2 minute meta: Rework or Remove?

[Taranok]

Not when in the party you have 5 classes that buff ~4% of damage in which they go in stack where the more potency you vomit in that window and the more damage you do to the boss even reaching 20+% additional damage and without gcd from potency 1000+ plus crit (statistic now too more significant than the others), you are not competitive. You really produce too much more damage during the phases where the buffs are activated, but because there are too many of them and therefore they become too significant for the dps check. And this in itself penalized him, then throw in the downtime phases where the boss is untargetable and the omelette is done.
It should have been heavily buffed.

If you remove the raid buffs from practically all the classes and give them to only a few and these are responsible due to their functioning to always keep up all the various buffs (raid or single target), the old pld can be always competitive, as can be all the classes that instead of having a mega burst every 2 minutes have a smaller one every 30 seconds or perhaps others that work with dots or others where the autoattack is a significant component of the damage or for the classes that do incremental damage, or classes that do combo damage, or classes that do I don't know, other infinite possibilities. But no, everyone must respect the 2 minute meta. all jobs same with 15 seconds to vomit the big damage and then have all the rest filler.

Something also worth bringing up isn't just the raw amount of potency vomit you can get on classes during the 2m burst windows, but also things like boss downtime. If a boss jumps, a class like SMN which is timed via cooldowns primarily, gets a lot more resources, a lot more potential damage, back than a RDM who has their white/black mana shut down.

In the most extreme and egregious examples, a class can actually lose resources during boss downtime. Notable examples being BLM during aldezaal's legacy final boss, as well as BLM/DRG/MNK during E8S transition. These problems can also be seen with LB3, where a class like BLM can be forced out of their timers if they don't refresh them instantly before firing it, and be ready to refresh it instantly after.

That last example is kind of sidestepping the point of this conversation and what I'm bringing up, but this showcases that when you design classes in such an extreme way, things start to get very wonky when you do things like make the boss untargetable for a time. Some classes care a hell of a lot more than others, and the 2m meta makes this far more unforgiving.

This is what ultimately sunk PLD's design, as well as ruined SAM to a degree necessitating major potency buffs for SAM and a hasty rework for PLD. You can't take an over-time class into a fight like DSR where the boss is up for 30s, and then down for 30s, repeatedly in the meta you 2 are, rightfully, decrying.

[Shurrikhan]

Also, if I remember correctly, the meta comp for much of stormblood was, actually, drg+mch+brd+smn with war/drk and AST/SCH as the final picks. The buff stacking was actually bonkers, ranged tax or no.

It was a meta comp because it was the simplest, not necessarily because it had the highest party DPS / clear times. Even in early StB, Monk comps were quite competitive and by the end, every set comp was (Caster-high, 90s, Monk, etc., all alongside Double Ranged).

And even by Stormblood, SMN and SCH spell IDs and balancing were separate. A SMN Bane did not have to be a SCH Bane; a SMN physick did not have to be MND-based any more than a SCH Ruin II would have to be INT-based.

[Darkpaw]

You realize that mch was one of the rarest classes to see in StB right? Getting into a raid with them was a nightmare, almost everyone preferred bard over mch, because of the strict ping requirements to play mch at peak performance. Also because MCH's were heavily reliant on server ticks because.. flamethrower for heat.. If you missed your overheat by not flamethrowering enough you completely screwed your rotation and your DPS.

I remember trying to join pf's as a mch player and immediately getting kicked out and receiving a tell to come back as bard or any other class that was actually useful. So do a lot of old mch players, and by the end of StB Bard's crit scaling was so good that MCH was basically a vestigial class that was more useless than blue mage.

[Valence]

To be fair, Machinist was literally completely broken, or do we not remember the fiasco that was the heat bar and its extremely technical, extremely limited burst rotation that required a 10ms ping and a ton of finger walking to execute correctly? The joke for MCH was that there were dozens of MCHs playing. DOZENS! It is one of only 3 examples of truly broken classes. AST from HW was also broken (couldn't heal content, literally dead on launch,) and SMN (hw and SB, buff stacking and buff snapshotting let it do so much more damage than intended combined with a rotation so hard for most people to merely approach made it impossible to balance. Esp. since so many skills were shared with Scholar at the time. For SB+, using oGCDs to get more wyrmwaves out of bahamut.)

Also, if I remember correctly, the meta comp for much of stormblood was, actually, drg+mch+brd+smn with war/drk and AST/SCH as the final picks. The buff stacking was actually bonkers, ranged tax or no. And with the buff gods aligned, MCH could put out absolutely ridiculous wildfires due to just how, exactly, it was broken in that expansion.

