2 minute meta: Rework or Remove?

[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.