Gamespot interview with Mr. Ozma... Very disappointing

[Shurrikhan]

It also exasperates issues and makes variance harder to balance against.

That... has very little to do with the particular timing of raid buffs (to per 2 minutes or otherwise) and almost everything to do with the likes of Communio and especially Hyosho Ranryu just having absurdly high effective potency for a single Crit/DHit roll.

Our nukes are excessively dense. That's not a 2-minute meta issue though.

When you can do a 75th per tier rotation and get a 90 because of crit luck in the burst window then something is wrong with the balance design

This, likewise, has far more to do with there being little uptime optimizations and fewer contextual-rotational optimizations to be done in a given fight, not the 2-minute meta unless the difference in skill expression available between Stormblood and Endwalker were solely in how well one banked resources (most of which one couldn't bank anyways back in Stormblood) for minor/off-sync raid buffs (i.e., any raid buff which did not create or add to any of the highest density periods of effective damage amplification).

It'd be a lot easier to solve issues like these... if we didn't conflate them to high hell.

We lack for contextual skill expression, largely due to excessive fight simplifications. That's an independent issue from the "2-minute meta" though.

In the current two minute meta a crit during the burst window of a DPS 1300 potency skill (so enkindle or hyosho ranryu) completely covers a healer never touching their dot in the entire fight. This level of variance would also cover approx 9 broken combos or 2 completely missed stardiver potency oGCD’s

The maximally amped crit skill can cover that much potency, sure, but that's not the difference of the crit itself -- you're measuring the effective potency of the entire action there (and likely also failing to account for actual effective potency --as per damage traits-- of what you're comparing it against).

Each Dia is worth 526.5 effective potency. The crit on a Hyosho Ranryu is worth some 676-1014 potency depending on one's Crit stat (+40 to +60% for those numbers). That crit covers less than 1 minute of healer DoT usage, not "the entire fight."

That is still way too much, imo, but... it's nowhere close to what you're saying. "Upwards of 38.5 seconds" =/= "the entire fight".

[Raikai]

The 2 minute meta likely exists because it makes for much easier job balancing as a whole, as you have a fixed scenario you can test jobs inside of.

That much is very clear, at least. I find hard to believe that they would think of the 2min meta as such a "good concept to have creative job design upon", and just go with it because it makes their job much easier.

I didn't do high end content in Stormblood (still lslowly getting into the game), but was the 'not-2min-meta' a jarring issue to the community or something that made many jobs not viable? If not, then we actually have a successful example of how it would be otherwise.

[OdinelStarrei]

That much is very clear, at least. I find hard to believe that they would think of the 2min meta as such a "good concept to have creative job design upon", and just go with it because it makes their job much easier.

I didn't do high end content in Stormblood (still lslowly getting into the game), but was the 'not-2min-meta' a jarring issue to the community or something that made many jobs not viable? If not, then we actually have a successful example of how it would be otherwise.

I can extrapolate with my experience during the time. It's when I did tons of PF, and started really getting into job complexity.

To say Stormblood was a "not 2 min-meta" is a bit reductive, because there certainly was a focus on the 2 minute, the 2 minute burst DID exist. However, Stormblood also had many, many jobs with deliberately misaligned cooldowns. We're talking 90s, 180s, and more instances of job specific 40s, 45s, 80s, 150s, and other just...odd timings that were job specific. What this meant is that every player had their own little world they were working in, sometimes, jobs would cross over during the burst window. I had the most experience with Dark Knight, which was actually a job with almost ZERO direct burst oGCDs, only a gauge depleter. What this meant is that if you were a party that had buffs centered in the "1 minute burst" such as NIN, or AST, DRK/SAM/MCH/WAR or really any offensive resource spending job would tune their resource generation mid rotation to put all their big damage spikes in there, provided it didn't screw up their OWN burst window. If you have a team that centered in the 90s burst, so MNK/DRG/RDM????, jobs would adjust their resource dumping into there instead. You see vestiges of this in "phased" ultimates today, where resources and cooldowns are held in reserve in the end of phasing once a DPS check has been passed. Think DSR P2 into P3, or P5 into P6. Not using all your resources, so you can open a phase with a massive burst of damage.

So, in SB, you could have depending on your job, you might have something that looks like this.

0 - Opener with potion, lacking resources, but that's ok if you gain a usage
20-40s - Personal buffs/resource generation
1m - micro burst/heavy burst depending on party comp
1m 30s - micro burst/heavy burst depending on party comp/ALSO CRITICALLY A BACK UP BUFF WINDOW FOR PEOPLE WHO MAY HAVE DIED OR MISALIGNED
2m - usually a heavy burst, with things like Chain Stratagem
3m - 1 mins, 90s, and 3 mins meet up here again, good place to realign CDs
4m - 1 mins / 2 mins hanging out again
4m 30s - 90s hanging out again, potion is back up, but if the fight allows, IT CAN BE HELD
5m - 1 mins hanging out again
6m - THE BIG ONE, where everyone in the entire group can burst, with potion if allowed by killtime, if done properly, this is higher damage than the opener
7m - start of the new loop, but if you can gain damage, 90s can hold their last usage to line with 2mins again in a last ditch effort to kill the boss, or potentially gain time in speedkills

In Endwalker, once Trick Attack was moved off of the 1 minute, this entire, relatively forgiving system that was more about maintaining your own rotation gets devolved into a big conference meeting every two minutes. Your own "power moments" were removed or scaled back in effectiveness, and "the team's power moments" were GIGANTIC. Very low valleys, incredibly high peaks. And if you weren't there for the peaks, you are screwed, and you can't fix it.

