How do you define (meaningful) choice?

[TheDustyOne]

I had a friend of mine also who wanted the buffs aligned back in ShB, he instantly regretted it when he finished the first tier of Pandaemonium. He stopped playing after clearing DRS.

I myself didn't really care whether buffs were aligned or not back then, but now that I've had one of my favourite jobs reworked to fit into the 2 minute burst, I miss having them misaligned. The burst is just too potent that any job not taking advantage of it is deemed unviable, which in turn requires homogenizing them into a burst job to conform.

[ForsakenRoe]

which in turn requires homogenizing them into a burst job to conform.

This is the part that annoys me the most about the 2min design, everything HAS to burst at 2m to conform. If it doesnt, it has to be reworked so that it does ala PLD. Which means effectively, the devs write off an entire swathe of designspace (the 'sustained damage' profile), it's just needlessly limiting and means that we're ever more likely to hit 'we didn't know what to do with SCH', but on the other jobs too. How do you make each job gain interesting additions each expansion if so much of your damage is from the 2min window? Put more into the window? NIN's already unable to fit everything in there

[TheDustyOne]

Even some of the jobs that were already sufficiently bursty still had their cooldowns shifted to align better with the raid windows. It still bugs me that GNB Bloodfest isn't 90s anymore, same with BLM Leylines going from 90s to 120s, and BRD just feels off having the DoTs and songs be 40-45s long just to make sure that all 3 songs end up being 120s.

[ty_taurus]

I also just think we have way too many raid buffs on jobs that I don't really associate with buffing. While it might not change the meta all that much, you could make buffs less significant by purging many of them from the game.

[ForsakenRoe]

So what I'm hearing is:

-Delete Litany (or merge it with DragonSight)
-Delete Searing Light
-Delete the damage up on Brotherhood, and make it just the chakra boost (so monk is a greedy DPS)
-Delete Arcane Circle (why did RPR need a buff???)

At the very least, could we have different buff effects than just flat damage or crit%?

[ty_taurus]

So what I'm hearing is:

-Delete Litany (or merge it with DragonSight)
-Delete Searing Light
-Delete the damage up on Brotherhood, and make it just the chakra boost (so monk is a greedy DPS)
-Delete Arcane Circle (why did RPR need a buff???)

At the very least, could we have different buff effects than just flat damage or crit%?

Pretty much. I’d go even farther. Drop Embolden as well, Battle Voice, and Chain Stratagem.

Even during the Stormblood Media tour, as a Scholar player, I was immediately put off by Chain. Heavensward introduced Astro, a healer with abnormally low DPS potency in exchange for having DPS via padding… i.e. buffs. So why then take the highest DPS healer at the time and slap a buff on them? Scholar didn’t need that. White Mage did.

[Shurrikhan]

So why then take the highest DPS healer at the time and slap a buff on them? Scholar didn’t need that. White Mage did.

A job having the highest personal/raw DPS is just a matter of tuning. Had they given WHM's attacks 10 more direct and periodic (where applicable) potency, that equation would be flipped.

Which sounds like the kind of job that would provide insights into the enemy's defenses, allowing further damage against them, or likely to buff attacks in general? The elementalist, or the job whose core actions translate to the likes of "Encouragement/Affirmation" and "Assistance/Boost Morale", from the Latin or Japanese.

If the problem is too little damage, the solution is just... more damage; the type of that damage is irrelevant except in that some fit with the theme as given better than others. There's no need to stray from identity just to insert a new type of damage production as if that type were a necessity.

And for my part, I'd have much sooner taken more ability to fill gaps and make exploitations of my own as WHM than a damage buff. That immediate pressure, and the that greater swing between healing and attack GCDs, is what made WHM feel like WHM to me. I wouldn't want to siphon that off towards a raid buff.

So what I'm hearing is:

-Delete Litany (or merge it with DragonSight)
-Delete Searing Light
-Delete the damage up on Brotherhood, and make it just the chakra boost (so monk is a greedy DPS)
-Delete Arcane Circle (why did RPR need a buff???)

At the very least, could we have different buff effects than just flat damage or crit%?

For my part, I don't mind having buffs actually worth playing around, and prefer having that something to play around over having nothing. Short of replacing LB with a job-specific variant of a raidbuff, though, so just one gets used but at least 1 is always available, though... our chance of having that layer of gameplay relies on the presence of buffs across enough of our jobs, so I don't mind, for instance, that DRG has Battle Litany, even if it doesn't seem super tied in with the job's theme. (It feels Ishgardian/Halonite [and vaguely like the Karoliners around the time of the Swedish empire], which is fine, I guess[?], but that also feels more Lancer-ish than Dragoon-ish.)

For that reason, though, I'd gladly see Searing Light removed (its rDPS obviously replaced) and would be fine with Arcane Circle made a self-buff only, since neither is generally worth holding anything less than a 90s CD even a single GCD for.

[SpiralMask]

I would define it as each choice itself being meaningful--every class choice being unique with varied playstyles, side-content being varied enough that it's a different and unique experience compared to others, and so on.

[ForsakenRoe]

Why boost the damage of a gimped DPSer when you could get more value from the actual DPS jobs?

If you want six cards with unique effects, you need to segregate them. Offensive buff cards cannot share a resource system with utility cards, or the utility cards will never see the light of day unless they're made aggressively busted. Hybridizing them is just another flavor of what we have now, just with the off chance that maybe the card utility will do something.

