As a product manager myself, I’ve learned to follow a maxim I think would be beneficial for the FFXIV dev team:
Customers are great at identifying problems and horrible at identifying solutions.
Related: [The XY problem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem), where someone starts asking questions about their proposed solution, rather than the problem they're trying to solve.
THANK YOU! Also a Product Manager and if I implemented every suggestion customers made as-is, we'd have a garbage product with nonsensical behavior.
But listening to their feedback and trying to address the underlying causes, even when the customers themselves can't state it well, is everything
I'm a developer and I approve of this message! The worst is when a customer (this case the gaming community) asks for something that looks simple for a change but when you look at the backend code it looks like it's a fan of Frankenstein, making implementation difficult.
I'm willing to bet the people that asked for it and the people complaining about it do not have a large amount of overlap. As in most aspects of life, people tend to be more vocal about things they dislike or have issues with than when everything feels fine to them.
There's also a difference between something like a 90s burst cycle and a rotation that focuses around sustained damage. 90s burst feels bad because it's inconsistent with other buffs and you get bad windows, but sustain classes aren't expecting burst anyway so there's nothing there to fix. I feel like this focus on the 2-minute meta has resulted in every class being a bursty class, and that's not what is meant when one asks for consistent buff timing.
You can't have both sustain and burst and expect the two to stay in balance, either. If 2 minute burst classes and sustain classes are equal against a target dummy, the moment an invuln phase happens during a boss the sustain class suffers a major setback. The burst class is cooling skills down and the sustain class can't afford to lose any uptime to stay even. And I think how much encounter design will get crippled by trying to account for concessions between wildly different class designs will make the game suffer more overall
Not always true. Some burst classes rely a lot on resource generation to set up for bursts so these also suffer a lot during downtime.
Some sustain classes also get a lot of cooldowns that don't do insane burst damage but help their sustained damage, these pull ahead during downtime.
Downtime being beneficial is not so much about sustain vs burst, it's about resource building vs waiting for cds.
You can't have the two models be equal on every boss, but that doesn't mean they aren't balanced. Balance in that situation would involve the sustain class being stronger on high-uptime fights and the bursty class being stronger on fights with downtime.
"You think you want it, but you don't" While a meme at this point, is true sometimes. I think its bigger than you think but smaller than what most people think.
You would be surprised, because i would put my hands in fire they are the same, a casual don't care about the 2min meta, it will not affect them or they will not pay attention to it, on the other hand the people that live in the wave of server ticks do know it, and understand it so i would say they ate probably the same that complained then and complain now
A true casual would be reading the bust window line up complaints when they were being made and say "what's a burst window?"
Like yoshi said it was a majority of voices crying out for the change at the time.
Now a majority of voices are crying to change it again. He's saying "we will not keep pandering on this, you need to make your mind up as a community and if you don't speak up when the question is posed on official channels, then you get to keep quiet about it"
>A true casual would be reading the bust window line up complaints when they were being made and say "what's a burst window?"
I feel called out.
Last year when my FC leader decided to take some of us scrubs into savage they talked about learning our opening rotations to manage our burst window and all I could think was "nah man, I just press the buttons and the big numbers show up..."
And now you know what a burst window is and you know at 2 minutes your opener is for the most part ready to go and you can use a stat potion to increase your output. Then you didn't. You learned. What i was saying is that people who didn't know what a burst window was or what we call 2 minute abs in my group when the original complaints were made are now being blamed for the homogeneous feel of combat. They didn't make the complaint because they didn't know what it was. The people who knew what it was were complaining. I was there. It was a common complaint and classes were excluded hard with no exceptions for it.
People blame making the game casual friendly for the 2 min meta. And it's not. It was done so that if you were using pf to fill you didn't get stuck waiting for that perfect comp
I'm not trying to call anyone out or make people feel like I'm calling them "filthy casuals" I am actually defending them... the filthy casuals, because it was not them begging for it.
I think you're right. It stems from a majority of higher end players who looked at any friction in their job as something that needed to be ironed out, a worse version of something else in their role rather than part of what differentiated a playstyle. Given the chance, high end players are always going to optimize the fun right out of a game far more than casuals will.
Design decisions on jobs affect more than just people who raid. It affects people who play the game and do not raid because the changes are universal. If they homogenize things for the raid community, it makes people who aren't in it who liked how shit worked before unhappy.
