The end of Raidbuff - A solution for futur job Design

[CalvinDescoles]

Let’s face it — raid buffs are probably one of the biggest obstacles when it comes to job balancing and encounter design in FFXIV. It’s also part of the reason why not every player is satisfied with how their job feels.

The fact that nearly all compositions are centered around 120s raid buffs, with almost no flexibility for different timing windows due to the homogenization of oGCD cooldowns, creates a rigid system. I truly believe that moving away from strict timed raid buffs could open the door to an entirely new era of job design, where each job could thrive with a stronger, more unique identity, without having to sync around strict burst windows or delay their GCDs to fit into a party plan.

What the end of timed raid buffs could bring:

- A healthier space for persistent buff jobs like BRD (songs) or DNC (partner mechanics), and maybe even a return of passive debuff mechanics (physical/magical resistance, etc.) that aren’t tied to precise oGCD timings.

- More diversity in job rotations, especially for tanks — who currently feel very similar rotation-wise — or even healers, if SE ever decides to give them more engaging DPS tools.

- It would free up design space for jobs that feel overloaded during 60s/120s windows, where too much is happening at once.

- And of course, it would simplify encounter design, where SE wouldn't have to constantly accommodate burst windows or make mechanics that are "raid buff friendly".

One example I’ve always wanted to explore is a composition that doesn’t rely on any burst windows at all:

Any Tank / WHM - SGE / SAM - VPR - BLM - MCH

I get that, under the current balance, this comp isn’t considered optimal — but it’s a setup where no one has to worry about raid buffs or strict timers. You just press your buttons as they come up. That kind of gameplay can feel both relaxing and satisfying, especially for those who value consistency and individual flow over burst alignment.
As it stands, there’s practically no way to build a team without at least one raid buff to manage. I’m not saying we should remove all raid buffs — but introducing more viable job options that don’t rely on raid buff windows could let players build comps that feel different, and allow for a more diverse set of playstyles.

So yeah — what do you think? Would FFXIV benefit from moving away from the strict raid buff meta, or do you think it's too deeply embedded in the game's identity to change?

[TheInsomniac13]

There is a whole lot more wrong with the job and encounter design,
But yes getting rid of the forced 2 min Raidbuff would be a majore step into the right direction.
When I started this game as Conjurer I was miffed when I realized I did not get any new attack but my 8th slightly different healingspell.
Then I leveld Thaumaturge and realized there is no situation based decision making but static rotation.
And then I learned that endgame Raids are all build an planned around a 120 second radbuff turning it into a choreographed performance...
Let's just say I thought it one of the dumbest design decisions I ever heared.

[jonimated]

The two minute meta, and the SE's strict adherence to it, is the root of some of the biggest problems plaguing current job design. I would argue among the biggest issues the entire game currently has. Aligning every rotation, and every raid buff, to the same timer creates stagnation in job design.

I don't think we need to remove raid buffs entirely either in order to solve this. There are significantly more interesting ways to go about fixing this problem.

Reduce the overall number of party buffs
Abilities like Arcane Circle and Brotherhood don't need to have a party-wide damage buff associated with them. Their additional effects are enough to make the player want to hit the button on cooldown. Turn some party buffs into personal buffs, like Battle Litany, and increase their effect.

Make variable cooldown timers and create different types of buffs
Give us buffs that are on a 20 second cooldown, and some ultra-powerful ones that are on a 5 minute cooldown. Allow for the chance to lower the cooldown of a specific personal buff. For example "Critical strikes reduce the cooldown of x buff by 1 second". Give us different types of buffs instead of just straight damage %. Crit rate (I know this exists) or crit damage increase, skill/spell speed increase, cooldown reduction. Just anything other than +% damage.

I don't think the 2 minute meta is too deeply embedded in the game's identity to change. Sure it would require a lot of work on every single job, but the 2 minute meta wasn't always a thing. We went through an entire game rework and 2 expansions before the devs decided to start homogenizing raid buffs. Abolishing the this would also have the side-effect of solving a lot of other issues plaguing jobs at the moment. Things like Reaper's gauge negativity wouldn't be a thing because there wouldn't a strict timer to adhere to. Jobs with incredibly tight rotations would have that completely alleviated.

IMO there are only positives to blowing this whole thing up and bringing back some variety in buffs and rotations.

