2 minute meta: Rework or Remove?

[vetch]

The original issue raised around raid buffs this expansion was homogenization. Players have been syncing up raid buffs in raid content for the lifespan of this game. Openers have been designed around TA timings since at least Heavensward. Standardization always leads to a degree of homogenization. It then gets harder to differentiate between individual job playstyles when everyone bursts at the same intervals. It's also a simplification of the system, as you no longer need to have as much of an understanding of how to sync up with other jobs in your particular comp, or as much of an awareness of what other players are doing.

Removing raid buffs actually accentuates both of these problems, leading to greater homogenization and simplification of the current system.

Hard to imagine how. One of the first effects of killing the buff-stacking meta would probably be an increase in build diversity as jobs like GNB and WAR that generate resources off of their GCDs realise, "oh, I can build skill speed for more frequent gauge dumps and not be griefing my party." And that's before any developers get involved with the newly excavated design space that appears when not every job has to be able to burst for 20s every 2min.

Nice dichotomy, btw. Standardization leads to homogenization, and removing the standardized elements... also leads to homogenization! Even if it were true, if I'm damned either way, I may as well ask for the removal of things I don't like, and I don't even need a content creator to help me come to that conclusion.

There are benefits to using standardized raid buff timings. Because the system is a bit more obvious and independent of comp, you actually have greater player awareness and engagement with timing raid buffs and teamplay.

"And if you don't like doing that, f*** you, because we don't have any of those jobs anymore. Play a burst job or unsubscribe." Cue river of PLD/BLM/MNK tears.

This is also one place where fight design can cross-compensate for standardized raid buff timings. Because every group bursts at the same time, mechanic timings can be designed to specifically inconvenience this. I think the real question to be discussed is around the interval of buff timings, because that comes down to intensity. Shorter intervals (i.e. one minute) lead to more opportunities for intensive mechanic checks and less downtime. Longer intervals allow for jobs to involve some actual resource management, giving you an adequate build phase and making you think about where you actually want to place your mini-burst relative to the standardized big burst. But this isn't really an issue for jobs that are functionally timer based.

Not every group bursts at the same time. To prevent the stress and potential errors of doing burst and mechs simultaneously, lots of skilled raid groups just... delay the burst. If the devs want to force engagement with 'during-burst' mechanics then they need unforgiving fight durations and unforgiving DPS checks, which both reduce the clear rate KPIs that CBU3 is definitely tracking. It's not free player engagement, not by a long shot.

Downtime is a question of kit design, and bad kit design is exacerbated by the existence of such a prominent burst window. Look how the crappy DRK cooldown spam was papered over by people pointing to how much burst damage it did. Further, you don't NEED to have downtime in a burst-less or long-interval meta, it's not a given at all. You could have a kit like HW DRK where you're constantly playing two gauges against each other, or like sustain-damage MNK. The point is, long-interval and burst-less design can accommodate the spectrum of downtime and non-downtime jobs and thus appeal to multiple types of players, while short-interval bursts naturally favor only one type.

One last point - I hope that we can all eventually move away from this idea that physical ranged DPS are somehow just there as 'support DPS'. That concept was eradicated with the job gauge systems of Stormblood, since you no longer had the opportunity to help your teammate generate additional resources. Treating physical ranged as a watered down 'support DPS' that provides 'utility' (read: 1% benchwarmer buff) just isn't good design.

Setting aside the tedium of every buff being a direct DPS buff without any obfuscation whatsoever, none of the buff jobs will ever be attention-getting even to support mains under a multiplicative buff-stacking meta. Bard isn't any more snoozeworthy for 120 seconds of 1-2% than Astro is for 15s of 6%. They're all forgettable numbers -- they don't seduce you on the tooltip, they don't seduce you in the leveling dungeons, and they don't seduce you in raids even though they finally make a difference there when stacked with five other buffs.

Deleting some or all of the raidbuffs from jobs like RPR, NIN, and DRG that scream 'I'm supposed to be selfish!' anyway, switching to additive stacking, and juicing the remaining buffs up to 10/20% makes the buff jobs a lot more attractive.

[Shurrikhan]

Hard to imagine how. One of the first effects of killing the buff-stacking meta would probably be an increase in build diversity as jobs like GNB and WAR that generate resources off of their GCDs realise, "oh, I can build skill speed for more frequent gauge dumps and not be griefing my party."

Again, I'm a fan of returning to slightly more staggered CDs, so long as the distribution is varied across each job, but...

Faintly reducing the external punishment for contextually unoptimal behavior is going to matter a whole lot less than just the ability for either of those kits, themselves, to handle overflow.

The fact that Bloodfest even exists, instead of GNB just starting instances at 3 cartridges, let alone that it is now 2-minute synced and doesn't scale with GCD speed, that Double Down so cuts into available margining, and that so much else besides in GNB's own kit punishes it for drifts caused by carrying more than the minimum amount of Skill Speed are what hurt its opportunities to take Skill Speed -- far, far more so than whether there's another buff also at 1:00 or 1:30 into the fight.