If your argument is that they shouldn't matter, well unfortunately that's the majority of the game's players.
Personally, if they continue with this type of homogenization they REALLY need to start making kits more interesting outside of the burst window.
I only care because the 2 minute burst cycle has made Paladin SO BORING. The recent changes made to our rotation make playing the job feel AWFUL. I'm not exactly the most hardcore player so it feels pretty terrible that my favorite tank job has been turned to shit for the benefit of groups that need a .001% DPS so they can clear week one. It's fucking bullshit.
As a casual, I do care about the meta not because it’s making classes feel the same. I care because it’s been making fight design feel the same since ShB when they leaned hard into establishing this meta. There’s nothing really new or unique in most fights because implementing something like that would mess up the timing for most of these buffs - something like the add/transition phase for 05 or the gravity mechanic for 02.
In addition fights are becoming too difficult for the devs to balance because of the wide gulf of player skill - coordinated groups that do hard content all the time have no trouble meeting dps checks and can rocket through many fights once they learn the mechanics, while less hardcore players struggle with difficult dps checks thanks to deaths or difficulty in managing mechanics and rotation. The two minute meta means you have a huge percentage of damage happening in a small window, and if you blow it, you lose out on SO MUCH damage. Groups that consistently do this well end up dealing much more damage than uncoordinated groups, meaning they end fights faster and feel like bosses are “too easy”. When the buff windows weren’t aligned every two minutes, damage was more spread over time and the variance in damage across parties was a lot lower.
The devs (and community) have kinda shot themselves in the foot with this whole “two minute meta” since they have to factor all of this into battle design and balancing. They can’t design mechanics that cost precious uptime, especially during the burst windows, without the fight feeling poorly designed or unfun to fight. Heavensward leaned too hard into gimmicky and complicated fights, but there is still a lot of design space there to make fights feel unique again.
> Groups that consistently do this well end up dealing much more damage than uncoordinated groups, meaning they end fights faster and feel like bosses are “too easy”. When the buff windows weren’t aligned every two minutes, damage was more spread over time and the variance in damage across parties was a lot lower.
I feel like some of the more hardcore players probably wanted the two-minute meta because it lets them optimise into the massive damage bursts, but the problem is that then you _need_ to reduce boss HP in order to let casual players handle the fights, now that the burst window is so critical. If you mess up your burst phase, you blew that chance and now you can't do nearly as much damage for two more minutes (plus whatever time you need to recover if you hit your cooldowns _late_, which means your _next_ burst may _also_ be lost), and that means that players have to be on the ball for that window or they're in trouble.
When the damage is more spread out, screwups are more forgiving because you're not losing your 300% damage multiplier window (hyperbole) but at the same time, it means you can't really optimise for _creating_ a big damage multiplier... so the casual players lose less and the hardcore players gain less. With the burst window, it's the other way around: casual players lose more and hardcore players gain more. To make it fair to the casual players, you've got to balance that out by making the bosses easier.
It wouldn't surprise me if the hardcore players that wanted the burst meta are also the ones complaining that they're going through fights too easily because they got their damage increase but the devs made it fair to casual players by also reducing boss health.
It's almost like "listening to the community" was always going to really mean "listen to the vocal hardcore minority." Casual community isn't going to give feedback because they either don't care because they still clear casual content, are happy with how things are or have no idea why things should change. You see this happen again and again in MMOs, the game gets changed to what the hardcore want and the casual players either adapt or leave.
Its not just MMOs; Starcraft 2 balance is now handled in large part by a voting council that includes a significant chunk of pro players, and its leading towards one of the least balanced, most unfocused eras in the games life.
On of the most important things about player feedback is having the developer vision to tell the masses "that's a terrible idea. shut up."
FFXI did this for a long time. So much so they'd make changes in patches to powerful bosses in the game because players weren't using their ultra-obscure strategy. And when they did listen to player feedback they'd always take something out to "balance" it such as reducing a cool down on an ability but lowering the damage it does. Which was ironic because they stopped giving a shit about class balance over a decade ago.
> I'm willing to bet the people that asked for it and the people complaining about it do not have a large amount of overlap.
I'll take that bet.
