2 minute meta: Rework or Remove?

[Shurrikhan]

If a 1.5s cast with full mobility during is going to kill people how do Black/Red Mages survive?

I implied no such thing. Heck, I said literally the opposite of that conclusion (that easily cancelled cast times are less likely to get people killed than a self-Heavy during casting that can't be easily cancelled via movement).

Even before accounting at all for slide-casting, a 2.5s cast with 50% mobility will have/cost the same %mobility as a 1.25s cast (and a 2.5s cast with 40% mobility the same as a 1.5s, etc., etc.), but the latter at least allows you to bail out at any moment without having to reach for the cancel key that comes awkwardly to most players (because of their being used to using movement itself to cancel casts).

And even without considering that HW cast times came with a spammable alternative that'd nonetheless do 73.3% of normal spam potency, HW cast times allowed for identical average mobility to a 40% mobility GCD (or ~60% mobility once considering ability to slide-cast), all while being more responsive. And if you want parity with 50% mobility, specifically (as per the example I quoted), just reduce the cast time to 50% of a GCD. With 40% mobility? 40% of a GCD (1s base, with almost as little as .5s actual time one must stay planted given slide-casting). It's that simple.

You could argue ‘but that’s not that different from what we have now!’ which is true, it wouldn’t be a massive ultimate rework. But it’s still better than literal nothing lol. I’d rather have some fluff abilities that are there just to be fun than a bunch of sterile automatic-use ones that are perfectly optimised (which is our current toolkits)

What does any of that have to do with mobility? Physical Ranged already have literally limitless mobility.

[Connor]

I implied no such thing. Heck, I said literally the opposite of that conclusion (that easily cancelled cast times are less likely to get people killed than a self-Heavy during casting that can't be easily cancelled via movement).

Even before accounting at all for slide-casting, a 2.5s cast with 50% mobility will have/cost the same %mobility as a 1.25s cast (and a 2.5s cast with 40% mobility the same as a 1.5s, etc., etc.), but the latter at least allows you to bail out at any moment without having to reach for the cancel key that comes awkwardly to most players (because of their being used to using movement itself to cancel casts).

And even without considering that HW cast times came with a spammable alternative that'd nonetheless do 73.3% of normal spam potency, HW cast times allowed for identical average mobility to a 40% mobility GCD (or ~60% mobility once considering ability to slide-cast), all while being more responsive. And if you want parity with 50% mobility, specifically (as per the example I quoted), just reduce the cast time to 50% of a GCD. With 40% mobility? 40% of a GCD (1s base, with almost as little as .5s actual time one must stay planted given slide-casting). It's that simple.


What does any of that have to do with mobility? Physical Ranged already have literally limitless mobility.

I misunderstood and thought the ‘harder to cancel heavy’ was referring to Powerful Shot for some reason. Which I mean, it can be a pain in the ass to cancel, because it goes out so fast (and then hits the Samurai that just used the skill that inflicts Kuzushi lol)

The last point was that the suggestions probably wouldn’t change much of anything overall (i.e powerful shot appears somewhere on pve bard), which inevitably leads to the question ‘why change it at all?’, which is the invisible unasked question I was trying to answer.

And I mean, personally I think unlimited mobility is overrated anyway. The devs shouldn’t worry so much about ‘can phys ranged still jump and run around in a circle while attacking?’. Then they make it worse by being like ‘we made it so you can run 100% of the time so you have to be worse than Summoner who can only run a measly 95% of the time’ (actual numbers may vary).

I just feel like they can be more inventive about phys ranged in general, rather than just making everything the same ‘hit this button until a glowing proc appears but you can still run in a circle’ style. Like Bard (or Machinist idk did anyone like Gauss Barrel lol?) having some charged skills or Dancers leveraging En Avant for positioning. The devs insistence on never touching their limitless mobility is only hurting the jobs long-term. While Dancer is already mostly there as an actually satisfying phys ranged, then there’s also no telling how it could turn out for Dawntrail lol. ‘Proc are now automatic and replace their respective skills’, ‘aoes now enemy based’ ‘Improvisation deleted because it made you stand still (or well, it’s supposed lol, but snapshotting exists)’, etc.

