2-minute meta

[Deo14]

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?

Just like any other game. Remove DH and split crit into critical damage and critical chance. Much easier to understand than crit hit which affects both it's multiplier and rate, and DH which affects only rate and then the CDH. Not like it matters what they do with stats anyways, you only need to know meld priority + desired GCD and that's as far as stats go in this game.

Now you're left with 2 random variables, and you can fine tune them to make anything balanced. If variance is too high, make critical damage lower and critical chance higher and so on. There is reason why so many games use this simple system, it just works.

[ForteNightshade]

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?

That could also work but as you noted, it would make both stats feel largely irrelevant. The whole idea behind Direct Hit being implemented is the dev team wants players to see "big numba!!!" They outright said it during Shadowbringers' media tour.

As for what to replace it with. Damage and Variance. Critical Hit does far too much, which is why it's been the runaway best substat from day one. Splitting it up would allow for easier balancing and maybe make Determination or god forbid Tenacity more relevant. The latter is pretty much a dead substat now that Warrior can meld Direct Hit. On the whole, I'd prefer something more interesting like what Absurdity suggested but the dev team seems determined to keep everything as basic as possible. So splitting up Crit works well enough.

[TaleraRistain]

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.

Well said.

I don't do content where this is a concern but it's always sounded dreadfully constrained to me to have to line up buffs perfectly and as you mentioned, what do you do outside them? It seems like it would allow a lot more flexibility and ability to respond to mechanics if buffs were independent of the party.

[Absurdity]

Well said.

I don't do content where this is a concern but it's always sounded dreadfully constrained to me to have to line up buffs perfectly and as you mentioned, what do you do outside them? It seems like it would allow a lot more flexibility and ability to respond to mechanics if buffs were independent of the party.

Lining up party buffs with everyone else was a fun part of optimising a fight...when you had to actually think about it.
What jobs does our group have? What are our available cooldowns and their timers? What is our killtime? Would delaying these buffs by 30 seconds here end up in a dps increase?

The problem is that SE decided to do the job for us by making everything line up automatically and when "optimising" means "just press it on cooldown" for every job it becomes incredibly boring to execute, not to mention very restrictive on top of that.
Having all buffs and burst windows automatically happen every 2 minutes also means that fights are now balanced around this. It isn't optimisation anymore, it is the baseline.

[Ath192]

Is this actually fun for literally anyone?

I don't like it. I want vastly different jobs.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Its stupid. I want classes to each have their own burst times and windows. I get the philosophy behind the 2 minute meta in order to encourage syncronized team play but its too detrimental to the combat experience because of how strict it is.

[caffe_macchiato]

Is this actually fun for literally anyone?

No, the two-minute meta is bori--



*gasp* It's him! Quick, defend the two-minute meta!

[Kickwars]

No, the two-minute meta is bori--



*gasp* It's him! Quick, defend the two-minute meta!

so handsome

[Nizzi]

I'm reminded of the interview Yoshi-P gave shortly before 6.0 released, where the interviewer asked about how most core job abilities/buffs had been changed to fit the 120s burst meta, but that Leylines was still at its original 90s. Yoshi-P answered that they still wanted jobs to have abilities where players would have to think "where would the best place be to use this ability?" and that Leylines was one of those abilities. Yoshi-P also said that he felt like if everything was on the same timer, it would feel very boring to play.
It's funny that Yoshi-P was correct about it being boring to play, and yet the developers still went ahead with shaving down everything to fit into it.

[Atelier-Bagur]

I'm reminded of the interview Yoshi-P gave shortly before 6.0 released, where the interviewer asked about how most core job abilities/buffs had been changed to fit the 120s burst meta, but that Leylines was still at its original 90s. Yoshi-P answered that they still wanted jobs to have abilities where players would have to think "where would the best place be to use this ability?" and that Leylines was one of those abilities. Yoshi-P also said that he felt like if everything was on the same timer, it would feel very boring to play.
It's funny that Yoshi-P was correct about it being boring to play, and yet the developers still went ahead with shaving down everything to fit into it.

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