Quote Originally Posted by Asari5 View Post
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.