Almost into 7.3, what you think about the *improved* encounter design?

[Raikai]

Procs help a lot but they aren't the only thing that can make jobs more engaging. They need to add more things to pay attention to in general with regards to damage rotations.

Procs, so we need to check if we got a proc after using an ability.

Non-30/60/120s cooldowns so rotations aren't the same loop over and over and over again. If we had some 20, 40, 90 and 180s cooldowns, things wouldn't come up at the same point every cycle and you would actually have to pay more attention to your cooldowns. Your opener, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 minute burst windows would all be slightly different due to different abilities being on/off cooldown. And you'd have your pot back up for the full re-opener at 6 minutes. Amazing. It's almost like the game was actually designed with this in mind instead of being boring, repetitive, 1-2 minute loop slop.

Buffs to keep up and debuffs to keep on the boss are good because they just give us more things to track and abilities that we need to use to reapply them. Not sure why they keep getting rid of these. NIN losing Huton and VPR losing its DoT (that was in the game for such a short period of time that I can't even remember what it was called...) sucked.

Abilities that augment other abilities are good (Kaiten). Imagine having to make sure you have enough gauge to spend on an ability by the time another ability comes off cooldown.

We need more diversity between jobs too. Every job boiling down to "123, build, burst. Press your 30/60/120s buttons on cooldown" reinforces how boring the jobs are. You can't even change jobs to freshen the game up anymore.

TL;DR - they need to make the dev team go play WoW again.

I hate to compare both games but they're right.

Of course, the combat approaches are vastly different, but the idea is still there: In WoW, there's no such thing as a "2min meta" (well, not counting a Bloodlust window, but that's usually in the opener when somebody brings the buff), and classes there only have inwards mechanics - timers, procs, abilities that interact with other abilities, short time and long time cooldown management, utility management, resource management. None of those elements are unknown to XIV, we had them in some capacity in the past.

In short, it is possible to make the jobs work without a collective burst window happening every 2 minutes if they had interesting inwards mechanics. And even beyond that if we still had party buffers like AST, who brings it in short intervals, it would still add a layer of complexity in figuring out the best way to adjust to a card coming at you every so often.