Those are already places you can and would bank cartridges for and blow them within regardless of Skill Speed, while adding to Skill Speed under GNB's present kit design would more likely push you outside of those more frequent but shorter-duration raid buffs, too.

bad kit design is exacerbated by the existence of such a prominent burst window. Look how the crappy DRK cooldown spam was papered over by people pointing to how much burst damage it did.

Arguably a matter of semantics, but...

DRK's gameplay being at least passable specifically because of burst windows isn't an example of burst windows "exacerbating" its offensive kit issues. If it did, it wouldn't have been sufficient to "paper [them] over", as you put it; it would have made the issues that much more obvious.

The key bottleneck there is far more obvious: developer complacency. That burst windows were enough to make a kit okayish to players despite the doldrum between just goes to show that flurries of synchronized, frenetic action are actually appealing to many.

switching to additive stacking

Multiplicative is already the fairest and most balanced approach. Additive just means multiplicatively diminishing returns.

Consider, a BLM sits on, during Astral Fire, an 80% damage bonus from AF3 and a 23% from Enochian. If those damage bonuses were treated additively, rather than multiplicatively, the effective potency of Fire IV would drop from 686 to 629.

But let's say we find a way to exclude hidden status effects (AF and Enochian) from this multiplicative scaling: You are still specifically nerfing any job that relies on their damage multipliers (FoF, No Mercy, etc.) in order to deal meaningful relative potency during burst. Having additive scaling between Fight of Flight, No Mercy, Lance Charge, Dragon Sight, Riddle of Fire, Raging Strikes, etc. and the likes of Divination, Searing Light, and Arcane Circle isn't making things more fair; it's just punishing PLDs, GNBs, DRGs, MNKs, and BRDs for being in the same party as a SMN, AST, and/or RPR.

And even if you then exclude all that, too, from the "additive" approach, so that raid buffs can suffer diminishing returns only with other raid buffs, you're solely punishing stacks of the same raid buff type, creating anti-synergies between Chain Strategem, Devilment, and Battle Litany (SCH, DNC, DRG) and between Divination, Dragon Sight, Technical/Standard Finish, Brotherhood, Searing Light, and Arcane Circle.

Additive scaling is not a solution. It's asking for the jank of guaranteed crits not being at all benefited by crit buffs / to purposely add a system by which certain jobs to reduce the value of certain other jobs. It's solely a negative.

"And if you don't like doing that, f*** you, because we don't have any of those jobs anymore. Play a burst job or unsubscribe." Cue river of PLD/BLM/MNK tears.

Actually, the solution to some jobs having less party value than others under the same rDPS is just... to increase their rDPS such that they have the same party value. Give them parity where it actually matters, party contribution (which tends to be nearer an average of aDPS and rDPS, as to account also for one's ability to exploit buffs, not just to have one's buffs be exploited)... not just rDPS (as defined and tracked by, and seen on, fflogs).

rDPS is not a good measure of balance. It is, at best, half the picture, and only that for buffers. For non-buffers, it's as irrelevant as solo DPS. And its conflation with the offensive party value a given job contributes is half the reason we're in this "mess of high burst" (effectively, high gap between aDPS and nDPS) "or rot".


That said...

...if you buff a sustain-heavy job's rDPS enough to compete, they'll literally just be better than buffers in both light parties (where the lack of raid synergy you've compensated them for... is half gone anyways) and in the hands of carries (while your party's worst DPS player would cost you all the least party damage by being on the most buff-heavy job of those they're roughly equally comfortable with, since their performance would be least in their own hands).

So, there's that potential "issue" (I'm not totally sure it really is an issue, at least until we get more meaningful/mainstreamed difficult 4-man content) too, if they were to truly get all that far apart. Do with that what you will.

[Kalaam]

If the direct damage buffs are replaced by tangential benefits there can still be advantage to coordinating with your team. It'll just be more comp/fight dependant, which could be a good thing.
Like increasing Skspeed to boost ressource generation before an opportune burst occasion or something

[Shurrikhan]

If the direct damage buffs are replaced by tangential benefits there can still be advantage to coordinating with your team. It'll just be more comp/fight dependant, which could be a good thing.
Like increasing Skspeed to boost ressource generation before an opportune burst occasion or something

That's still a raid buff. Yes, the value of Haste is far more contextual than that of Crit, Determination, or Damage itself, but that trade has nothing to do with existing design being built around two-minute buffs.

You'd still want to pop those Haste buffs, just as with Ley Lines and Presence of Mind, where you can get the greatest total value of them... which is by popping them on CD unless within X% of the other raid buffs' timing, where X equals the rough damage bonus value of those raid buffs. I.e., they're still bundled, or the actual timer is irrelevant (just hit it on CD).

Would having the occasional less directly damage-granting buff be an improvement, in that it could at least increase thoughtfulness and be less redundant among other damage-granting buffs? Probably... if we revised kits to, say, be less screwed over by Haste in the current context, and/or revised the current context not to screw over kits so badly when given excess Haste, etc., etc.

