IGN Brazil Asked Yoshida about 2 min meta

[Aldath]

Agree, SE kinda listen I remember back in ARR/HS era when healers complained and cried so had because " Why I'm DPSING? I'm suppose to be a heal bot and not spam dots/aoes wtf anxiety" , Tanks the same " Too many skills! I'm struggling really hard with Anxiety right now", Relics arent fun! nerf them! too much work! not fun!

Honestly the more I dig into this issue and read older stuff the more I realize why people think Margrat is a stand-in for the devs.
I don't like the direction the game takes in regards of just releasing and dumping content without making it accessible to newer players, but heck, I'm sure if they removed stuff like the 2 minute meta you'd have people moaning about whatever solution was implemented and try to squeeze the fun out of it for the sake of DPS performance.

2. The only real problem with FFXIV, which is the same problem with GW2 and I imagine with a lot of games, are group-wide damage buffs. These are always going to be tyrannical no matter how you implement them. In GW2 because 100% buff uptime is possible, alacrity and quickness are now mandatory, forcing the game into the terrible decision of either designing dedicated boonslaves, or just allowing both buffs to be inconsequentially generated with a passive trait that does nothing to change up playstyle. In FFXIV, having limited buff windows just forces players to dump all their skills during someone else's golden hour, which in turn forces the designs and playstyles to all converge on this weird in-step DDR Rockettes routine. PARTY DAMAGE BUFFS RUIN INDIVIDUAL SKILL, REACTIVE GAMEPLAY, AND SPONTANEOUS CHOICE. If the devs would simply cut that very small category of skills, no class would be locked into a two-minute rotation and could be redesigned with new cadence and contours, the game would still have plenty of room for complexity and cooperation in other dimensions of combat, and players would be able to optimize DPS in their own ways without the feel-bad of needing to blind-sync with other people's buffs.

Although I agree with you, people would then proceed to gatekeep whatever classes have the best individual performance, which happened before in GW2. I don't know if you were there when you couldn't play a Necromancer in Fractals with random people because of the class performance despite content being completely clearable with all sorts of class combinations. There's no real solution to the meta mindset.

[SeverianLyonesse]

Honestly the more I dig into this issue and read older stuff the more I realize why people think Margrat is a stand-in for the devs.
I don't like the direction the game takes in regards of just releasing and dumping content without making it accessible to newer players, but heck, I'm sure if they removed stuff like the 2 minute meta you'd have people moaning about whatever solution was implemented and try to squeeze the fun out of it for the sake of DPS performance.



Although I agree with you, people would then proceed to gatekeep whatever classes have the best individual performance, which happened before in GW2. I don't know if you were there when you couldn't play a Necromancer in Fractals with random people because of the class performance despite content being completely clearable with all sorts of class combinations. There's no real solution to the meta mindset.

FFXIV's GCD is so slow there wouldn't be much disparity between top and bottom, just like there is now. In GW2 you still have gatekeeping and meta, largely because either classes are too versatile as support (FB, Mech), or just have far too low of skill floor and easily spew out DPS on even the most casual player (Virtuoso, and again Mech).

FFXIV really doesn't leave as much room for a gap between skilled and nonskilled play as GW2 does, as long as you always be casting. In GW2 the difference can be on the order of a magnitude, so obviously class choice and build matters for unskilled players. FFXIV generally doesn't allow players to fail as much. We wouldn't see gatekeeping nearly to the same extent, except for tryhard speed-farmers, and those people are lame anyway.

Plus, in my opinion, making jobs as "nonequivalent" as possible actually makes for easier balancing (see Smash Bros). You have the freedom to tweak the damage or speed on specific skills in isolation without needing to constantly look at how that same change affects the equivalencies on all the other classes. Certainly I think this applies at least with respect to DPS skills, since they all ultimately have the same specific outcome. And in a game where all non-DPS skills have been so heavily homogenized for consistency, they might as well diversify as much as they can along the only axis they can: DPS.