It was not a fiasco and a great, flavorful system, sorry not sorry, and that's coming from a machinist player that used to play on NA with 200 ms ping back then. Yes, the latency sensitivity was bad and a problem, and the flamethrower trick was finicky and badly thought out (because the job wasnt even possibly supposed to overheat in the original design, which tends to show how far they think things out when it comes to that job...). Still, the overall concept was great, and the bursts were actually interesting and unique to execute, and wildfire used to be extremely satisfying to pull off.

They could have fixed the class, but instead chose to demolish it and replace it with something bland, as they always do for everything anyway.

MCH + BRD in SB wasn't meta at all, this was in HW. MCH was lagging behind hard in SB already, and BRD was able to make up for it more or less by having broken itemization. Both were carried by DRG at best.

[Llynethil]

Find me the hardcore raiders who asked for this? Even Yoshida's interview frames the complaints as a matter of being "too hard" for more casual players, not for the actually "hardcore", to whom such was already customary.

Read the IGN interview with Yoshi from a week ago or so, he basically said that players around the world were tired of the way raidbuffs worked before shb, then changed it to the 2min meta because majority of people asked for it, which in turn allowed them to make ew ultimates and some savage fights so crazy mechanically.

Maybe you don't like it, but majority of people did want this.

[Aravell]

Read the IGN interview with Yoshi from a week ago or so, he basically said that players around the world were tired of the way raidbuffs worked before shb, then changed it to the 2min meta because majority of people asked for it, which in turn allowed them to make ew ultimates and some savage fights so crazy mechanically.

Maybe you don't like it, but majority of people did want this.

He did say he got feedback from around the world about raid buffs, but nowhere in the interview did Yoshi P say that a majority wanted this. In fact, he said a majority of the hardcore playerbase hates the homogenisation.

[Kalaam]

Just needs a few people to say something vaguely going in the direction of a change to be able to say you just followed the community's demands

[Connor]

I really hope they change their mind on raid buffs, at least in terms of making more 30/60/90 cooldown ones. So-called support classes like Dancer, Bard and Astrologian and Scholar feel awful to play because the whole point of the job(s) has been relegated to being near-automatic and requiring no thought, planning, or anything generally associated with ‘support’. Then outside of those 10-15s windows you’re just a really bad dps lol, or a ridiculously overpowered healer with nothing to heal, no dps options, and you’re not allowed to provide any support outside of the 120s cycle . Even bloody defensive buffs are being homogenised at 120s lol

Additionally I want to say that I’m literally the most casual player ever. I haven’t done an extreme/savage since Stormblood. Hell I use Succor as a Scholar in normal content; I am one with Sylphie. I still absolutely do not want these levels of job homogenisation and conveyor belt raid buffs. I just want to support my party and have fun doing that, and part of that is not having arbitrary restrictions on everything you can do just so the player has to think as little as possible

[Valence]

People saying that the old raid buffs were any better may be suffering from a severe case of rose tinted glasses. It didn't change anything at all in how one played their job: you pressed raid buffs on time, and tried not to drift, because that's what was most optimal mathematically anyway.

Read the IGN interview with Yoshi from a week ago or so, he basically said that players around the world were tired of the way raidbuffs worked before shb, then changed it to the 2min meta because majority of people asked for it, which in turn allowed them to make ew ultimates and some savage fights so crazy mechanically.

Maybe you don't like it, but majority of people did want this.

If that's what Yoshi and SE actually understood, I think they understood completely wrong. People were unhappy about very specific jobs that were designed around extremely odd timings, notably a lot of tanks on 90s patterns, which didn't really lent themselves well to 60s based buffs (1min, 2min, 3min).

There is a literal highway between realigning 90s burst into 60s or 120s timings, and making everything, bursts and raid buffs, 120s.

[Darkpaw]

People saying that the old raid buffs were any better may be suffering from a severe case of rose tinted glasses. It didn't change anything at all in how one played their job: you pressed raid buffs on time, and tried not to drift, because that's what was most optimal mathematically anyway.



If that's what Yoshi and SE actually understood, I think they understood completely wrong. People were unhappy about very specific jobs that were designed around extremely odd timings, notably a lot of tanks on 90s patterns, which didn't really lent themselves well to 60s based buffs (1min, 2min, 3min).

There is a literal highway between realigning 90s burst into 60s or 120s timings, and making everything, bursts and raid buffs, 120s.

But aligning everything for 2 mins is exactly what we got. Which is what the naysayers were warning about when people asked for this. You can't have your cake and eat it too here. If 2 minute bursts are going to stay. You're going to see more homogenization. Because now we have 60 second mini burst, 120 second big burst. So every job has to be designed around that philosophy, every fight has to be designed around that philosophy. Was HW/StB perfect.. absolutely not... but did it allow more interesting job design? Absolutely.

Now could you say every 120 seconds? Every job needs to have a big burst that aligns? Old raid buff system was bad, but new job design is bad too.