2 minute meta: Rework or Remove?

[Shurrikhan]

But aligning everything for 2 mins is exactly what we got.

So, two things here:

1. As compared to what? Hitting them on CD? Aligning them for <every X seconds, based on raid comp>? What stands as an improvement over this, and by how much?

2. What we got does not necessarily equal the only thing that was feasible even under those exact conditions.

So every job has to be designed around that philosophy, every fight has to be designed around that philosophy.

Until/unless we get mainstay difficult light party content, where the value of raidwide buffers is greatly reduced for lack of recipients, no, that's really the case. Jobs just need to put out the same in-group damage in practice. If a job with a less bursty profile has to do more DPS over 6 minutes of solo-play slapping a striking dummy than its burstier peers so that it then has the same party contribution amid an average composition, that's fine.

We shouldn't be attempting to balance jobs around their solo dps, nor exploiters (jobs whose party synergy is hidden from the rDPS metric) around their rDPS.

Was HW/StB perfect.. absolutely not... but did it allow more interesting job design? Absolutely.

Except our design opportunities still have all those same options and freedoms even now; the devs have just chosen not to use them. You're not going to hold a 90s CD for raid buffs, as proven by every 90s CD we've had in Endwalker. You're not going to hold a single-charge anything more than ~10% of its cooldown regardless of the timing of raid buffs. Job design could reinclude the old timings of personal damage amplifier buff CDs and direct damage CDs and they'd then be used at the old pace. The only difference is that you'd have to slightly compensate those faintly less synergetic jobs with that much more damage.

Yes, a super meta all-the-raidbuffs comp may thereafter still deal a fraction of a percent more damage than a near-buffs-less one (while non-buffers, in turn, would be further preferred for light party content), but that's also what you had before, often to a much greater degree.