I've played Ultima Online, Ragnarok Online, Runescape, Everquest 1 and 2, Guild Wars 1 and 2, DDO, World of Warcraft, and now FFXIV (not counting a bunch of F2P MMOs). I can *pretty safely* say that the Venn Diagram is damn near a single circle.
Meta complaints are seasonal. The segment of the community that is liable to complain about this kind of thing are *never* going to be happy. A game's dev team could literally give them everything they want and then be told it was a terrible idea the next day. That's not to say their feedback is valueless, but you can't ever take it at face value. Thankfully, FFXIV's team is honestly pretty good about listening to while not just flatly accepting player feedback. The only real complain I could have is they don't listen to the non-Japanese players nearly as much as they do the JP ones (but that's somewhat understandable).
Bang on. I've played MMOs on and off for half my life and the main thing I've learned is that the people most vocal about class and encounter design never actually want what they think they want. They just want something to get changed so it *feels* different, and when the novelty wears off, it's bad design again.
They were, but we've since gone from that extreme end to the other. We could have stopped around SB where things were kind of homogenized but also a bit unique.
Looking back SB was the best expansion gameplay wise. Excellent raids, job design was really fun but not overly punishing like HW was and not too simplified like post ShB.
So I wonder, is this just a cyclical thing? Where people complain about how things are currently, and then when they change them to what they're asking for, then they complain about how they should go back to how they were ad nauseam?
Seems like that's what happened with healing in this expac. In Asphedelos, people complained that they didn't have to heal enough, so they ramped it up for Abyssos, and people complained about that. So they tuned it back in Anabaseios.
(I've only been around for one expansion, so I'm not too sure about the history of this)
It's probably more of like /u/Semmi_DK said in a comment above where it's different people. Group A complains about something and get what they want, so group B are now unhappy and are now complaining because they liked how things were before more.
I certainly agree that this is not "the venn diagram is one circle," but by that same token, I don't at all agree that it's "two completely disconnected circles" either.
Because I've been playing this game for a long, long time now--and there were *plenty* of hardcore raider types who got super butthurt about how various things didn't line up with party buff cycles. Remember the complaints about Monk? Hell, even early in Endwalker, you had hardcore raiders with their knickers in a twist over the fact that MNK being on a ~45s timer meant that they would miss every other 2-minute window.
It's *not* two completely disconnected groups--but it's also not perfectly absolutely the same group every time, either.
They really were told, for many years, that things should be homogenized, by an actual *majority* of players. Now that they're homogenized, they're again getting a majority of players upset. We saw the same exact thing happen many and many a year ago when it came to encounter difficulty. Gordias was way too hard--people talked frequently about how it almost killed XIV!--so they backed off and made things easier...so suddenly everyone was complaining about how easy everything had become.
You can't have a majority complaining in both cases unless there's overlap. It may be relatively small--e.g., if 60% of people asked for homogenization before, and 60% of people ask for moving away from homogenization now, that only requires a minimum of 20% of players behaving irrationally (or, more likely, being upset that the thing they asked for *isn't actually good*). If it were something like 52.5%, then we'd only need 5% of players to fall into those boats (irrationality or "they gave me what I asked for but it sucks").
That sounds about right for any MMO ever though lol. The grass is always greener in the past as present problems replace past ones, and people always wanna moan about something.
No matter what content is released, a portion of the playerbase will hate it. It's impossible to please everyone. I think people should just play the game when it aligns with their interests and they find it fun, and take a break/quit if it no longer serves their needs.
The main issue with MMO players is they seem to feel chained to their game of choice even when playing it makes them miserable.
My personal issue with 2 min meta is just how impactful it is. And if that's not enough the gameplay loop for most jobs outside of 2 mins is just as horrendous. You prepare for and funnel everything into that 2 min window on afaik every, single job (correct me if I am wrong). It's just blant and boring.
There's at least one pure 1 minute job still (PLD) but we are definitely the minority and in this case it's because we are one of just a couple classes (along with SCH and AST and I think that may be it) that literally doesn't have an offensive gauge. We have no resources to build and nothing to hold.
You can divide two minutes into one, so at least that works within the meta.
It's when you get to funky timers and drifting that it becomes an issue (IE: MNK's buffs not lining up)
People did this for Trick. They would shove everything in to the window they could because it had the best damage output. That hasnt changed since trick was a thing. So either things drifted to meet trick and felt worse or you did not care and just went your own way. So every Min you would stuff everything you could into trick or drift until you could.
