2 minute meta: Rework or Remove?

[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.

[Shurrikhan]

But aligning everything for 2 mins is exactly what we got.

So, two things here:

1. As compared to what? Hitting them on CD? Aligning them for <every X seconds, based on raid comp>? What stands as an improvement over this, and by how much?

2. What we got does not necessarily equal the only thing that was feasible even under those exact conditions.

So every job has to be designed around that philosophy, every fight has to be designed around that philosophy.

Until/unless we get mainstay difficult light party content, where the value of raidwide buffers is greatly reduced for lack of recipients, no, that's really the case. Jobs just need to put out the same in-group damage in practice. If a job with a less bursty profile has to do more DPS over 6 minutes of solo-play slapping a striking dummy than its burstier peers so that it then has the same party contribution amid an average composition, that's fine.

We shouldn't be attempting to balance jobs around their solo dps, nor exploiters (jobs whose party synergy is hidden from the rDPS metric) around their rDPS.

Was HW/StB perfect.. absolutely not... but did it allow more interesting job design? Absolutely.

Except our design opportunities still have all those same options and freedoms even now; the devs have just chosen not to use them. You're not going to hold a 90s CD for raid buffs, as proven by every 90s CD we've had in Endwalker. You're not going to hold a single-charge anything more than ~10% of its cooldown regardless of the timing of raid buffs. Job design could reinclude the old timings of personal damage amplifier buff CDs and direct damage CDs and they'd then be used at the old pace. The only difference is that you'd have to slightly compensate those faintly less synergetic jobs with that much more damage.

Yes, a super meta all-the-raidbuffs comp may thereafter still deal a fraction of a percent more damage than a near-buffs-less one (while non-buffers, in turn, would be further preferred for light party content), but that's also what you had before, often to a much greater degree.