The end of Raidbuff - A solution for futur job Design

[ovIm]

What prevents people from intentionally delaying their, say, 105s cycle to line up with 3 other people in their group who cycle at 110s, 115s and 120s?

Because then it would not be mathematically needed to do the best DPS anymore. They can still do it, but it would not be required.

The reason we have this "everything converges around big damage cooldowns that occur once every 120s" gameplay is because of the multiplicative damage calculation which rewards buff stacking with more damage. People delayed their cooldowns so they could align with trick attack back in the day, since that meant an overall noticeable increase in DPS. Which is an important metric in a game where the goal is to reduce enemy hitpoints to zero, so much so that people complained to Square Enix about this. Thats how we arrived at today, where every class is builder-spender on a 120s timer.

[Carighan]

Because then it would not be mathematically needed to do the best DPS anymore. They can still do it, but it would not be required.

What if delaying mathes out to be optimal DPS? Meaning to do maximum damage you'd be required to do that?

The point I made in my first post is that you can't really prevent this if you want to stick with this overall type of buff-centric design. You can fudge the numbers to the point where it becomes optimal not to align all the buffs, but... you could already do that now. But you don't. Hence some jobs delay their burst by a few GCDs while others do not, based on the per-job variance in lead-in time to the burst. Because right now it mathes so that aligning everything is optimal. But that's not a problem that'd be fixed by the proposed change really. It would still exist, just in a more crass fashion. Or maybe not, if you play the numbers right, but then it's important to realize that it was messing with potencies and hence the value of buff-alignment that did that, not the mechanical overall change.

Or if you go the way of an extra crass route and remove buffs (whole, leaving them on a handful of jobs like Dancer or Bard would usually make the problem worse unless you do it say that the PRanged jobs bring the buffs but you are hard-capped to only have 1 of them in the group, no exceptions), then we'd still math whether it's optimal to delay a rotation here or an effect there to align potting windows around boss abilities, or around debuffs, or around multiplicative effects where Monks or Reapers feed from other's GCDs.

It's not a problem you can solve at the root while just cutting a head of the hydra off. You need to get rid of the entire hydra if you want to keep the same goal.