2 minute meta: Rework or Remove?

[Shurrikhan]

Take pld as an example.
The old pld could not exist with the new 2 minute meta and was reworked to be in the image and likeness of practically all rotations.
All the classes that were designed to have a sustained damage output over time have been transformed like all the others into burst classes. There is no other way out with this system.

Again, though, Paladin could at the time literally could have been made fully competitive... by just being slightly buffed.

Heck, it still needed to be buffed twice more after its rehaul (6.4 and 6.5), so clearly just shuffling around when that damage was dealt was not enough.

Clearly, if we take shB as an example, leaving the 2 minute goal leads to another problem: some comps will perform better than others. Bad. But the point is another: why did it happen? why were some better than others? For raid buffs.

Not really, no. The majority of Shadowbringers' raid balance woes was from non-buffers overperforming, not underperforming.

It just happened that jobs with no business looking at rDPS for their measure of balance complained that their rDPS was fell below other jobs' (as it should, because it's still missing a good 3-5% of their additional value over other jobs with lesser ability to exploit buffs, which is only accounted for within the aDPS metric, with neither side alone telling the whole story of the value buffers bring).

BLM generally remained on top in rDPS and SAM near the top in rDPS despite their offering more value than anyone else from constant and finite-duration raid buffs, respectively, outside of the usual issues of minor outliers (SMN just wiping everyone else off the table in Ifrit/Garuda and Shiva, and later OoD, etc.).

And even before Shadowbringers, the problem was less that there was a meta comp or better performing jobs on the basis of raid buffs... as that there were set comps (outside of NIN being able to glide between whatever).

By late Stormblood, the best comp for a RDM could have damn near equal party dps to the best comp for SAM as the best comp for BRD as the best comp for DRG, etc., etc.; the issue was just that once you had jobs A, B, and C you wanted jobs D, E, and F, not jobs G, H, I, J, K, L, or M.

What I meant here is that a buff shouldn't be a measly button press every 120 seconds, but should be an integral part of the rotation.

Yours? Theirs?

If it's a vital part of your rotation, then you'd have to keep your rotation synced to the time others could most benefit from it, likely meaning you must follow a specific GCD tier and/or rotation, which would be less flexible even than what we have now (though obviously some jobs, like DRG, will be less flexible than others, like MNK/SAM).

If it's a vital part of their rotation or otherwise affects their gameplay in some pace-setting way, too, then they doubly have to keep synced to your actions, too. Again, not an increase in flexibility. Quite the opposite.

It comes down to the details for any of these implementations. What flexibility are you willing to give up? What is the threshold for something being "integral"?

Arcane Circle, for instance, is already useful to RPR's rotation, and Brotherhood to Monk's, regardless of their 3% and 5% buffs, respectively. Does that count, or is it something entirely separate?

Let's say we made it Chain Stratagem would cause each Crit landed on an enemy to increase their chance to be critically struck.

Does that change behaviors or otherwise make it any more integral to gameplay than the mere more direct damage increase of +10% crit? In itself, no.

There'd need to be available compromises between total damage and more opportunities to crit, so that before and after reaching a certain Chain Strategem stacks threshold given one's crit chance, you'd prioritize A and then prioritize B.

Maybe we go further, and make it so every job had some sort on-Crit proc, and many had ways to force a crit (revised Kaiten, certain procced arrows, Berserk, Life Surge, what have you), and Battle Voice would increase all proc chances by 25% (of their existing chances, so Repertoire becomes guaranteed), while Battle Litany stays as a crit.

Now they would all have gameplay effect, of some sort, that makes their value that bit more contextual. But would that at all redeem them in your eyes? What are you looking for here?

The one for the sch is a button that you press every 120 seconds which is separate from everything else, the one for the ast is an active component of its rotation, it is its gameplay which is based a lot on its buffs and which rewards it by also unlocking some damage .

...When Divination was actually linked to the grade, I'd agree, but... they are quite functionally identical now in single-target combat. It's just that SCH has and rDPS buff and a utility buff (Expedient), while AST has two purely rDPS buffs.

Now, thematically, if I were to make just one of them a buff job, and knowing what I do of their history in this game (had I known nothing of how XIV planned to implement each or seen only their ability names across the multiple languages, I would likely have gone with making SCH the buffer instead, but w/e), yeah, I'd make AST the buffer over SCH. But...

At the same time... does Chain Stratagem harm SCH's identity through its inclusion? Is it mutually exclusive with some other, more "XIV SCH-like" action that SCH would/likely could otherwise have had? Does it harm AST's, WHM's, and SGE's by association? I am not convinced it does any of those things.

As such, I don't see an issue in SCH's one-off raidbuff except in that could at least be more interesting for the SCH itself (and, per my preference for more staggered timers, perhaps could have been more engaging for the party as a whole if introduced in some other way).

As for what you mean and what I would like to see anyway, they are the buffs that do not directly affect the damage, and they could be mana regeneration for example, it could be the speed up, it could be the skill-speed. These buffs could change the considerations that are made during the content, also changing the way of approaching the fight.

Agreed. As long as there's sufficient context for them without also obliging them.

If a job can give MP with no alternatives (nothing else that cooldown or their MP-draining effect can be spent on) but no one has any way to favorably spend excess MP, then there needs to be a context in which that extra MP almost certainly cannot be excessive. But if you do that, then gameplay now depends on that MP-granting class being present, else the MP-receiving jobs end up with dead GCDs for reasons entirely outside their control, which will probably be far more unfun than uniquely granting MP will be to the MP-granter. (And what of the jobs that have no use for MP? Do we just avoid bringing them if bringing the MP-granter?)

If you give a job that grants Attack Speed, cool, you can hit new rotational/GCD breakpoints. Except, now you have to carry two sets of materia-ed gear, one for with that job and one without, in order not to be caught awkwardly between rotational/GCD tiers. Is that likely to carry a net improvement to enjoyment, in the current context?

Now, don't get me wrong: I absolutely think you could create a context in which those things are net gains or perhaps even have little to no downsides. But it's going to take a lot of very careful consideration and likely even some pretty drastic shifts in undermechanics.

• Games built around Stamina/Energy bars (with at least the length of a full rotational string before being depleted), for instance, can far better absorb differences in attack rate, because they take on a small amount of flexibly timed downtime in place of a lower base GCD, allowing them to overclock or underclock).
• If all jobs used MP, then we'd have a far better signal of readiness to burst at a glance from our party frames and %max, flat, or % of missing MP restoration or %MP cost reductions could be useful to each role without necessarily being identically useful to each role (may still favor emergency situations).
• Etc., etc.