Two Minute Raid Buffs - The Bane of Endwalker Job Design

[Mikey_R]

Don't feed the troll, Mikey.

I am fully aware of his mannerisms, however, my post was more as an information post rather than a correcting post, as I assume there might be others out there with the same thought. So, explaining why it has suddenly become a bigger issue was the goal. This is also why I am ignoring his follow up post as it does nothing to aid in the discussion at hand.

[RyuuZero]

Some Job fit better into the 2minute Burst Window, like Samurai but I'd be lying when I say that I enjoy the outside of PvP since 6.1.. speaking of which.. should we abandone PvE and migrate to PvP instead? and only go for PvE for the MSQ and the Weekly Cap?

[CKNovel]

I don't think it's exactly a "bane", I can understand why SQEX wants to design jobs around 2 minutes:

• Easier to balance burst job VS sustained job
• Easier for players to play around party buffs

Now, the jobs are getting repetitive and designing all jobs to be burst based isn't the only solution. After all, we have BLM able to shine and compete with burst jobs, why not others?

BLM has tools that allows the job to not lose resources during downtime while keeping important cooldown ticking.

In PLD case, the dot was an important source of damage, it can't tick during downtime.
In MCH case, the gauges are frozen during downtime and Drill/Air Anchor cooldowns are most of the time too short, you will lose a use.

For the dots to maintain, there's no solutions. Either integrated them to cooldowns like Sonic Break or remove them.

But for the other abilities, I believe there's many solutions:

• Allow cooldowns to "Overcharge", increasing their potency as you keep them on cooldown to soften the loss. Just don't make them neutral to avoid those cooldowns being aligned to raidbuff.
• Introduce alternative resources generator. An example for MCH would be a long GCD that increases heat and battery to compensate for the loss of gauges during downtime.

And probably more. What we need is to make sustained DPS job able to compete with burst jobs.

[Sparkthor]

I don't really get why people are so angry against according all jobs arounds the same timers. I personnally find managing to hit many group burst phase with my group very satisfying. Also, when I'm playing a heavy party buff job (like dancer), i'm not worry anymore about my raidbuff going to waste because few jobs will be able to push dommage with them.

Having more raid burst window is also to me positive, because missing one got less impact than before. Also i don't think it's change anything for top players as it's still using your ability on cooldown. And after many years trying to limite the difference between top players and more casuals ones, theses changes allow best player to express themself better.

However i can get it streamline many job to have burst phase (just look at PAL changes), but theses changes are ingoing since SB. Also, if I'm not wrong, most of changes donne in EW was putting 3min cd on 2 min, and 90s on 60s, and put asside jobs which went by some kind of low/big rework (Summoner, Monk and Paladin now), it changes few to no things to how we play them, we just push some actions more often, which, to me, speed up the game and I cannot see this as a bad thing.

[aloneatsea]

snip

The reason why people might consider it a "bane" is because the nature of the meta dictates a correct style of play; to play any other way would mean sacrificing massive amounts of potential damage. With how buffs are now, your typical two-minute window can stack up to a 47% increase in damage, which is utterly insane! You're dealing your full damage and then half again, essentially. That's huge. Because of that huge damage window, any job which has massive spike damage (NIN, DRK -- who am I kidding, every job now lol) is going to be able to take much better advantage of this buff window and subsequently deal much more damage. Your alternative is simply to buff sustain DPS jobs to all high hell to make them equivalent regardless -- which still doesn't make them equivalent, because jobs with DPS on cooldown are losing very little DPS during downtime, whereas sustained DPS jobs are losing much more damage. In addition, buffing sustained jobs leads to them being vastly stronger in non-raid scenarios, such as dungeons, criterion, deep dungeons, etc etc.



Ultimately, it's a frail solution; if you're not going the break the 47% buff stacking meta every two minutes, it's better for the health of the game overall to have every job burst well at two minutes. (Except Black Mage, of course. They would never mutilate Black Mage.) Much as people like me want to believe, balance does matter for conditions outside of your typical 8/8 raid. We've seen this already with how absurdly overpowered MCH is in POTD -- it's been buffed almost every patch, and it was already the strongest class to run POTD on.



It is because this sort of buff stacking enforces a very specific type of playstyle that ends up feeling incredibly samey (and is, as far as I can tell, not even necessarily popular) that people call it the bane of EW job design.



