The end of Raidbuff - A solution for futur job Design

[Carighan]

As Valence said, if we're no longer shackled to the party buff window every 2 minutes then rotations no longer need to revolve around it. We could have 60 second bursts, 90 second bursts, 120 or jobs that completely rely on sustained dps again.

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?

[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.

[Absurdity]

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?

That will then be entirely dependent on kill time, as it used to be.
In almost all cases it is a damage loss to delay cooldowns so they fit into a bigger buff window if that means you lose out on a usage over the entire fight.

Best example being Warrior between 4.2 and 6.0. Most party buffs did not align with it's 90 second cooldown IR but if delaying it meant you would lose out on a use towards the end of the fight it would pretty much always be the worse choice.

Obviously 115 and 120 seconds are so close to each other that you'd most likely always want to align them, but even the difference between 105 and 120 seconds is long enough that you could end up losing damage overall if you delayed your cooldowns.

[Carighan]

That will then be entirely dependent on kill time, as it used to be.

But then why not just make all those cycles equal so to avoid the unexplained and unintuitive "sometimes you have to delay based on kill time and context and you better read up on that on The Balance you know"?

... that's how we got here, mind you:

1. Raid buffs and cycle times are different.
2. "Oh, we can optimize damage by delaying and aligning."
3. Everyone does (2) but it's neither explained nor visible, so might as well bake it into the base class definitions to fix that.
4. Everyone is aligned around a single, shared, cycle.

If we now add (1) as (5) at the bottom, wouldn't the cycle just repeat?

[EdenElsewhere]

Yeah, the thing is, raiders themselves made this game design. It's not like this was something planned by devs.

It was a noticeable player habit.

Devs fed into player habit.

Now players are moaning again.

Not everyone is going to be happy. The moment we go back unaligned buffs, raiders will just be aligning them again.

[ovIm]

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

I... what? I am trying to read your point but you make no sense to me in the context of this thread.
The issue is that buff stacking has taken over both job and fight design because of how the game works mathematically. Removing the mathematical need to stack buffs frees up options for player ingenuity, like what you are saying, delaying something depending on the phase because its worth it.
The issue is not players delaying their burst or working to sync up.

Yeah, the thing is, raiders themselves made this game design. It's not like this was something planned by devs.
...
Not everyone is going to be happy. The moment we go back unaligned buffs, raiders will just be aligning them again.

Devs indirectly caused all that by making buff stacking mathematically superior to everything else. Thats what a good game designer would have seen and understood, and I highly doubt CS3 does not have one of those laying around. When the synching up issue arose, they could have gone with a different route that was not pushing every class into the same damage type mold.
And no, the moment we go back to unaligned buffs, players will then have to see if it is even worth to realign since you may lose uses of your abilities over a fight if you delay too hard.

[Carighan]

Does it matter much whether instead of all using it bugs at one we all use them in sequence?

Like, what does it matter? The combat sequence is static either way, unless you first want that changed, static rotation #1 it static rotation #2 has little bearing. Might as well align everything to remove the unintended interactions (which, as said above, is exactly the evolution the game went through, as all other MMOs do).

[ovIm]

Does it matter much whether instead of all using it bugs at one we all use them in sequence?

Like, what does it matter? The combat sequence is static either way, unless you first want that changed, static rotation #1 it static rotation #2 has little bearing. Might as well align everything to remove the unintended interactions (which, as said above, is exactly the evolution the game went through, as all other MMOs do).

The combat sequence is static because everything has to align, there is no room for variance in the current design paradigm. If the buff stacking, which has shackled job and encounter design, was removed, we could theoretically go back to less static rotations on some classes.

[Asari5]

having to decide if we want to align and actively paying attention to it seems to be the more fun / less boring thing instead of just pressing it whenever the cooldown is ready.

it also pushes the skill ceiling up. which is a good rhing in a game.

or am i wrong?