Quote Originally Posted by mallleable View Post
Might be a take, but I think the whole 2 minute thing is kind of a red herring. Damage is damage whether it's a party buff, personal buff or pure potency. These actions will be expected to be used on cool down no matter what their cool down timer is, unless it is not advantageous to do so as dictated by a fight's timeline. My biggest critique is that a lot of the big 2 minute skills are just not that interactive, but for for the most part I think that a lot of 2 minute discussions are very surface level, and just lead to dead ends.
It really is not too much of a red herring, at least not when you look into it in depth. The reasons we have this meta is a combination of the following elements:

1. The goal is to reduce the enemy HP to zero. Because of that, the more damage you do, the better.
2. Many classes have huge potency nukes on a long, 60/120s cooldown. Other attacks do not nearly do as much damage.
2a. to get to those huge potency nukes, you need to always follow the rigid "to do" list of your class, no matter the encounter. The only variance happens in fights where things happen at a 60s/120s point.
2b. if you die, your work towards the end of your "to do" list often gets erased. Recovery usually won't be fully possible until the next 120s window.
3. Damage calculation in this game is multiplicative. Which means, combining damage cooldowns will always result in more damage than if you were to not combine them. The reason the cooldown times of those were adjusted to 60s/120s is because players actively asked for that.

-> that all means that to do the most DPS, you all sync up your damage buffs and high potency nukes on the same time. it just makes more sense mathematically.

This is the reason we have the problem of classes being designed around this very specific mold. This mold is what players usually criticize, and makes classes feel "same-y".

Instead I think the real meat of job design discussion is in the filler rotations. Filler is where you spend the majority of your time playing a job, and where most of the moment to moment gameplay happens. This is where I think jobs need the most improvement -- especially healers. If filler is great, then standardized bursts shouldn't matter.
Thats an important bit too, yeah. Its annoying when the real fun of playing a class only happens once every 2 minutes.