How would you *fix* battle content?

[AntoniusQuil]

How to improve tanks?

Simple, make bloodwhetting and raw intuition a permanent part of warrior tank stance

[Rithy255]

how would I? fix battle content... well theirs a lot, here's some key ones i'd love to see but I think realistically we won't see any of these.

• Add Job specialization, have 3 different builds that would change up how your job plays and possibly even changing a tank into a healer, dps into a tank ect. While people will cry this is "illusion of choice" In a casual sense (savage like first few weeks, Ultimates) I like to actually have that choice and it becomes less of a illusion when people don't just follow what's "meta" people who only care about the META can just follow whatever is meta while we can have actual fun, instead of the game catering to them.

• Instead of "lets just remove tank healing" I would personally try to look at the core fundamental issues which isn't a regen on holy sheltron, it's the lack of damage, its the amount of mitigation and self healing combined on a tank, skills like bloodwhetting clearly do go too far in AOE situations, Ideally healers and tanks should be working together to sustain the party instead of one job having all the responsibility.

• Add More dependence on procs & skills that aren't just a set rotation (this could relate into my post about specializations, where some jobs could get more proc based specs in the mix) Tanks and healers need more interesting damage gameplay too

• Raid buffs need to be reworked, 2 minute meta is super boring and restricts us from having sustained dps jobs

[Shurrikhan]

While people will cry this is "illusion of choice" In a casual sense (savage like first few weeks, Ultimates) I like to actually have that choice and it becomes less of a illusion when people don't just follow what's "meta" people who only care about the META can just follow whatever is meta while we can have actual fun, instead of the game catering to them.

What is that "catering", though, exactly? Balance in general? Balance specifically where toning down capacity features so that X may be viable in more situations, enlarging the effective roster? Balance specifically where things get increasingly generalized? Reduced RNG dependence so that one can compete on some leaderboard without rerunning 20+ times for greatest crit-luck?

Raid buffs need to be reworked, 2 minute meta is super boring and restricts us from having sustained dps jobs

Food for thought:

Technically, if we wanted more sustained jobs now (ones with less variance, say, between their damage from 0:00 to 0:20 or from 1:00 to 1:20 and the remainder of the first two minutes), all we'd have to do is charge other jobs at least a bit for the utility of being able to put out a disproportionate amount of damage into a small window of time or buff the less dynamic jobs in compensation for their lack of dynamics. But for that to actually be a utility, we'd need some actual DPS checks for which such would be relevant.

But, that gets us to a second point: What even would a "sustained" job be, exactly? For instance, how "sustained" is a job that has an 8-GCD combo that cycles from very low to very high damage? Per any given span of 20 seconds? Per 40? Per 60? Per 120? How sustained is a job that does 3x its auto-attack damage between mini-bursts, but mini-bursts explosively for 2 fairly bankable GCDs per 20s? Within a scope of 10s or so, that'd actually be rather bursty. Over 60s, though? About as flat as a board.

The issues holding back apparent distinction here aren't just that there 2-minute buffs and 30/40/60/120s attacks that would naturally align with them. It's also that so little matters besides overall damage. It's also that no checks are short enough or rotations manipulable enough to make use of changes in potency per GCD across a combo or rotational string. It's largely for that reason that the portion overlapping one's self-buffs or big hits and raid buffs is about the only scope we think about. At present that's 20s per 120s, but diversifying the raidbuffs' frequencies without adjusting their duration or giving new DPS checks to make other window-lengths more important aren't going to change that in any fundamental way.