Quote Originally Posted by Gserpent View Post
Right, I'm not saying it was perfect, just better.
On what basis relevant to (playing around) raid buffs, though? Or is this all tangential to / separate from the earlier chain of topics?

I'd agree that Shadowbringer was by and large better, though I still think the likes of Brotherhood and Embolden affecting ALL damage is probably better than their arbitrarily not. (For those not to simply negatively affect MNK and RDM, each, or force set comps between them, they'd both have to be sort of innately desirable -- worth taking even without perfect synergy.)

Similarly, I think that Endwalker RDM is better designed, on the whole, than Shadowbringers RDM, and EW PLD slightly better than ShB PLD, even if I vastly preferred late-Shadowbringers SAM to modern SAM (though I'd still have liked slight adjustments to TG and how Meditate contributes towards Shoha).

And then look into dialing back those raid buffs even more. Because obsessive focus on raid buffs got us to where we are now. It was a mistake, and it was an obvious one in hindsight.
Raid buffs were arguably bigger back in Stormblood, when we stacked Chain, Expanded Balance, Foes, Hypercharge, Litany, and Contagion/Trick Attack/Brotherhood, etc. The multiplicity of it was bigger, too.

I'm not convinced Endwalker has made the community any more obsessed with raid buffs; rather, I suspect this is the state we'd have seen even if the game went unchanged, this many years later, even from Stormblood's designs. I think this trend has more to do with that sort of "Game Two" community-driven experience/perception than it does with those actual design changes. Because these habits were handed down from on high in either case, that raid buffs are a bit more accessible now hasn't actually had, I suspect, that big an impact on the space they take up in our heads. I suspect it's more akin to the neglected brain tumor than increasingly violent concussions, so to speak.

I suspect that view from "hindsight" is more a matter of "resulting," or conflating results with bad decisions regardless of whether the results stemmed from it.

Take that with a grain of salt, though; I can't conclusively prove it either way. And there's a fair bit to dig into regarding how rapidly an idea spreads (collectively) or grows (per individual) from the experience of actually doing something being that tiny bit less complicated (and therefore seemingly clearer).



All that's kind of besides the point, though. I imagine we want to focus on potential improvements, rather than just our rationales for why things got so, as we see it, bad?

Let's assume for a moment that the players' (not devs') lessons learned or obsessions formed won't soon be forgotten or dissipated. What kind of gameplay would you like to see that would make playing around raid buffs less prominent? And what would actually change, in practice, between your vision and what's present now?

The biggest sticking point I'm running into when imagining something different to our status quo now is that, unless the encounters are changed to give something else to focus on, nothing would change outside of
  1. a bit less punishment for being desynced due to an especially ill-timed death --with any other timing being largely irrelevant, since CDs still cool while dead, outside of the very rare cooldown-reduction per action on Warrior-- and

  2. noticeably less gameplay/complexity on certain jobs that would otherwise have among the least (DRK, WHM, for instance).

On the other hand, I could see kit changes being immensely impactful to the minute-to-minute, moment-to-moment feel of jobs within/despite that fixation on raid buffs. When Samurai's Tsubame-Gaeshi was a one-minute CD, it anchored its macro-rotation; now that it can hold two charges, it instead seems to simply crowd its two-minute burst and then leave SAM with nothing of interest for the next 100 seconds. Imagine if TG had instead just been made a little less punishing of latency / packet loss (such as by not being made unavailable until your next Iaijutsu or opportunity therefor). That, I imagine, would provide the same flexibility (or better) that the two charges provide, but without overly siphoning from its moment-to-moment or minute-to-minute play in favor of its full raid burst.