Quote Originally Posted by Gserpent View Post
That's easy - no more raid buffs. Period. You might have your own personal buffs, but when and where you use your buffs is entirely up to you, and your knowledge of the encounter. Involving raid buffs is clearly too much trouble to keep it in, even if it's against class fantasy to remove them (really, only Bard and Dancer have always been "buffing jobs", the others have often had buffs but it wasn't their core focus.)

The reason for this is simple - it completely unchains fight design and dramatically increases skill ceiling across the board, without touching kits *at all* aside from adjusting potency and buff values to account for them only affecting you rather than everyone. It's not a coincidence that a lot of major mechanics are specifically timed to happen around a 2 minute marker in fights (typically within 10-20 sec on either side of the line.)
I'd have to argue in return, though removing raid buffs would not unchain fight design, because it still would be chained to the remaining CDs (just with a slightly greater emphasis on some jobs being screwed over more than others) and increasing skill ceiling independently of individual kit designs... isn't a bad thing. If anything, though raid buffs aren't any exemplar I'd follow, that I expect the game would be more fun if it had more such cross-player interactions.

That said, I do think you overestimate its impact. Apart from on jobs like MNK, almost nothing changes between optimizing damage alone and optimizing damage under raid buffs; at most, a GCD's worth of oGCDs are delayed slightly further.

When your DPS is up to you and you alone, the ceiling is improved.
They're not zero-sum, though, and gameplay wasn't changed much at all.

As long as the *floor* is low and accessible, and normals and Ex's continue to be tuned and balanced accordingly to be basically impossible to fail and very generous with recovery opportunities, respectively, then you can do things that add layers and depth to hard-mode content.
Wouldn't raid-buffs pass muster under that warrant? On nearly every job, the floor is low and accessible, and no one needs to operate any differently over the presence of raid buffs until Ultimate -- short of maybe double-Solar/Lunar/Optimal Drift stuff for the rare overtuned Savage fight.

Insofar as making classes more active, you could accomplish that simply by reducing cooldowns of oGCD abilities across the board. Instead of 450 potency every 30 sec, change it to 225 every 15 sec.
Completely agreed.