2-minute meta

[Absurdity]

Well said.

I don't do content where this is a concern but it's always sounded dreadfully constrained to me to have to line up buffs perfectly and as you mentioned, what do you do outside them? It seems like it would allow a lot more flexibility and ability to respond to mechanics if buffs were independent of the party.

Lining up party buffs with everyone else was a fun part of optimising a fight...when you had to actually think about it.
What jobs does our group have? What are our available cooldowns and their timers? What is our killtime? Would delaying these buffs by 30 seconds here end up in a dps increase?

The problem is that SE decided to do the job for us by making everything line up automatically and when "optimising" means "just press it on cooldown" for every job it becomes incredibly boring to execute, not to mention very restrictive on top of that.
Having all buffs and burst windows automatically happen every 2 minutes also means that fights are now balanced around this. It isn't optimisation anymore, it is the baseline.

[Yeol]

Make it 1 minute. Give us 15s, 30s and 60s abilities. Get rid of 120s CDs.

[SweetPete]

I’ll just say this. 2 min meta SUCKS! Hope they remove it in 7.0. Just messed everything up.

[boopadoop]

boop boop !!

[RitsukoSonoda]

IMO 2 minute meta only damaged the overall game design.

[Gemina]

boop boop !!

Sometimes, it is ok to start a new thread.

As for the 2:00 minute meta, the most amusing thing about it is all the content out there on optimized rotations can be summed up with, "Just shove all your strongest attacks into this window FTW."

[Turtledeluxe]

I believe I started the game close to when it was implemented and I've hated it ever since.

Also any time I see or hear it discussed, it skews very hated. There must be a super silent majority that's indifferent or likes it. Or maybe, as others have suggested it is a JP player thing in which case I can see why our feedback is ignored.

[Supersnow845]

Honestly besides it making quite a few jobs feel samey my biggest problem with the meta is the fact it’s made the crit problem even worse (and the crit problem was bad enough in ShB

Jobs don’t need massive 1200 attacks you do in the burst window, hope crit then never touch again and it’s made the other substats completely redundant

Ignoring AST’s horrible design problems with what it has to stuff into the burst window AST has a disgustingly powerful MP economy (it gets 3566 MP per minute not from natural regen or lucid dreaming), this means it can run massively high spell speeds and still not run out of MP, however even using a spell speed of 2.09 (you read that right a natural spell speed of 2.09) FASTro can’t beat out crit on AST with a slow GCD

What’s even the point of the other substats when the meta has pushed crit that far

[Turtledeluxe]

Honestly besides it making quite a few jobs feel samey my biggest problem with the meta is the fact it’s made the crit problem even worse (and the crit problem was bad enough in ShB

Jobs don’t need massive 1200 attacks you do in the burst window, hope crit then never touch again and it’s made the other substats completely redundant

Ignoring AST’s horrible design problems with what it has to stuff into the burst window AST has a disgustingly powerful MP economy (it gets 3566 MP per minute not from natural regen or lucid dreaming), this means it can run massively high spell speeds and still not run out of MP, however even using a spell speed of 2.09 (you read that right a natural spell speed of 2.09) FASTro can’t beat out crit on AST with a slow GCD

What’s even the point of the other substats when the meta has pushed crit that far

Just my speculation but it's feedback from people who love seeing huge numbers on the screen that have mostly shaped the combat into what it is today.

And I can't blame them, obviously you want to optimize your gameplay and do as much dps as possible, but instead of devs maintaining the "dance" like feel FF is so often called out for, many encounters feel more like a train you can't get off of. I mean you can, but it's pretty hard to.

[Heroman3003]

Just my speculation but it's feedback from people who love seeing huge numbers on the screen that have mostly shaped the combat into what it is today.

YoshiP directly confirmed it tbh. People kept complaining all over about how it was too hard and complicated to sync buff timers, so they unified the timings and created 2 minute meta as a result. And those complaints were, obviously, primarily coming from parse-sweating 'hardcore raiders' (except usually they arent even hardcore raiders, just people who do savage raiding badly and look for any excuse that doesn't require them to improve). And that's why they don't want to change it, because they don't want to play a game of back-and-forth between "give us synchronized buff timings!" and "unhomogenize things!"