0 - Opener, pot.
1m - personal buffs, if you even have them
2m - Burst
3m - personal buffs
4m - Burst
5m - personal buffs
6m - Burst, with pot
7m - personal buffs
8m - Burst
etc etc

That being said, Stormblood did have problems. We still had a bad WHM experience, we still had things like slashing debuff that made jobs like NIN and WAR even more desirable, on launch we had a few serious issues that needed patches, but by 4.3 it was mostly figured out. Then in 5.0 all that work was thrown away, when all we needed was more focus on fixing system issues in SB, rather than throwing away the baby with the bathwater in ShB, getting a new baby, and then throwing away the new baby as well as the entire bathroom when EW rolled around.

It's certainly easier to design EW compared to SB. But the combat, not the encounters, but the combat itself has suffered immensely, and I would almost say, has stagnated. Every single fight except for ultimates due to forced phasing plays nearly identical on a pure mechanical rotation execution standpoint because of this, and I ultimately think it makes for worse players because no one who is below ultimate can flex or tune their rotation depending on the situation or have an ability to demonstrate individual job rotation understanding and proficiency, since everything is shoved into 2 mins, and the rest of the rotation is dead space. I think it limits job growth.

[OgruMogru]

It's certainly easier to design EW compared to SB. But the combat, not the encounters, but the combat itself has suffered immensely, and I would almost say, has stagnated. Every single fight except for ultimates due to forced phasing plays nearly identical on a pure mechanical rotation execution standpoint because of this, and I ultimately think it makes for worse players because no one who is below ultimate can flex or tune their rotation depending on the situation or have an ability to demonstrate individual job rotation understanding and proficiency, since everything is shoved into 2 mins, and the rest of the rotation is dead space. I think it limits job growth.

This has also resulted in player attitude where instead of what you can do for the team, it's what the team can do for you at each 2min point. It's so dogmatic and pass/fail that the moment something deviates by 1 second people get all pinched and angry because it's scuppered their max potential for the entire fight.

[Raikai]

To say Stormblood was a "not 2 min-meta" is a bit reductive

Thanks for the detailed answer! Probably should've worded it differently, meant more 'not just 2min meta', just like you described.

Honestly, by what you wrote, is clear that the flow was more interesting. You actually had to put your brains to think regarding your party composition, especially being able to seize a better re-alignment moment.

The 2min meta we have nowadays - at least to my experience - is basically a game of reflexes and muscle memory, and not combat intelligence and situational awareness.

I'd rather have encounters with less of a puzzle aspect if it meant to have jobs back to the point where we needed to use our brains to make the best out of our roles (reminds me of how melee lost their uptime optimization).

[SquishyPlushie]

The 2 minute meta likely exists because it makes for much easier job balancing as a whole, as you have a fixed scenario you can test jobs inside of.

Yea, it's balancing for the expected kind of player.
The communication needs to be more explicit in the target player if anything.

[ThaCa]

If uptime is free, then why ranged tax still exists?

[Anonemoose]

Let's just remove combat from the game entirely. Make encounters a mini-game like putting the square peg in the square hole, or trying to move an object without touching the sides.

[Eisi]

I think they misunderstood the feedback. Not wanting the boss to disappear and lose uptime didn't mean "make the entire arena a hitbox." The point was finding the uptime and adjusting strategies to maximize uptime while doing mechanics is part of the fun. We just didn't want the boss to literally disappear. Now we lost that seemingly due to what might have been a mistranslation. It makes me worried about Dawntrail.

"The 120-second burst windows and the limitations of player uptime on bosses are aspects where we received lots of player feedback, and have undergone lots of trial and error. We tend to run into issues with encounters that temporarily prevent players from targeting the boss, so we've significantly reduced the frequency of bosses becoming untargetable. Furthermore, we've reduced the frequency of what our team calls "sports meet phases," where the boss becomes untargetable while players run around the arena to resolve mechanics. We received lots of feedback regarding them, primarily from our players outside of Japan. I have the impression that more players enjoyed resolving mechanics while attacking the boss, and I feel the same way when I play the raids myself, so a lot of bosses are designed for maintaining uptime nowadays. That said, certain mechanics can only be expressed through these "sports meet phases," so I'd like to keep an eye on striking a good balance to incorporate both designs."

Unfortunately he doesn't mention the enlarged hitboxes at all but only the fact that they want bosses to remain targetable and that players enjoy being able to attack the boss while doing mechanics. Meaning that uptime strats for smaller hitboxes would still fit that definition. They probably just couldn't make it work and so enlarged the hitboxes as a crutch, rather than change the mechanics to allow for better uptime on smaller hitbox bosses.

[DPZ2]

There is zero uptime when the boss is either untargetable or the hit box is so small that mechanics require players to run around dodging them without being able to attack. The only useful solution is larger hit boxes. The unhelpful solution would be for players to stop complaining when they can't hit something.