Musings over raid buffs: MP, gauges, and roles

[Valence]

So we are all aware how the infamous 2min burst meta has blown out of proportions. A lot of people miss the variety we had in timings which brought a bit of uniqueness to each job providing them. Some people speak of homogenization, but I do believe myself that ultimately the problems were already there before, in ShB and even perhaps SB as well, for the simple reason that groups pressed their raid buffs on time, almost always.

1. It's more optimal not to drift

It's just more optimal to do so, and drifting your minute raid buff or burst meant potentially missing the 3 min heavy raid buff window anyway. The only cases where raid buffs and bursts could be held, and can still be to this day, is when a group knows their specific kill time and want to delay a burst due to downtime, realignment, or just to dodge an involved mechanic, for example superchain 2A in P12S, or second Pinax in P4S. Other examples can exist on different variations, like getting the beast form first in P8S, etc. This hasn't changed, but on every other case, you just press your burst and buffs on time, to the GCD, because that's what's optimal to do.

2. Job and role balance, sustain vs burst

Job balance means that if a job is designed with odd timings and doesn't line its burst with a lot of raid buffs, it needs to account this into its base potency power to be able to make up for it. SE chose not to go that road, probably due to the hassle, but it's still a possibility.

But I somewhat miss the concept of sustained jobs vs burst jobs. We still have this a little with BLM because BLM as a job is a literal fossil, but most other jobs have actual bursts to various degrees, and we get that occasional batshit oddity like DRK (seriously, this is too much, DRK, just stop bursting harder than half the DPS roster). I do believe it is totally possible to envision sustained jobs that don't necessarily line a lot with raid buffs, and just soak them well without having to synergize like crazy, and BLM for instance (or old BRD) can fit into that mold comfortably imo. The issue becomes glaring though when you get into fights that have an insane amount of very short phases with big downtime, like *cough* ultimates. There is a reason some jobs like DRK or NIN overperform in some of those, especially DSR. So obviously, this informs immediate constraints into fight encounter design, for sure.

But perhaps there is alternatives to consider to alleviate this. For instance, one could imagine that the concept of heavy burst, medium burst, and freeflow sustained jobs, could be assigned to actual roles instead of on a per job basis, which would bring the immense benefit of not having jobs fighting with each other within the same role for balance/meta. For instance, caster could be building around the BLM sustained model, and RDM already lends itself decently well to this for the simple reason that the mana generation is still somewhat rng, and the job isn't too much concerned about 120s alignment, and just does it currently because the meta demands it. On the other hand, one could imagine physical DPS to be heavily focused on burst, and would require more focus on raid buff synergy, for example. This doesn't mean that a sustained job wouldn't care about playing into raid buffs though, for the simple reason they would still benefit from those buffs. Spooling some poolable resources like xenoglossy, etc, and pouring them into buffs, could still be skill play, but the overall structures of their rotations would just work differently, and their base potencies be accounted for that. And perhaps sustained jobs would benefit from significantly stronger downtime tools like meditation, gauge fillers, etc, just to keep up with burst jobs that would lose less from said downtime.

3. Raid buff intricacy & flexibility

Raid buffs are inflexible by design those days. To be honest, very few of them have been flexible before either. Your raid buff is on a 120s cooldown, some on 110s because they're the odd kids in the bloc, but you just press them on time every 120s anyway, and that's it. It's not very engaging overall.

There is 2 big axes of thought around buffs:

- Being more than a button to press every 120s. Some rare buffs involve more than just this, for instance, Radiant Finale that requires going through songs to build up the buff (even if it's still barebones gameplay tbh), or Technical Step, which requires... to dance. Or even brotherhood, that is just a button on cooldown, but still interacts with the monk kit in some way. Well, I'd like raid buffs to involve at least that very minimum baseline of involvement, else just remove them from the class and reduce hotbar bloat in the process to be honest.