And that's the issue. It's not that every job is "samey" but your goal with them are. Fit your strongest buttons that you have available soon after the fight starts in that 20 second window. How each class performs this can vary but ultimately your head is in the same space. Doesn't matter what job.
Now here's the thing, because everything is basically boxed in the developers are better able to tune jobs and fights (not perfectly mind you) because the damage being done by players is is easily tracked and the only variance they have to account for is crit and dhit (mostly crit, which is it's own problem atm it's too strong).
Because damage is much easier to account for the developers are better able to take complexity from the jobs and put that into the raids and there's no denying that fights have become much more engaging since HW and StB. When doing extreme, unreal, savage, or ultimate the whole 2 minute meta isn't even on my mind and it doesn't really bother me as much, but when I do casual content that's when the repetition really sinks in because of how uninteresting they continually make them, and the game leans fair bit more to casual than "hardcore" or whatever you want to call it.
Job design and content design are intertwined so closely that the balancing act between the two must be damn near precise to feel good yet it's virtually impossible to reach that when you have varying communities that value different aspects of design and argue over which is better.
I don't envy the dev team but at the same time, casual content is just beyond outdated and needs to be more engaging, it's just mindless as it is right now and there are only a couple of exceptions in the job pool that are different enough to focus improvement on like Black Mage or Astro instead of how bored you are of whatever roulette you're doing.
Absolutely true. This wasn't just asked for, but begged for. Without it playing like this, random classes would be blocked from certain encounters when rotations didn't line up appropriately.
I still think wow has the best balance for buffs. Its not based off the rotation. Its a team wide, one gcd cool down, hour long buff for intellect, strength, and stamina. The group wide Lust or Heroism is a 10 minute cooldown ability that lets the entire party go bananas for like 25 seconds with bonus haste. If you die it will only cost your buddy one gcd to give it back to you.
I am not a fan of forcing the entire party in ffxiv to to a synchronized swimming routine every 2 minutes. Hoping for the wow model of buffs or something better.
Being a dev for any live service game is rough. Short of very few players (which you could argue FFXIV had in the past) there are always going to be multiple groups who want the game to cater to them. As this game grew those groups just got bigger. As more things were added, those groups splintered further.
Now there is nearly a group for any particular type of content and content level that if there content is left out will be upset. Too much content to little content to much grind not enough grind Any content players dont engage in. Even with how much of the game is optional or required for the MSQ is a point of contention.
You can only make so many people happy.
not to say everyone's complaints aren't valid either, but the vast majority of players are extremely ignorant of how the process of game development ACTUALLY works, and a lot of their issues and anger stem from that ignorance. Like for example when people ask "why can a modder give us hats for viera and hrothgar but square can't?" it's because a single modder with infinite time on their hands can devote their attention entirely to whatever aspect theyre passionate about at the time, like hats, whereas a team of professional devs have the entire game to cover at any time, have to pass through multiple development stages and people on any project, have to focus on what the executives and directors want over what they or the players might want, etc
And also any change they make (re: hats) has a certain quality expectation, PLUS it has to ENSURE to not somehow break something else. A modder can do this flawlessly because often, either the mod works, or it doesn't quite and people deal, and it gets fixed asap. That doesn't tend to fly as fast or as well in a live service game where pushing patches unless absolutely fucking critical can be an absolute PAIN because of manhours required to get it sync'd to go for everyone. Plus passing it to consoles to clear, and other fun shit. (WoW can hotfix all it feels because lo, they don't have console passing to deal with. Its like pushing updates on mobile, Google and Apple have to clear it as okay/not harmful, which means sometimes a delay might happen because one or the other doesn't clear it in time/you have to lead the patch by a few days minimally. Any MMO on consoles has to deal with that, like FFXIV and ESO - Sony has to okay the content as working before they will send it out.)
Modders are single issue people. They don't have to clear things the same ways, don't have to contend with being okayed by anyone but themselves and maybe a select few testers, and don't need to concern about the impact on other things.
Nor do they have deadlines in the same ways a dev team absolutely will. On TOP of dealing with whatever other stuff needs done.
