Quote Originally Posted by strawberrycake View Post
See, the real issue here isn't that 2 min meta is bad persay, we just have two running theories since Yoshida and the Dev team are as transparent as Wood. It's either hard to express the unique personality of each job within 2 minutes, or the Battle content designers are still 3 guys and their interns so they're struggle bussing it as per usual.
Honestly the problem runs much deeper than that because it's a math problem that causes severe imbalance because of multipliers to damage. The 2 minute meta does mean that job identity is lost, but it's because with the 2 minute meta, you CAN'T have job identity and still have every job be viable.

With the older buff system, buffs only ever fully aligned on the opener and the 6 minute window. Outside of that, every player was always playing into something. Multipliers were dispersed throughout the duration of the fight.

With the 2 minute system, you are pumping all your hardest hitting things into what is often around a 16x multiplier. Any tiny discrepancies get amplified to a ridiculous degree. Think about the difference between 50 and 100 potency with a 16x multiplier. A gap that starts as 50 potency is now suddenly 800 potency. So any job that has very slight potency adjustments can suddenly be several orders of magnitude stronger than a job within the same role. That's before even talking about crit which is it's own ridiculous issue since you're stacking another multiplier on top of that already ridiculous multiplier.

This happens literally every 2 minutes, so instead of having two very strong burst windows in a fight, you have 4 or 5, and as the frequency increases the more important it is to not make any mistakes. Once you make a mistake and misalign yourself, you don't have any other windows to play into like it was with the multi-burst-window meta. So you then have to design encounters based on players making a moderate amount of mistakes which vastly changes the experience that players have with each fight based on how well everyone can maintain their rotation.

With this one change they've made it infinitely harder to maintain job balance, annihilated the possibility of job identity, greatly exacerbated punishments for death or rotational errors, caused crit variance to become a much more prevalent issue, and also made the game a million times easier for people that want a challenge and a million times harder for mechanically dis-inclined players. All of this just to make pressing a series of buttons easier for people that don't want to learn the most efficient order to push said buttons in.

So it's worse than just increasing the difficulty of designing jobs with personality.