If we want sustained DPS playstyles to exist, the two-minute meta simply has to go. There is no other way around it. When buff stacking is much weaker (say, 10% instead of a whopping 47%), but more frequent, sustained DPS jobs can thrive much better, because the potential damage they're losing from not being able to burst during buff windows is much less. Though we were seeing the beginnings of these sorts of problems in Shadowbringers (what with the omnipresent SAM-NIN-DNC-BLM-SCH-AST-GNB-DRK comp), the lesser frequency of effortless aligned buff windows meant that burst overall was less important. If Square Enix is at all interested in preserving multiple types of playstyles (strong burst at 1min, loops with burst at set intervals, sustained DPS, etc etc) then moving back to a SHB-like raid buff environment is really the only way they can reasonably sustain it.

That said, I'm not convinced SE is at all interested in maintaining unique playstyles. Unfortunately, it's burst or nothing, certainly until 7.0, and highly likely forever.

[Rilifane]

Here's a fun fact: it did not make balance easier, at least not when you consider that the goal of balance is that classes are equally viable and likely to taken into content.

I wrote a long wall of text about it months ago and the tl;dr version is that with classes on different timers, smaller hitboxes, a mix of sustained and burst damage classes, more mechanics that result in uptime loss etc. you had a party skill ceiling that allowed you to easily make up for things like a class being currently weaker.
Now all the options people had are gone, everyone pushes their buttons at exactly 2min, everyone has hilariously high burst potencies that result in huge damage variance from crit vs no crit and there is nothing a party as a whole can do to make up for a weaker class/ player. As we have seen in p8s before the HP adjustment it comes down to praying for crits.

They stripped the individual and group skill ceiling away in the name of balance which they still did not achieve when it mattered and continues to be extremely fragile as even the slightest bit of potencies being off on a class snowballs into a much bigger effect and the group can't even compensate with good coordination and gameplay. The more rigid something is, the more fragile it is. They completely railroaded the gameplay and as such, playing the exact way that SE wants is either enough or not. No options, no wiggle room, no compensating for anything allowed. You push your buttons every 2min while praying for crits and you will like it.

So yes, the 2min burst meta is the bane of Endwalker in every way.

[Lyth]

Unfortunately, it's burst or nothing, certainly until 7.0, and highly likely forever.

You're right that the current setup will continue until 7.0. At that time, they'll remove all two minute buffs and design all jobs so that they can be played completely freestyle without regard to burst timings. Then there will be a massive outcry from this forum in which the very same posters who were active in this thread will come in with pitchforks demanding to know why two minute raid buffs and burst design was removed and who they were targeted to benefit, and complain about how much they have simplified everything down from the good ol' days of Endwalker.

Then the Uptime Meta will start, in which the highly observant players of this subforum will challenge the devs on why we are all expected to press buttons and stay on the boss. Dying hurts my uptime? But it's so unfair!

[SpartanPawnch]

(Except Black Mage, of course. They would never mutilate Black Mage.)

Tin foil hat theory from me: Black Mage not being "mutilated" is what got us to the current state of the game. With YoshiP being busy with FF16, he can only judge the state of the game based on playing his main - BLM, which has avoided almost all of the issues of Endwalker. This has made him think that overall gameplay is in a much better state than it actually is and has made him approve a lot of the unfortunate changes we have seen in 6.x.

I don't want to think that YoshiP, who isn't even in charge of job design, is the only dev who can make actual informed decisions about gameplay, but some of the changes made by the design team in this expansion have lead me to believe otherwise.

[Renathras]

Agree completely. I wonder if you can have a thread in each of these forums (Tank, Healer, and DPS) that points to a single discussion thread. Probably not...

I'm posting this in the DPS section, but I feel it is just as relevant to all other jobs
...
Job homogenization and sustained damage
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Damage Polarization
...
Misguided notion of accessibility

It's been overall a disaster and wrecked Job balance, as well as skill expression. Obviously we've all seen what happened to PLD. MCH has been given (what should probably never have been taken away) a powerful raid mitigation in Dismantle just to be useful in the new meta. Thus far, the only Jobs that have survived the burst axe are...well, probably just BLM. Arguably WHM (though its "burst", Misery, is now every 60 sec instead of 90 sec, so it lines up with the 2 min windows, as does Presence of Mind). But Jobs that didn't either capitalize on the 2 min burst window OR contribute to it (AST doesn't have burst but it contributes to the burst of others) have gotten the axe. [An irony here is that old SMN was on a tight 2 min window, so oddly, it would have worked under the new system just fine; they just couldn't think of where else to go with it.]