:: Inb4 "flat additional potency" as another diversified raid-buff option. There's only about one narrow means of approach by which that wouldn't be a terrible idea. In all other cases, it's less balanced and less fun/optimization-capable for both the buffer and buffed than even just a simple %damage increase.

[Reimmi]

Remove it, only allow astrologian and bard/dancer to have raid buffs, and those raid buffs aren't raw damage increases, rather utility like movement speed and such
Give everyone unique burst cooldowns like reaper's enshroud or monks perfect balance, and shift the focus to personal burst windows and not raid buff windows.

[Kalaam]

The thing is, current job design is made for that perfect buff stack alignement with burst and that is what annoys a lot of players.
If it disappears, or becomes significantely rarer, then the need to constantly stack everything in the same 10 seconds window does as well, unless all fights are designed to have a single 10 second opening to deal a DPS check that would require that kind of damage.
It's a communicating vessel kind of thing, one informs the other.

Having buffs on varied timers that rarely align would be neat as well, but also might make some comp more "competitive" (aka: X job's buffs align more often with the burst of those DPS so you should always pair those) which leads to all kind of issues we've had before (hello dragoon and bard from SB)

[Shurrikhan]

The thing is, current job design is made for that perfect buff stack alignement with burst and that is what annoys a lot of players.

If the problem is kits being designed for automatic/effortless alignment, then wouldn't it be enough just to have more of our CDs be, say, 45|80|90 seconds, thereby more rarely syncing up?

In either case, though, you'd still be hitting CDs on CD. So... what's changed exactly by breaking that alignment, except that you depend less on (or, are rewarded less by) team "synergy"?

The only real difference seems to be the degree and manner of advantage for sync:

Remove raid buffs, and there's no longer an advantage for keeping up with your team (in terms of uptime, as affecting rotational milestones, and avoiding deaths). We could say that frees up design, but to what result? To go from mostly hitting CDs on CD to... truly only ever hitting CDs on CD?

If you have staggered raid buffs, there's slightly more instances to optimize, but less value in each optimization -- and you risk set comps if you don't spread that variety in those timings out pretty evenly to/within each job, so that a party can't just go fully 90s or 120s for its primary interval (which would otherwise reduce job choice). Is that going to change how the game feels in any noticeable way, though? Especially, unless you're simultaneously someone who cares about your damage relative to others on an unofficial leaderboard, but not enough maintain uptime (including by being alive) as much as the rest of your party?

I suspect I'd slightly prefer that staggered layout, since I like having more things to bank for and play around, but the difference really isn't huge, and would end up constraining job kits just as much as the current 15|20|30|60|120s CDs do presently (just in terms of forcibly diversifying those CDs' rhythms to sync less instead of keeping them lined up to sync more).


I feel like we're still picking at one of several knots of a rope that's been soaked in glue, expecting that all would be solved if we could just get this single knot undone. But the exploiting CDs (what ought to be hit under buffs), the amplifying CDs (the buffs themselves), alternate in-kit means of pacesetting, alternate encounter-based means of pacesetting, our intended balance points between simpler/less risky kits and higher risk/more complex kits, and even future proofing for job balance across light party content (if we were ever to get mainstay more difficult 4-man instances) all play a part in this, and that's still likely not even an exhaustive list of factors. Tugging just the one of many knots free just leaves you with, more than likely, a messier still-bound-up knot.


Tl;dr: The "two-minute meta" is not as simple, not as new, and not as impactful as most are making it out to be. Yes, there are potential improvements possible, but they won't be had just by staggering CDs, and certainly not by just throwing out all raid buffs altogether.

[ZiraZ]

The thing is, current job design is made for that perfect buff stack alignement with burst and that is what annoys a lot of players.
If it disappears, or becomes significantely rarer, then the need to constantly stack everything in the same 10 seconds window does as well, unless all fights are designed to have a single 10 second opening to deal a DPS check that would require that kind of damage.
It's a communicating vessel kind of thing, one informs the other.

Having buffs on varied timers that rarely align would be neat as well, but also might make some comp more "competitive" (aka: X job's buffs align more often with the burst of those DPS so you should always pair those) which leads to all kind of issues we've had before (hello dragoon and bard from SB)

No it isn't, stop lying, you don't even know what you're saying or asking.
This is prime dunning krugerposting.
What you are suggesting will just destroy the game, you completely misunderstood the complains people have with the 2mins and ran the opposite way with it.

[Kalaam]

Now that's something I am not knowledgeable enough about to have detailed discussions about, sadly.
Definitely there is a need to spread the buffs more, and I do think more variety among them would also be nice. Dedicated supports can keep straight % increase sure, but I just hope we move into a design space that isn't as cleanly aligned as it is now. 'cause you don't really "need" to work together to align stuff outside of very complex fights where mechanics force a delay. If it comes to a "Ok in this party we play with a dragoon so for them better hold on the buff for a bit so they can build ressources and get the most value out of it." vs "Alright we have a samurai there, just gotta wait a few GCD and then let him let all hell loose" that'd be nice I think.

[Kalaam]

Then explain to me what the majority of people complaining about it thinks.
I understand what I dislike about it myself, no need to tell me what I think. That gas won't be lit my friend.