ZephZaeora discusses job balance and how it's gone downhill in Endwalker. Thoughts?

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TL : DR - Job balance is being hurt by 2 minute burst windows and leaves little room for optimization.

Alright, here's my take: Standardising all jobs to 2 minutes is the reason we have broken combat balance right now. It's not the only reason, but it's the straw that has broken the camel's back.

In previous expansions, we had job burst on 60s, 90s, 120s and 180s. When used on cooldown, these naturally aligned on opener, and again at 6 minutes.

However, depending on an expected killtime, you could hold the 2 minute buffs at 8 minutes into the pull and get a full buff alignment again at 9 minutes. This wasn't something pugs were expected to do, and casual statics typically didn't, either.

This creates a situation where the devs can balance for the expected gameplay of the average player (everyone uses everything on cooldown), but leaves the ceiling high enough for coordinated groups to squeeze in a little extra damage.

That means if an enrage is tough, there is room for a group to improve in order to meet the DPS check. When everyone's burst is aligned to 2 minutes, and fights are purposefully designed around 2 minute burst, the skill ceiling is lowered and players have nothing to improve.

This problem is compounded by said burst also being extremely high potency relative to past expansions. Every expansion we get higher and higher potency single-use abilities where if you don't crit, you lose a huge chunk of DPS.

A single job can have a DPS swing of close to +-5% from one pull to the next. If the entire party has a bad crit RNG run, you hit enrage. After doing all the mechanics perfectly and executing your rotation perfectly, beating enrage is down to a dice roll.

The irony is that in an attempt to make balancing easier by standardising all jobs (if that was the intent) they have made it impossible to reasonably balance.

You either set the DPS check to the low end of expected crit RNG (of a party consisting of the weakest jobs), making the DPS check a joke for any competent group, or reintroduce a skill ceiling in which the players have the ability to find extra damage where it's not expected.

Speaking of which, GIANT HITBOXES are another part of the same problem. During prog, melees have to play safe. You can balance around expected lost GCDs. As they optimise, they can find extra damage to make the DPS check easier.

Movable bosses also allows for strat creation to cater to melees enabling a party to get even more damage by being creative with how they solve a mechanic.

When melees are doing more damage than ranged, and they're not punished for being a melee (because they get full uptime for absolute free), there's no point to bringing triple ranged, and no room to optimise uptime.

P8S part 2 is especially egregious due to there being a single 2 minute buff window with DOUBLE DAMAGE. If you don't get lucky crits during this window, it can completely negate all optimisation effort you did in the first 60% of the fight.

P8 doorboss is a fun fight but the overall design of combat this expansion is a complete disaster and needs a major rework.