Two Minute Raid Buffs - The Bane of Endwalker Job Design

[SpartanPawnch]

I'm posting this in the DPS section, but I feel it is just as relevant to all other jobs

It is undeniable that Endwalker has had its fair share of job design-related controversies between controversial reworks, job homogenization and the most volatile balance we have seen in a long time. All of this stems from a single source - two minute raid buffs.

Job homogenization and sustained damage
Regardless of your opinion on the PLD rework, it is undeniable that the job is less unique than it was in 6.2. The SMN rework was even more drastic - the job was essentially deleted and replaced with a completely new one in terms of gameplay. MCH has been neglected and as such is the last "sustainy" job left. It is consequently pretty bad in the current meta. Unfortunately, the only way I see this being fixed in current FF14 is a PLD-style rework, as any amount of buffs or nerfs will never solve the issue - it will either be too weak or too consistent.

That being said, previous expansions had way more sustained damage and this was never as much of an issue. The reason is simple - right now, a job either has the burst to fully take advantage of the two minute window or it doesn't. In previous expansions, while a sustained damage job could not fully take advantage of any one raid buff, it could decently utilize multiple raid buffs with different timings.

Damage Polarization
EW job balance is the worst it has been in a while. I only started in Stormblood, so I cannot speak about ARR or Heavensward, but this is the first time I've heard about a specific job (machinist) being blacklisted on a large scale due to low DPS. With so many buffs being concentrated in a single window even small differences in raw burst damage are severely amplified.

I honestly feel that the whole discourse around damage is a bit exaggerated, but there have been times such as P8S where it has mattered. Still, the devs do seem to care a lot about this, which is why they are making constant changes and very misguided ones such as kaiten removal. Balance would be a lot easier to maintain if most of the damage wasn't concentrated in 1/6th of an encounter's duration.

Misguided notion of accessibility
The original intention of making all raid buffs two minutes was to make raiding more accessible. In practice, this has not been the case. Dying at a bad time is now way more punishing, as missing out on one raid buff means missing out on all of them while completely misaligning any cooldowns with the burst window.

At the same time, it has removed all aspects of timing specific skills in relation to raid buffs. This has never been a requirement for casual content or even most pugs, but it was a fun bit of optimization for dedicated players which has now been severely gutted.

The two minute buff experiment has utterly failed and has become a massive detriment to this game's combat. It needs to die.

[Connor]

I do agree that the ‘2-min meta’ design has gotten way, way too out of hand lol.

The sad thing is having like one or two buffs that are better use when synchronised with other party member’s buffs is a fun idea. It encourages being aware of more than just the usual ‘am I standing in red’. But when literally every single buff ability in the game ( including defensive buffs which is just bizarre, why do they need to fit into the raid burst meta lol ), it takes all the fun out of it because at that point the buffs may as well be passives that auto-activate after 120 seconds

[Rithy255]

I think raid buffs should generally be removed outside of some certain ones here's ones that should stay, Bard songs, Dance partner + crit on partner, Astro cards, Dragon sight, We should also add or change around some more Buffs to be similar, I think the issues arise from having Buffs that are just these strict all party 120 only buffs, something like Bard while effecting the party is consistent so Jobs such as Old PLD (outside of battle voice finale), wasn't really negatively effected by this consistent party buff, but with 120 buffs just couldn't keep up because they didn't synch up inside those buffs, so they resorted to redesigning the entire job to be apart of the meta. (Which i don't mind the changes but old pld was also fun and I know people will miss it).

Raid buffs are Interesting at points but theirs zero interesting aspects in clicking one buff that makes the entire party do "5% more damage" Instead I think having raid buffs be more unique to Jobs or turn into "partner buffs" would make the game at least more Interesting Astro cards are a great example of a raid buff that has actual choice towards it that you're going to benefit more from selecting the right target ect. I think we need to be moving away from a "2 minute meta" in the future, it's just bland theirs nothing intresting in any basic 120 raid buff, jobs like Ninja used to be cool "support" jobs now are just more 120 samey burst meta Jobs.

I can only hope in 7.0 we move into a more Interesting game with unique raid buffs and even utility, recently the Phys ranged changes to Bard/Machnist are actually pretty cool and Interesting, I do have some hope that they're listening to the general feedback.

[Ggwppino]

In my opinion, the 2 minute burst isn't that bad. The design problem with endwalker is the fact that there has been a disarming simplification of the classes. In my opinion, the 2-minute burst is the only thing that makes everything more interesting, especially in this tier where interruptions often happen right in the burst moments and if the game would have a slightly more severe dps check, there would be a nice some precautions and optimizations that a party should do but ignore.
As far as balance is concerned by checking the 5.5 patch ranking on a strange site, the mch was still at the bottom of the standings quite far from the first. Also from the same site it can be seen that endwalker has actually weakened the dps gap in the various classes, balancing them, especially the melee dps classes which are in an almost Tibetan balance. Furthermore, if the buffs have lost their meaning it is because by now almost all classes have damage buffs for the all party, so even if you miss a burst of a single player it doesn't matter. But here in my opinion it is due to the fact that there are too many buffs and therefore there is no need to optimize them, therefore a dnc, for example, is not inclined to optimize its buff, because there are also the mnk, drg, rpr, nin, smn, rdm, ast, brd, sch with obscene buffs.