Ultimately I think the ‘2-min meta’ feels egregious on phys ranged because outside of that limitless mobility we’re not really allowed much else lol (unless melee/casters can already do it). If support was more involved there’d at least be that, but then it runs into the question of ‘how can support ever be engaging in a 2-min meta setup?’

[Asari5]

isnt the big disadvantage of the 2-min-window the limitations it puts on fight AND jobdesign?

[Lyth]

isnt the big disadvantage of the 2-min-window the limitations it puts on fight AND jobdesign?

Again, raid buffs are in the game with the full intention of being a design constraint. That's both a good and a bad thing.

The dev team are telling you that if you want to do the highest amount of dps possible, you can only apply your highest potency attacks within specific fixed windows in the fight. They then design fight mechanics to line up with those windows. If you're good, you have a sense of when those windows occur, know how to prepare your resources and cooldowns going into them, and know how to maintain full uptime when they're up. If you play freestyle and mash buttons when they light up, then you get penalized.

There is naturally a convergent trend on job design, but this occurs even in the absence of raid buffs. Part of this just comes down to the existence of burst vs. sustain. In the absence of mechanics, burst is easier to manage than sustained dps. If most of your damage is weighted into 1/6 of your gameplay, then you don't need to focus for the entire time. In fights with mechanics that sync up with burst, sustain is easier to manage than burst. If you scuff the moments when the mechanics are up, you're not punished as much, and the rest is just downtime.

There's also the issue of what happens during forced downtime/intermission phases where the boss jumps. Timer-based burst has a pretty big advantage over sustain under these conditions, because the timers continue to tick down even during the intermission. The middle ground is to move towards resource-based burst, because you need uptime to actually build resources. But all these considerations have been convergent forces on job design across previous expansions.

[Connor]

isnt the big disadvantage of the 2-min-window the limitations it puts on fight AND jobdesign?

I don’t know if it’s actually true, but I think the devs frame it as being that essentially ‘they can only do fun fights if job design is [how it is currently]’. So basically they’re saying ‘well, if you want jobs to be more complex, we’re going to have to reduce the overall difficulty of new content’.

Which, seems like a bit of a lose/lose scenario in my opinion. Having interesting and distinct jobs shouldn’t preclude us from having interesting and distinct fights

[Equitable_Remedy]

I like the 2-minute burst in raids - it makes it such that the sum is greater than its parts. Yes, that means that your performance isn't solely determined by you but also, in part, by the others in your raid - I take that to be a good thing in an MMO.

[Raikai]

I'd be more content with the 2min meta IF we could get more interesting 'sustained' gameplay outside of it.

In fact, some jobs, like Ninja or Dancer, are traditionally extremely busy during the 2min burst and are at capacity. What they can even add to the equation there without reworking old actions? And unsurprisingly, in the 2meta downtime, those examples of jobs are extremely boring to play.

[Lyth]

NIN has always felt like that, irrespective of raid buffs. If you have roughly similar numbers of actions per job, there's going to be a trade-off between how many GCD actions and oGCDs you have. Having more oGCDs results in a high APM burst. Having fewer GCDs results in a more monotonous downtime once your burst is over. The balance can be gradually shifted over time by adding more GCDs than oGCDs in subsequent expansions, but you'll never get the balance right for everyone.

[RyuuZero]

I think the 2 minute meta is fine, but it's important that what you do within those 2 minutes is fun. 6.08 Samurai is the Perfect Example, since you have a 2 minute Buster but you also have that layered and satisfying Resource Management, which has been removed in 6.1.. Also kind of the same with NIN, though not straight up removed they just reduced the NIN Rotation in terms of priority to 2 buttons by stripping Trickattack off it's unique-ness shoving it to mug and maging Trickattack boost personal damage ._.
imo in oder to "fix" NIN, I'd just switch the effects of Trickattack and Mug, done. But also GNB is so weird to play now.. why doesn't Double Down line up perfectly with Draw!? ugh.. Dawntrail better be Good and not a Darntrail!