2 minute meta: Rework or Remove?

[Reimmi]

I feel like option 2 would just cause more problems than solve them. Like what happens to Bard and Dancer if they can’t buff the party? Physical ranged can’t have dps close to casters because of ‘balance’, but if they stay as they are but with no buffs they’d be kinda useless. Then there’s the whole thing with mobility no longer being a role advantage, as evidenced by Summoner. If they boost physical ranged damage to be on par with casters though then they just cancel them out.

They could just have every job do the same damage I guess, but it’d be a bit unfair for the people who do enjoy supporting the party to just completely lose to access to it on every job. Plus it would make dps feel even more homogenised if they all reached the goal of ‘kill enemy’ the same way. Part of what makes dps enjoyable to me is having the choice of a selfish dps like Black Mage or Samurai, something more ‘middle of the ground’ like Dragoon or Ninja, or something more support oriented like Bard or Dancer.

That said I do agree that their ‘raid buff homogenisation’ has gotten way out of hand, and the ‘2-min meta’ has made it all the more apparent. Plus, it’s just kinda weird that practically everyone has a raid buff now lol. I wouldn’t be surprised if Black Mage and Samurai get ones in Dawntrail.
Personally I think it makes more sense to cull the majority of current ‘raid buffs’ but with the exception of certain skills or mechanics that are central to the job like Bard’s song buffs or Dance Partner / Technical Finish. And of course things like Chain Stratagem or Astrologian’s cards. There is of course the issue of ‘but then you always need those jobs’ , but that’s pretty much already happens because of 1% party buff anyway. It’s not like people are generally taking like, X4 melee or X4 ranged to raids. I don’t think it’s too out there to expect a party to have 2X melee, 1 caster and 1 ranged.

Ultimately I wouldn’t be sure about option 1, but I definitely wouldn’t choose 2 personally. But I would say that definitely agree that something needs to change regardless.
As an aside, I’m curious whether people feel the same about ‘non-damage raid buffs’. They’re not as consequential, but they have become fairly ubiquitous lol

I feel like the best compromise is give bard/mch the pvp fillers, where you move at 50% speed while casting them. Not gun/bow mage like hw, but not full mobility either.
idk about dancer though. I think before endwalker they had a good gimmick of having to go into melee to do their aoe procs, putting them in danger.

Unless fight design changes the mobility ranged dps get doesn't really matter anyway. But if the devs really see it as a boon then that should be good enough to qualify ranged physical for being on equal terms with casters i think

[Connor]

snip

For Bard I personally think the PvP Powerful Shot ability would work really well in Paeon. Currently it’s the only song that has no mechanic associated with it (I really don’t consider 100% passive fake greased Lightning a mechanic lol), so having the Burst Shot change to Powerful Shot would give it an actual mechanic of its own. It’d also mean the casting would be limited to that specific window, so they could potentially mix up song rotation to maximise the uptime of mobility before going into the Paeon. Plus, the fake Greased Lightning synergises with cast times by reducing how limiting they can be through the haste effect

As for Dancer I agree that it was better then they were moving between melee and ranged. Since they have En Avant along with full mobility, it makes sense for them to have to leverage that with rapid repositioning. Unfortunately outside of Curing Waltz and Improvisation (lol), you have absolutely no need to reposition as a Dancer now that they changed how procs work (not that 99.999% of fights aren’t just the entire party sitting up the enemy’s butt lol). Still I think it’d make sense for Dancers to have more abilities that require them to fully leverage their mobility.

Lastly I personally don’t think ranged phys should ever be ‘equal to’ casters. It just kinda defeats the purpose of the role; they’d be as well just merging them into a full ‘Ranged’ category.

According to SE’s literal job guide that they wrote lol, physical ranged dps provide support to companions . Except literally every melee not called Samurai / every caster not called Black Mage brings just as much to the table as phys ranged in support. Hell casters arguably have infinitely more valuable support options solely because they have Raise. Red Mage can provide on-demand heals, chain resurrection, damage reduction, damage buffs, and still pumps out respectable dps. Same with Summoner to a lesser extent. Practically every melee has party damage buffs, Monk literally has a copy of Bard’s Nature’s Minne on a shorter cool-down (technically it was Monks first but again, since when was Monk a party support?), Dragoons have been lol’ing their way into raids for years thanks to Battle Litany and the Dragon Eye tether thing (I still cannot fathom why Dragoon is a support/rDPS class, has Yoshi-P played an FF before? Lol).

Basically I think that what SE needs to do isn’t increasing the overall dps output of physical ranged, they should build upon the ‘supporting the party’ aspect of the role ( which literally does not exist in any other role, according to SE ), and stop giving out copies of every raid buff ever added to melee. They already have enough! Why the hell can Reapers do a party wide regen? They’re edgy dark fighters with a giant sickle for god’s sake, in what world does that theme scream ‘this is a job that likes to help his party and heal his companion’s wounds’

[Shurrikhan]

I feel like the best compromise is give bard/mch the pvp fillers, where you move at 50% speed while casting them. Not gun/bow mage like hw, but not full mobility either.

A forced, harder to cancel heavy is actually more likely to get you killed than the HW cast times despite having about the same overall movement speed reduction...

[Ayche]

I love that after the community has reached this zenith moment of collective conclusion on the 2min matter, the proposed solutions involve absolute schism.

You know, this is where time being an everflowing river might come to being an advantage for the developers. Nothing is worse than an uneven number, as seen by the struggles of the tank and healer roles through out 3.0 to 5.0/6.0. It is better off being accepted than unique after all, but even number of jobs finally allows you to return to the idea of subroles inside roles, as seen with the concept of shield and regen healers. Yes, they did not really pop off with the concept in Endwalker, but it is a lot healthier way to built exclusive features into jobs than the alternative of ... not doing so.

[Connor]

A forced, harder to cancel heavy is actually more likely to get you killed than the HW cast times despite having about the same overall movement speed reduction...

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

HW Cast Times still didn’t allow actual movement either, so you’d have to deal with interrupts if you tried to walk while casting (or turn off Minuet and cry at the amount of lost dps lol). Powerful Shot still allows you to literally walk out of an AoE while casting, so I don’t understand how it would affect survivability in any way.

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)

[Reimmi]

A forced, harder to cancel heavy is actually more likely to get you killed than the HW cast times despite having about the same overall movement speed reduction...

True, i dont think either is necessary tbh considering summoner lol

[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?

[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