- Being flexible: perhaps groups want to adjust when they actually use their raid buffs. Perhaps this means more skilled play. Maybe there is boss downtime here or there, and it would be actually neat to be able to delay, or adjust earlier. I do feel that raid buffs could benefit from being on a gauge, for instance the default being MP like old Foe Requiem or Hypercharge, but they don't have to be. For example Radiant Finale could be working like it does right now, but not using the buff after 120s would just unlock a second layer of buff not to overcap or overwrite anything. You get the idea.

The only concern I have is that it could probably require every job design to also have more easily adjustable burst phases. Some can afford it right now, and some definitely less or not at all. That's the problem with hard 60s or 120s recasts on big nukes and tools...

4. Roles, rPhys

rPhys currently suffers from being subpar and taxed on damage output, and I'm not here to tell you how it makes little sense design wise or anything, as it's been beaten to death already everywhere.

However, whatever the developers want rphys to be about, it used to be about buffing and supporting the party. Those days everybody and their mothers have mitigation and support abilities, especially tanks and healers, but even dps role actions. Fine. But I do believe that cementing rphys into heavy raid buffing for damage would bring back a lot of identity and justification behind bringing an actual ranged physical to a group.

For instance, if we consider rphys to be bringing a very significant amount of party damage translated into raid buffs, promoting teamplay, we would need probably to cull a lot of the buffs those other jobs bring that make little sense or flavor, and bring literally nothing interesting besides stacking buffs for the sake of it. With this in mind, bringing a rphys job to a party would definitely justify into the burst jobs playing right into those buffs, way more than it is today (rpds <> adps synergy).

5. New UI considerations

If one gets to consider more floating raid buffs and bursts, I do think that the UI should include a way to keep track of what party buffs are being set up, and when. Currently it's relatively easy because we have landmarks in our rotations, and know that when the 120s stuff comes back online, then if other players are not crapping the bed, then the raid buffs will be up with it.

Within a system where parties can adjust and preplan their buff and burst strategies, either through out of game means for static groups, and through macros and/or raidplans for PF/DF, the game would need a notification system when a raid buff is being prepared, and when it goes online, so that other players can also prepare, and burst at the right moment. It's not that different from pvp in a way, where we have burst macros and countdowns.

[Valence]

Maybe it's dumb, maybe it's not, but I do feel the game battle system is slowly suffocating beneath way too rigid timers.

[kajv95]

Stopped playing Bard during Shadowbringers over being bored to death due to not having more to consider other than the DPS. When they took off all the weird parts that were sticking out of Bard that happened to be the raid buff things, I simply stopped enjoying it. It's not like I was dealing damage either. Apex Arrow was/is a clunky addition and they doubled down on it in EW it seems so I don't go back other than to flex jobs if needed on the odd occasion.

Red Mage is the job that gives me the feeling of still being more than a DPS, but that has the issue of casters being a bit weird in balance.
The main problem is that the battle system is incredibly simple - most of it is either "get more/less damage" or "deal more/less damage"

Even with the trimming of the battle system to its most barebones state, they *still* ended up making certain jobs better than others in certain situations. Like cutscenes that force enochian to fall off on BLM for example, because they last longer than 15 seconds. Sure, it's not much, but when some jobs simply don't have to worry about it (even having cutscene downtime be a borderline benefit through relativity) it really feels like even the simplest of battle systems isn't being properly designed for.

There's an odd fixation of having Machinist in the rphys job type being a selfish dps which blocks the entire role from being a support role instead, and so we get what we have today. Bards and Dancers that do about as much raid buffing as your friendly neighbourhood punchy monk.

[Valence]

There's an odd fixation of having Machinist in the rphys job type being a selfish dps which blocks the entire role from being a support role instead, and so we get what we have today. Bards and Dancers that do about as much raid buffing as your friendly neighbourhood punchy monk.

I totally agree that rphys as a role and identity would benefit immensely from being focused on raid buffing, and that's why DNC and BRD still somewhat work, in spite of being ranged taxed, because while in rDPS they'll show in the second rate dps group at the bottom with SMN/RDM, and perhaps a bit above MCH, they still enable a lot of selfish or melee jobs that play into their buffs which isn't represented in that metric. MCH on the other hand... Well it's not a melee, let's just say that.