That first part makes the assumption that every card boosts the damage of it's target in the same way, via their attacks. It doesn't have to be like that, though. For example, if a hypothetical Bole were to give 3 stacks of 'reflects damage equal to 10% of the target's max HP each time they are struck' (and the mit effect for utility/flavor), then it's not better to put on the DPS, but on the tank, since they have more max HP. Ewer could be given an effect that makes it more incentivized to use on a healer over every other class. The option would remain to prioritize using the utility creatively over the 'correct damage choice'. For example, saving a DPS with a well placed Bole would still be possible. And yes, this would cost damage in a way that current AST does not. However, unlike SB AST, which many seem to agree was good and also cool, doing so here would cost only some of the damage. If the stacks were to have no duration for example, lasting until a new card overwrote them or were all spent, then you could recoup over 50% of that 'lost damage' by just waiting for enough raidwides to hit the party to eat those stacks.

I can see why we'd want to segregate the cards into say 3 'only utility' and 3 'only damage'. But then we have the issue we do now: those utility cards potentially won't see much of the light of day outside of Savage. Then we've taken the deck from 6 down to 3

That... doesn't actually fully explain Balance fishing

I should clarify, when I say 'Balancefishing', I don't literally mean fishing for the card called 'the Balance', it's more like a phrase I was using to convey the concept of what you described: Get Expand, then fish for the best damage card to spread with that RR effect. Not necessarily Balance, depending on comp, tuning, etc. But in that moment, it was Balance. If the Balance was nerfed, we'd just do the same 'Balancefishing', but with Spear. Or Arrow, whichever was better damage for the group. If the Expand effect was removed, however, then we'd have to completely change up our priorities. Extend was good on some classes, and not so much on others. Empower or whatever it was called (burning a Bole) was better for bursty classes, not so much for sustained classes. We'd have to adapt the RR more based on who we planned to give the card to. But, Extend was so much of a gain for everyone, that it was just 'the best one' in every situation except 'pad the one guy who's going for a 99 log'

If the aim is to remove the 'concept' of Balancefishing, ie redrawing cards you get because you're in search of 'the highest damage card', then every card has to give roughly equal value in damage. It's either that, or some cards are worse but some external factor makes up the difference (eg playing Ewer is bad for your damage, but empowers Div to be stronger, which totals more than 2 Balances would have), which then causes a 'this feels bad' feeling for the player in the moment, when they play the 'bad card'. I just think that the main factor in why AOE Balance was so busted, was the AOE part, not the card, so that's what I'd use to solve the problem: keeping the cards single target.

I feel like this muddles the intent and available utility value of those other cards, though. Especially if still including Seals (which I like for the variance it can add) and Divination, both, it seems unnecessary, given that you could just have a bit more of that total rDPS value end up within Divination and re-tie Divination to one's Seals to ensure that the other cards are mixed in for at least half of one's Play casts.

It does a little, yes. But we're looking at it from a perspective of 'today', rather than in contrast to 'what people want from the past'. As above, compared to the past this would be a godsend. Losing only half a (singletarget) Balance damage from playing a player-saving Bole instead of a whole one? I'd assume people would be a lot more open to that if they were asked back then. The issue with Div being tied to Seals (as it was in 5.X) was that it felt exceptionally bad if you did not get 3 Seals, because it was a punishment that is multiplied by the size of the party. I don't see how it's too bad a problem for people to have the 'meaningful choice' between using the utility more creatively, or just full-send the damage as intended. If we say 'oh we can't have MP on the Ewer because people won't use it for MP, it'll just go on whoever gives the most damage (under my tyranny, that'd be a healer)' then we end up where we are now: every card is exactly the same, because we didn't allow for any potential for 'it does less damage'

Actually, I take that back: using a Bole on a DPS and only getting half effectiveness (as described above) is possible now: Play a Bole on a melee. It's 3% instead of 6%, halved effectiveness. Sometimes you get screwed by RNG, and draw a ton of ranged cards in a melee heavy team, or vice versa, and have to decide to either play a scuffed half-card, or hold it until after the first cards fall off and it's no longer bursting time. So if people were able to make the choice to play a card for it's utility in this hypothetical, and still reap half (or more) of it's effect despite 'playing it wrong' (eg a Ewer on a res'd caster to help their MP til next Lucid), I'm not sure I see how that's a bad thing. Especially when they are choosing to do so for the additional effect like Mit or MP or movespeed or whatever, whereas at the minute we do it because 'well there's no other player to put it on, and the 2min meta means that most of every class's damage is now in that bursty 15-20s window, so I have to even though it feels awful'

[Shurrikhan]

It does a little, yes. But we're looking at it from a perspective of 'today', rather than in contrast to 'what people want from the past'. As above, compared to the past this would be a godsend.

Even looking at it from a perspective of 'today', though, you don't need to mix AST's rDPS and utlity capacities in that way.

You'd still have limited opportunities to replace cards (so it's not as if one even could constantly Balance-fish or 'balance-fish') and you'd still want the Seals from those non-damage cards for a greater rDPS gain than solely using damage cards.

Outside of your very best targets' densest potency window coming up, whenever you'd see an opportunity to actually make use of that utility, that utility would have priority, because those utility cards are your bottleneck regardless, much like wanting to keep your (G)CDs rolling within any other kit.