[Valence]

I think this is something that will definitely need to be done to get away from buff stacking metas like the game has had since forever (this isn't an EW 2min meta new thing at all, before it was Trick Attack). Jobs that aren't especially buffers in nature like MNK, DRG, etc, don't need those buffs. They're just a button that's there to press on cooldown.
Buffers like BRD and DNC however need to keep them, be valued for them, and also have more involved mechanics around them beyond pressing them on cooldown (Foe Requiem was the goat).
For example in pvp you have a select amount of buffers, and those are SCH and BRD only (DNC only buffs one person with more tools). It works well enough because this prevents buff stacking to break the balance outright.

On the other hand it goes without saying that removing this for half the job roster will remove one of the two remaining team based battle mechanics (the other being healing/mitigation), and this will show that the current pve model is desperately in need of more systems that prevent us from just playing a solo game with 7 players you never interact with since everything is about standing in the right spot individually.

[Carighan]

Yeah this wouldn't be as simple as you think.

I mean, on a very macro-level, you can have three degrees of "buff-related" your class design can be:
* No buffs at all, except some self-stuff to indicate resource availabilities and combo-effects, more as a UI element. Far as I know few if any MMORPGs go this route, as this massively curbs design space in a really bad way.
* Some buffs of all types, but they're a special thing. <-- we are here. This has upsides in that individual buffs can feel meaningful, plus you can play with all kinds of buff types and modes, and they can all feel distinct. The downside is that they end up being a lynchpin of your design, as we can see from the 120s meta. Even if you break up the CDs, this'd always get optimized, and if anything lead to buffs being held or entire classes being excluded from some setups because they cannot sync up with everyone else in the group.
* All the buffs, all the time. This is usually done like how GW2 approaches it: Buffs are of a shared type, and various classes have different ways to apply what is ultimately the same buff (and hence doesn't stack). You're expected to have ~all buffs at ~all times. This is effectively trivializing buffs, but unlike the first option it keeps quite a lot of the design space around, even if the impact is very small and all flavor is lost.

There's no truly good solution. Every approach has downsides. You can mitigate each of those, but it's important to recognize that a different approach is not strictly better, it's just different. It has equivalent downsides of its own.

[Absurdity]

I think this is something that will definitely need to be done to get away from buff stacking metas like the game has had since forever (this isn't an EW 2min meta new thing at all, before it was Trick Attack).

The major difference with the old Trick Attack was that while it was up every 60 seconds your own job burst was not, if you even had any in the first place.
You wanted to put as much damage as possible into the buff window but your burst didn't just automatically align with it and you certainly also didn't want to drift your major cooldowns out of the much bigger buff windows.

This meant pooling resources for a sort of "mini-burst" or delaying some shorter cooldowns to take advantage of both the smaller and bigger windows.
It also made the average kill time more of a factor since it determined whether you should take advantage of certain buff windows or rather get an extra usage out of a cooldown.


Old Trick Attack itself wasn't all that interesting, everything around it was.
If you brought the 60 second Trick back in the current environment it wouldn't even move the needle since almost every job is now a 60 second burst job anyway.

[Valence]

Which is why raiders complained enough and SE changed it to 2min because some jobs weren't meta and whined because they couldn't play inside Trick Attack as much as others. That's why I'm saying having raid buffs become literal cornerstones if the whole gameplay where everyone wants to stack as much as possible else their gameplay or job is suboptimal doesn't lead to great things. Jobs may have been way more flavourful with different damage profiles back then, it didn't prevent raid buffs to already be a problem.

Don't get me wrong, I'd go back to the old design in a heartbeat, just without Trick Attack as a cornerstone to it so people would be less shackled by it.

[CidHeiral]

I would love a culling of most raid buffs. Let jobs have all sorts of varied and wacky playstyles without having to line up with an arbitrary buff window.

[ThurinTurambar]

A simple solution would be to make raidbuffs additive instead of multiplicative. Of course it would require changing buffs that are naturally multiplicative - for example one increasing damage with one increasing crit, they naturally synergise into multiplication.

But yeah aside from that, make all buffs count from the base damage instead of the unholy mix of all of them.

Of course, you would still want to stack them as most jobs either have burst at 2 minutes or can prepare for 2 minute to burst, but it would make non buff party compositions viable.

[Absurdity]

Of course, you would still want to stack them as most jobs either have burst at 2 minutes or can prepare for 2 minute to burst, but it would make non buff party compositions viable.

That's only the case right now, because they literally all have to be designed to have a 2-minute burst or their aDPS falls off a cliff.
As Valence said, if we're no longer shackled to the party buff window every 2 minutes then rotations no longer need to revolve around it. We could have 60 second bursts, 90 second bursts, 120 or jobs that completely rely on sustained dps again.