Job balance has been worse...but I don't think since HW really. SAMs were blacklisted during part of SB and WHM was heavily undesired because the SB Lily prototype was abject garbage and the game was shifting away from oGCD heals with WHM not really having sufficient ones to make the transition. But I agree that the Job representation on the forbidden abacus site seem to suggest that balance (or at least the perception of balance) is off kilter. The reason for the PLD rework was because they were not being brought to groups for Savages and Ultimates. WHM is the least desired healer since it's the only one that doesn't have either a 2 min party buff (like AST), considerable mitigation (like SGE), or both (like SCH). And we've seen how PLD (and to an extent WAR) and MCH have been treated by it.

And finally, on accessibility, it really didn't help as much as people think. As you say, dying at 30 seconds after burst is FAR less punishing than dying 30 seconds before a burst, or sometimes worse, in the burst window. And while it's supposedly made it easy - "Just use your 2 min stuff on CD, stock a couple resources going into the buff window" - in practice, this has made the gap between top players and bottom players wider. The top players find it more boring, the bottom still can't coordinate it (and suffer more from the random KO's they have), and the coordinated midcore on voice chat, probably the only group benefited by it, still have the occasional string of no-crit-buff-window type stuff or a death right before burst that costs them a clear.

Indeed, Crit >>> all is another problem of the 2 min window, AND sometimes getting a 99 pink vs getting a 74 blue is literally decided only by "Did you get Crit Direct Hits during all the burst windows or did RNGesus forsake you in your time of need?"

.

Of all the changes in this game, this is probably one of the worst and I hope the PLD change was just a band-aid to get us to 7.0 where they can move away from it rather than an indication they intend to keep it. I've seen a few people speak on behalf of the 2 min burst meta, but most people seem to either hate it or are neutral but kinda still wish it would go away.

[Ggwppino]

And finally, on accessibility, it really didn't help as much as people think. As you say, dying at 30 seconds after burst is FAR less punishing than dying 30 seconds before a burst, or sometimes worse, in the burst window. And while it's supposedly made it easy - "Just use your 2 min stuff on CD, stock a couple resources going into the buff window" - in practice, this has made the gap between top players and bottom players wider. The top players find it more boring, the bottom still can't coordinate it (and suffer more from the random KO's they have), and the coordinated midcore on voice chat, probably the only group benefited by it, still have the occasional string of no-crit-buff-window type stuff or a death right before burst that costs them a clear.

I don't think the designers when they moved all the buff windows every 2 minutes thought they were simplifying the game for the players. Having the buffs lined up necessarily leads to having the coordination to take advantage of them. This actually leads to not playing randomly but keeping well in mind a rotation to be made and possibly modified according to the mechanics of the raid and your comp needs. In high-level raids this could also lead to group reasoning to be able to optimize the timing of buffs to get clear by agreeing on when to use them and conversely optimize the rotation to fit within the buffs while also taking into account the needs of the entire party. currently the main problem is not the 2-minute burst but the fact that there are too many buffs that break the math of the game used badly without considering so many factors of the raid. I dont understand why there was ever this belief that the 2-minute burst is a simplification.

Indeed, Crit >>> all is another problem of the 2 min window, AND sometimes getting a 99 pink vs getting a 74 blue is literally decided only by "Did you get Crit Direct Hits during all the burst windows or did RNGesus forsake you in your time of need?"

Is it a problem with the 2-minute buffs or is it a problem that the crit in this game is broken? The buffs have accentuated it, I don't question that, but the problem of damage variance given by the crit has always been there. Personal parse are penalized by random values in general certainly not by the burst phases in the game. Take off the random numbers in the parse and you have solved the problem, but that is a problem of fflog that should consider individual performance and not mere numbers. It is not a problem of the game. I write this as one who got 99 by losing a fountain of fire, and 87 with a perfect rotation but nonexistent crit so you described me perfectly.