2 minute meta: Rework or Remove?

[Darkpaw]

Honestly, i don't adhere to either of these options, I'd like to go back to the heavensward style. Away from the 2 minute meta, where you may not be able to align every single buff properly, I feel it allows them more fight creativity and more job creativity, I think this 2 minute meta has reached the limit of it's effectiveness and the cost is too high. Make good unique jobs and good unique fights and let us figure out how to best combine them.

Yes make sure all party makeups can clear the fights, but i never saw the problem with there being a "meta" it's like some fighting games. Yes there are characters that are not as innately strong as others but if you love your job you'll get good enough to make sure it clears all content and overcome meta.

Doing away with the 2 minute meta lets us get back to more creative fight designs like we had in Alexander, interesting and different style jobs like we had in heavensward. Allowing us to combat the homogenization that we have been seeing by the people who were once clamoring for the synchronized meta.

[Raikai]

Yes, it's another 2 minute raid buff thread. This horse has been beaten to death but I got a new whacking stick so why not. Someone brought this up on the xivdiscussion subreddit and it got my noggin joggin'. Let's say the devs leave this to a community vote. In 7.0 we get two options:
1. Raid buffs are put back on the cooldowns they had before EW.
2. Raid buffs are entirely removed. Anything that increases how much damage your party members deal, be it a buff on them or a debuff on the enemy, is gone.

Which would you pick and why?

First option. Second option would actually hurt more than it would mend, unless it's made in a sensible way that the jobs considered support at their cores could find a way to retain the role. Like Bard buffing the entire party for the whole fight, Dancer buffing a single person for the whole fight, or Astrologian jumping buffs through different people for the whole fight.

[Llynethil]

Just a reminder that this 2 min meta is what people asked for.

People who hardcore raided in previous expansions wanted this, they gave them what they asked for and people are still whining.

FF14 has it's flaws, but goddamn does it have to be tiring to be a dev and see people react like this to things they said they wanted.

[Shurrikhan]

People who hardcore raided in previous expansions wanted this, they gave them what they asked for and people are still whining.

Find me the hardcore raiders who asked for this? Even Yoshida's interview frames the complaints as a matter of being "too hard" for more casual players, not for the actually "hardcore", to whom such was already customary.

[Llynethil]

Find me the hardcore raiders who asked for this? Even Yoshida's interview frames the complaints as a matter of being "too hard" for more casual players, not for the actually "hardcore", to whom such was already customary.

Read the IGN interview with Yoshi from a week ago or so, he basically said that players around the world were tired of the way raidbuffs worked before shb, then changed it to the 2min meta because majority of people asked for it, which in turn allowed them to make ew ultimates and some savage fights so crazy mechanically.

Maybe you don't like it, but majority of people did want this.

[Aravell]

Read the IGN interview with Yoshi from a week ago or so, he basically said that players around the world were tired of the way raidbuffs worked before shb, then changed it to the 2min meta because majority of people asked for it, which in turn allowed them to make ew ultimates and some savage fights so crazy mechanically.

Maybe you don't like it, but majority of people did want this.

He did say he got feedback from around the world about raid buffs, but nowhere in the interview did Yoshi P say that a majority wanted this. In fact, he said a majority of the hardcore playerbase hates the homogenisation.

[Llynethil]

He did say he got feedback from around the world about raid buffs, but nowhere in the interview did Yoshi P say that a majority wanted this. In fact, he said a majority of the hardcore playerbase hates the homogenisation.

Do you people also realise that because of the 2 min meta, they were able to create the raids and ultimates for ew, the ultimates being mechanically the most fun, interesting and hardest to date.

It's not the sole reason, but it's part of the reason those ultimates are so fantastic because they don't have to take into account the mess from before shb where for example a ninja would have to choose between using their cd or waiting to align it with the ones from others.

If they kept going with sb/hw system, none of these ultimates would be as complex and interesting in design at all and you people whould have whined about that instead.

Not only that but the 2min meta makes accessability to savage slightly better for midcore players (there's still too big a gap in difficulty though), who are the real ones who have suffered this expansion to begin with.

Raiders got all the usual savages, some of which were pretty tough aswell, the usual extremes and 2 ultimates this expansion, a lot of them having fantastic designs and some of them being the best too date in part thanks to 120s meta, so it DID work better than the old system.

It could be improved sure, but not before they add some serious midcore content first, hardcore raiders had their fill this expansion, there's 0 question about that.

And people complaining about homogenization, check job balance now vs hw ... yeah again it works better then what we had before.

You may not like it, but hard fact is jobs are prob the most balanced right now then ever (rdm needs a little love, but it's nowhere near an outlier like in previous expansion weakest jobs).

[Valence]

People saying that the old raid buffs were any better may be suffering from a severe case of rose tinted glasses. It didn't change anything at all in how one played their job: you pressed raid buffs on time, and tried not to drift, because that's what was most optimal mathematically anyway.

Read the IGN interview with Yoshi from a week ago or so, he basically said that players around the world were tired of the way raidbuffs worked before shb, then changed it to the 2min meta because majority of people asked for it, which in turn allowed them to make ew ultimates and some savage fights so crazy mechanically.

Maybe you don't like it, but majority of people did want this.

If that's what Yoshi and SE actually understood, I think they understood completely wrong. People were unhappy about very specific jobs that were designed around extremely odd timings, notably a lot of tanks on 90s patterns, which didn't really lent themselves well to 60s based buffs (1min, 2min, 3min).

There is a literal highway between realigning 90s burst into 60s or 120s timings, and making everything, bursts and raid buffs, 120s.

[Darkpaw]

People saying that the old raid buffs were any better may be suffering from a severe case of rose tinted glasses. It didn't change anything at all in how one played their job: you pressed raid buffs on time, and tried not to drift, because that's what was most optimal mathematically anyway.



If that's what Yoshi and SE actually understood, I think they understood completely wrong. People were unhappy about very specific jobs that were designed around extremely odd timings, notably a lot of tanks on 90s patterns, which didn't really lent themselves well to 60s based buffs (1min, 2min, 3min).

There is a literal highway between realigning 90s burst into 60s or 120s timings, and making everything, bursts and raid buffs, 120s.

But aligning everything for 2 mins is exactly what we got. Which is what the naysayers were warning about when people asked for this. You can't have your cake and eat it too here. If 2 minute bursts are going to stay. You're going to see more homogenization. Because now we have 60 second mini burst, 120 second big burst. So every job has to be designed around that philosophy, every fight has to be designed around that philosophy. Was HW/StB perfect.. absolutely not... but did it allow more interesting job design? Absolutely.

Now could you say every 120 seconds? Every job needs to have a big burst that aligns? Old raid buff system was bad, but new job design is bad too.

[Kalaam]

Let's be real a second: Square has their own vision for the game, their own plans. Especially for stuff as big as how it's balanced and the overall fight/job design.
Apparently it is to make it the most balanced (and easy to balance) system that is the smoothest possible so anyone can go in and do decently.
The homogenization toward the 2 minute burst window goes toward that goal.
If just a few people asked stuff such as "make it easier to align for buffs" or "X mechanic is a bit too present" they can just use that as a justification: "The community asked for it" but "the community" can be 3 posts that got something way different to what they asked (DRKs wanted Dark Arts to be less spammed, not removed entirely) or a genuine demand that happened to align with their vision.