But, let's not push it either, a good BRD or DNC will output thrice or four times more raid buff damage than a monk easy. This is already good mind you, but it tends to drown a little into the huge noise of other smaller buffs like said monk's brotherhood, and others.

Agreed with everything about Bard; it’s definitely one of the jobs to have suffered the most from the rigidity and passivity of ‘party support’. I will never not be salty that they think ‘Esuna’ aka Warden’s Paean needs a bloody 45 second cool-down instead of an MP cost and/or cast time. Imagine if healers had to deal with the same thing. ‘Sorry about the Doom but I used Esuna on the tank, bye dps!’. I mean, I’m sure 80% of Bards literally don’t know what the song actually is/does lol.

Uhm, Esuna is not an oGCD and has a small cast time as well. I do agree that Warden could probably benefit from adjustments or a rework, but I'm not gonna spit on their latest attempts to make it useful, notable this tier in P10S and especially P12S.

[Connor]

Stopped playing Bard during Shadowbringers over being bored to death due to not having more to consider other than the DPS. When they took off all the weird parts that were sticking out of Bard that happened to be the raid buff things, I simply stopped enjoying it. It's not like I was dealing damage either. Apex Arrow was/is a clunky addition and they doubled down on it in EW it seems so I don't go back other than to flex jobs if needed on the odd occasion.


There's an odd fixation of having Machinist in the rphys job type being a selfish dps which blocks the entire role from being a support role instead, and so we get what we have today. Bards and Dancers that do about as much raid buffing as your friendly neighbourhood punchy monk.

Agreed with everything about Bard; it’s definitely one of the jobs to have suffered the most from the rigidity and passivity of ‘party support’. I will never not be salty that they think ‘Esuna’ aka Warden’s Paean needs a bloody 45 second cool-down instead of an MP cost and/or cast time. Imagine if healers had to deal with the same thing. ‘Sorry about the Doom but I used Esuna on the tank, bye dps!’. I mean, I’m sure 80% of Bards literally don’t know what the song actually is/does lol.

Also agreed about it being weird that Machinist ‘has to have no party buffs’. The weirdest part is, it started off as a ‘supportive’ job. While that was mostly just using Turrets as Ballad/Paeon clones, Hypercharge and things like Dismantle gave it debuff skills that still made it feel like it was supporting the party despite having a more offensive leaning than Bard. It also had the benefit of instant use support, contrasting with Bards having to sing (i.e cast).
We got Dismantle back (with like no explanation lol) after like 3 expansions, but the rest of what made Machinist still feel like it could fit into the ‘provides support’ niche for ranged phys was removed and never developed them further

[Connor]

I totally agree that rphys as a role and identity would benefit immensely from being focused on raid buffing, and that's why DNC and BRD still somewhat work, in spite of being ranged taxed, because while in rDPS they'll show in the second rate dps group at the bottom with SMN/RDM, and perhaps a bit above MCH, they still enable a lot of selfish or melee jobs that play into their buffs which isn't represented in that metric. MCH on the other hand... Well it's not a melee, let's just say that.

But, let's not push it either, a good BRD or DNC will output thrice or four times more raid buff damage than a monk easy. This is already good mind you, but it tends to drown a little into the huge noise of other smaller buffs like said monk's brotherhood, and others.



Uhm, Esuna is not an oGCD and has a small cast time as well. I do agree that Warden could probably benefit from adjustments or a rework, but I'm not gonna spit on their latest attempts to make it useful, notable this tier in P10S and especially P12S.

I mean Esuna as in ‘the cleansing effect’, not the actual spell itself which is indeed a GCD. I mean, Warden’s Paean used to as well…but they oGCD-ified it as they always do. Didn’t it even have like a 90s cool-down at one point? What’s wrong with just giving it a 1.5 cast (which wouldn’t affect mobility and still create space for single weaving)