[Lyth]

Sustained Damage vs. Burst Damage
Having large differences in burst vs. sustain has historically resulted in some very lobsided job performances (I'm guessing that Heavensward/Stormblood WAR's era of complete and utter dominance was before OP's time). Fights with downtime skew the advantage to burst. But if you make sustain more powerful at baseline to offset that, those jobs become preferred in target dummy fights. You don't really want to be in a situation where 'only sustain' or 'only burst' is preferred for a fight. The solution is to give them similar burst profiles. That doesn't mean that every job has to play the same mechanically, of course. Just that they are capable of achieving performances across all fights such that you're not forced to main multiple jobs during prog if you don't want to.

Rigid Raid Compositions
Again, we've seen entire expansions go by in which everyone runs the exact same raid comp. Any time you have even a slight rDPS discrepancy between jobs, players will jump ship and start locking in those preferred jobs. Community perception matters even more than the numbers do in practice. If your job is not a top performer, it's considered low skill and unwanted. Which doubly unfortunate, because you're probably working much harder to reach parity than the current FoTM players. The solution is strict rDPS parity, and it should be across roles, not just subroles. All DPS jobs should be doing similar rDPS, regardless of whether they're melee, ranged, or caster. Anyone who is complaining because they need to maintain uptime on melee or move on caster really should reconsider their role choice.

Accessibility
One byproduct of making something more accessible is that you're punished harder for playing poorly. Back in the days of traditional tank stance/cleric stance, simply leaving on a stance button automatically made you a higher tier player. Did it require skilled play? Absolutely not. It required knowledge. Take that out of the equation, and suddenly you have players on a level playing field. So your mistakes look worse on paper than they used to. Competition is absolutely a good thing. Barriers to entry that prevent competition are not.

The same is true for raid buffs. Players have always played in to raid buffs. Job openers dating back to Heavensward were based around the GCD on which Trick went out. The only thing that has changed is that how buffs should get utilized is more obvious for the average player. And now that everyone is able to do it, you suddenly aren't so special anymore and need to find other ways of standing out. Like good uptime.

This whole discussion around a 'two minute meta' is just nonsense. If you're only now discovering that buff timing is important, then this change was really entirely for your benefit.

Just wait, the next development that's going to come out of these endless complaints is that they'll take raid damage buffs out entirely, turning DPS into a single player game.

[Alpheus]

The only simplest solution I can think of is that you're allowed to snapshot raid buffs at a (diminished potency) whenever you pop your personal 1min/2min buff. This would mean every job has to have a 2min compatible CD for their buff but it's the most straight forward way I can think of (cuz they're clearly all in on the 2min meta) that would allow for a lessening of requiring static levels of coordination in PF while still rewarding such coordination (by not having to deal with reduced potencies) offered by statics/stable roster of friends (who's play-styles either match your own or who have play-styles that you get to know over time).

I'd rather they do away with it entirely but if they're gonna insist on it then some adjustment is needed. Can even have the diminished potencies offered from snap-shotting be on a sliding scale based on how "late" or "on time" you are relative to the group. Hell give healers a passive so that their 2mins allows for this manner of snap-shotting

[aiqa]

Considering SE has such a hard time understanding that jobs with rDPS at the core of their design, are worse at rDPS than selfish DPS jobs, then I'm all for dropping those raid buffs.

[Ggwppino]

This whole discussion around a 'two minute meta' is just nonsense. If you're only now discovering that buff timing is important, then this change was really entirely for your benefit.

Currently, not because of the 2 minute buffs but because of the disproportionate amount of classes with the buffs, they actually make the right buff timing useless. Currently if someone loses the buffs, nothing happens at all because the clear is guaranteed as 6/7 other people are buffed by 2/3/4 buffs during the burst. So there is no need for research to optimize timing, to the detriment of those classes that have been designed precisely to be buffers.

Just wait, the next development that's going to come out of these endless complaints is that they'll take raid damage buffs out entirely, turning DPS into a single player game.

I don't think that removing the buffs will make the game any more single player than that. Having so many classes that use buffs (10) doesn't need to be organized on how best to use buffs because the game is currently broken just by the amount of buffs, leading all those classes that were designed to be selfish (but with buffs, but weren't designed to be buffers) to still be more selfish.

[FireMage]

There will always a burst window, 2 min design is a good thing. Next

[Mikey_R]

There will always a burst window, 2 min design is a good thing. Next

Yes, there will always be a burst window, the difference here is how often the strong burst window happens.

In ShB, you effectively got the big strong burst every 6 minutes as that is when all the cooldowns line back up again. You then had mini bursts at 60 seconds, 90 seconds, 120 seconds and 180 seconds. However, with EW, you now do those 6 minute bursts every 2 minutes, effectively tripling the amount of damage spikes you have in a fight. This is the whole reason why every job has become a burst job that lines up all the raidwides every 120 seconds and have personal buffs that line up every 60 seconds.

The issue was never the fact burst windows existed, the issue was the frequency of the big burst windows happening which has driven all jobs to the same playstyle and make the windows much much more punishing to miss.