

...

I feel like this slightly... conflates issues.


The 2-minute meta's optimizations are nothing new, fundamentally. It's just a lower floor and ceiling to understanding (i.e., you don't need as much knowledge of the other jobs in your party) but with higher punishment for failing its basics (use your CDs on CD after the opener) and having fewer available instances of optimized timing than before (no per 60s, per 90s, etc., sync-ups).

That is to say, they tried to simplify things, making it easier to optimize but more punishing not to. Since not all failings there are going to be from lack of understanding, the latter can feel a bit worse than they likely imagined in that exchange of 'ceiling' and 'lenience' for more broadly accessible/felt 'engagement'.

If not for the only times the difference really matters also being the times where the community was that much more likely to push set compositions (to the point where, optimally, you play a comp through a particular vantage point, not [just consistently playing] a job), I'd say our current state of 120s-buffs-only is a clear downgrade over what we had before, but... it's not a huge one.


Similarly, front-loaded (CDs and spenders from gauges that start full) vs. back-loaded (spenders, when gauge starts empty) aren't really that big a deal; they vary the opener, and that's it, while making it that much harder to balance short-but-difficult encounters (not that we have any at the moment, outside of maybe Criterion Savage) if any job swings too far one way or the other.

Yes, having CDs that you only pop during other CDs, and do not even alternate in their contexts are going to feel worse than those that see more varied contexts and therefore seem less... 'bundled' or 'bloated', but that's not wholly a matter of things being useful to the 2-minute meta (or burst windows in general) or not. It's more to do with simple button-efficiency, rhythmic variation, and the like.


In the end, the far bigger things are (A) just the available depth and the sort of "effort-to-output" curves of the given job's kits and (B) the designs of the fights themselves. Whether we start with full gauge to immediately blow our big damage, or unlock it with a CD, or the CDs themselves are our big damage... isn't super relevant/impactful overall, nor is what portion of abilities will naturally sync up to within 15s per 120s (so long as there's still variation in contexts between those raid burst uses).