2-minute meta

[Kickwars]

Is this actually fun for literally anyone?

[Dorito_Burrito]

It's fine.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

I feel like this is another troll thread, but you know what? I'll bite.


I dislike the 2 minute meta, mostly because of the changes to job flow from 5.x to 6.0.



For me, peak job flow was 5.0, but I was best at my job during 4.x. The reliance on job buffs and all made combat less fun. Especially since they force disengage mechanics in at the 2 min mark in most fights.

[Ransu]

I feel like this is another troll thread, but you know what? I'll bite.

Its one of several of OP's alts.

[Szylver]

It just bothers me that it forces the game to be more orchestrated. when i play ffxiv i feel like i'm always watching a chess replay and memorizing it. I miss the old days of mmo like tera and cabal.

[ForteNightshade]

Troll thread or not, I'll comment.

The two minute meta is awful. It makes gameplay both incredibly rigid and boring at the same time because most jobs have practically nothing to do because they have to all funnel into exactly two minute intervals. The few 90s abilities now feel... hollow as they just can't of exist but don't often factor into your burst. Salt and Darkness, Bunshin and Riddle of Wind could all be deleted without changing a thing about each respective job. Hell, they had to change Bloodfest from 90 to 120 because it caused issues with Gunbreaker's damage in burst windows.

Worse then the above is every job feels too similar nowadays. Spacing out buffs allowed for some sense of individuality due to having to take into consideration what timers your comp played into. One minute Trick Attack meant Dark Knights could plan their Floods within those intervals instead of aimlessly dumping gauge to avoid overcap. Speaking of Ninja, it's been among the hardest hit. The job has virtually nothing to do outside of two minute bursts except spam 123 and the very occasional Bhavacakra.

The final insult to injury is this new shift didn't even accomplish the intended goal. Casual players still press their buffs on a whim because they don't really care to align everything. What's hilariously ironic is this actually made things worse for inexperienced players despite it supposedly being easier for them. A death nowadays is significantly worse than ever before. You have no way to mitigate your loses going into a two minute window. God forbid you die during said window. Now everything is completely misaligned and you've not only punished with weakness but have de-synced your buffs from the raid. So either you sit on them for potentially over a whole minute, losing even more damage, or you screw your team for the remainder of the fight.

If the dev team is set on making buffs easier to manage. The solution would be to make them almost entirely independent from the party (i.e. like Large Charge, Huton and etc). Yes, this heavily removes party synergy but that is a far better alternative than the mess they've come up with for Endwalker. My preference would be to revert the whole thing back to Shadowbringers or even Stormblood and let jobs run on different timers.

[Kickwars]

The final insult to injury is this new shift didn't even accomplish the intended goal. Casual players still press their buffs on a whim because they don't really care to align everything. What's hilariously ironic is this actually made things worse for inexperienced players despite it supposedly being easier for them. A death nowadays is significantly worse than ever before. You have no way to mitigate your loses going into a two minute window. God forbid you die during said window. Now everything is completely misaligned and you've not only punished with weakness but have de-synced your buffs from the raid. So either you sit on them for potentially over a whole minute, losing even more damage, or you screw your team for the remainder of the fight.

I was under the impression they did it moreso because JP players of certain jobs complained that their buffs didn't align with 2-min bursts. (MNK etc.)

Though the end result is the same anyways. I wish they developed in a direction to make 90s cycles just as viable as 2-min.

[ForteNightshade]

I was under the impression they did it moreso because JP players of certain jobs complained that their buffs didn't align with 2-min bursts. (MNK etc.)

Though the end result is the same anyways. I wish they developed in a direction to make 90s cycles just as viable as 2-min.

It could be a bit of both. However, in one of the LLs leading up to Endwalker, I recall Yoshida directly saying they wanted to make buff alignment easier and that was the reason for shifting everything to two minutes.

I just dont get how this even happened. Did they all have some freak last minute change of mind or is there something we're all not being aware of with this system being somehow good because clearly the general public doesnt approve of it

If I were to hazard a guess, they only realized after how difficult it was to actually balance everything with so many abilities being forced into this two minute meta and/or there were concerns with players forgetting to align 90s abilities. So they gradually started shaving more of them down as it became far too late in development to scrap the whole system. This is why we saw a few hold overs like Bloodfest and Leylines. Both those abilities add credence to the theory as they simply didn't work anymore, making it much harder to properly optimize. It wouldn't be the first time they made changes without rhythm or reason. Case in point, Bard. After years of begging and pleading for Bloodletter charges, Bard mains finally got them... only to remove the entire reason they wanted them in the first place. This disconnect meant people complained and the dev team threw up their hands, wrongly assuming the players don't know what they want.

Considering the woefully poor balance we've seen throughout Endwalker, it really does make one wonder how much testing they did or how exactly they test jobs.

The 2 minute window on its own doesnt cause issues. It's other design choices that make it look bad.

Chief among them being Direct Hit and the now abundance of ridiculously high potency skills which lead to absurd swings in damage. Having two layers of RNG is, frankly, dumb. Nevertheless, it's the high potency skills that are the real issue. A Ninja shouldn't see Hyosho flux between 80k and 170k because they just happened to roll lucky that pull. While that could happen in Shadowbringers, most jobs lacked the big hits and it wasn't nearly as impactful because buffs were more spaced out. A weak Hyosho at the two minute window could level itself out if you crit during the one or three minutes as you were likely running into buffs such as Litany or Battle Voice. Now you're wholly dependent on two minutes exactly. I've seen myself dip upwards of nearly 1,000 rDPS on Paladin simply because my blade combo and/or Goring Blade just didn't not to crit at all. Same exact rotation. Game said go fly a kite.

So while the two minute meta remains awful, I'd also like to see them abandon Direct Hit and stop with the fat potency skills. Sadly, I suspect come 7.0 they're just going to make them all auto DHC, which I guess solves the problem but kind of defeats the point of even having modifiers.

[Mikey_R]

So while the two minute meta remains awful, I'd also like to see them abandon Direct Hit and stop with the fat potency skills. Sadly, I suspect come 7.0 they're just going to make them all auto DHC, which I guess solves the problem but kind of defeats the point of even having modifiers.

An alternative could be to reduce the impact of DH and crits by reducing the damage bonus they give, for example, making DH be a 5% increase and crit being a 10% increase as an example. Of course, if your normal 100K hit crits for 110K, it probably won't feel impactful.

The only other concern is, if you do remove DH, what could they do to replace it?

[Absurdity]

An alternative could be to reduce the impact of DH and crits by reducing the damage bonus they give, for example, making DH be a 5% increase and crit being a 10% increase as an example. Of course, if your normal 100K hit crits for 110K, it probably won't feel impactful.

The only other concern is, if you do remove DH, what could they do to replace it?

It will probably never happen, because the job team quite obviously doesn't have the manpower to balance it, but I'd like to see some sort of mastery stat that interacts with job specific mechanics.