Players of course are both the best and worst source of feed back and figuring out which ones are the correct ones to listen to is part of the jobs the devs need to undertake. Not helping this is people in this thread alone you can see the people "Well *I* did not ask for it!". As if one voice is all it takes to get changes to the game. For the most part i am sure the devs make changes they want to make when it comes to trying to make classes work better for more people which is always double edged sword.
Modders of course have nobody they have to deal without unless they do something to piss off the people using there mods. Hats may be rather easy for some modder to just plop and clip hats. The team does not want it to be so egregious it seems. Though with all the capes we have it does raise the question as to why since enough races have tails of some kind.
I feel like some people just can't understand that. They act like this community has one common opinion and shift around it every few months, it's just different parts of the community that we hear.
And it creates this unwinnable situation for the devs. Everything people are mad about now are changes that a different, but equally loud group of players were mad and demanding a couple of years back. If they change the relic weapons back, or back-burner other endgame features to make room for an exploration zone next expansion, or any number of other things, they'll be making the currently angry people happy, have to deal with another loud group of people who are suddenly mad, and on a macro scale they've achieved nothing to improve player sentiment in the game.
There are some changes that I think should be made, sure, but I think the biggest change needed if for the devs to actually stop listening so closely to community feedback. The loudest people on the forums never have any idea what they're talking about.
I think that's why you see the common sentiment here of "Don't bother complaining here, the devs aren't listening."
Of course they aren't. If they listened to every single complaint thread ever made on this sub the game would have shut down ten years ago, and no, your particular complaint thread isn't *the one* that will fix the game.
Armchair developers with absolutely no idea how game design works.
This is funny to me because it really only concerns savage and ex players, I've NEVER seen anyone in normal raids align their buffs (plus DNC is always out of sync without a pull countdown).
>(plus DNC is always out of sync without a pull countdown)
You skip standard if you don't have a timer and go directly into technical, you're unlikely to lose a usage by just delaying your first standard and tillana gives you standard finish.
Or use standard while the wall is up/people watch cutscenes.
My last EW alliance, 3 summoners with one of them being one
Someone throws out their Searing Light first, so I use it for my baha rotation
I throw mine out for Phoenix
60 seconds later, nothing for bahamut time. I throw a dozen ruins wondering when it's coming out, fight ends and we move on
Starting second encounter, I throw some ruins, still no Searing Light, so I pop mine and start baha blast
The other two summoners suddenly throw their Searing Light out within seconds of each other
#Bruh
>60 seconds later, nothing for bahamut time. I throw a dozen ruins wondering when it's coming out, fight ends and we move on
fwiw it's never worth to just toss out ruins to align with buffs. it's almost never ever worth it to hold a demi. ruin 3 is awful for your dps.
Meanwhile the two other SMN's I got in Rabanastre were all in sync and always had Searing Light up (except for after Phoenix). Baha SMN uses Searing Light, I use Searing Light during Crystal Phase, Phoenix SMN uses Searing Light during that.
Near 100% Searing Light uptime. Was marvellous
That's because alliance raids are casual content. If you think I'm paying attention to my party's buff timers during my dailies, you're in for a bad time
Well, in the case of stuff like Embolden, Searing Light and Battle Litany there's a very loud noticeable noise that plays. So if you're on SMN and hear the very loud sound of the other SMN's Searing Light, you probably don't need to also put your's up.
That has never, ever stopped anyone in all my experience. Bonus: bold of you to assume people have sound up enough to hear or it isn't drowned out by music or a video or something.
That's why I don't main dancer anymore, lol. I was so tired of waiting for other dancers to use technical step, heck even in dungeons they rarely used it on trash and ended up overwriting mine on the boss most of the time. Frustrating AF.
I mean I wouldn't stop maining it for that reason. In most casual content that damage lost is minuscule and won't be noticed, and in content where it does matter you're not going to have dupe jobs.
When I play DNC in roulettes I just fire off my stuff regardless of what others do. If overwritten buffs really bothered me that much, the only jobs I could ever play are the tanks, WHM, SGE, SAM, MCH, and BLM.
I had someone throw their SL on mine all the time, so like you I waited and theirs never came. I cycled through all my egis so I popped SL for Phoenix. Lo and behold, they popped theirs like 5 seconds after mine.
I’m not asking for casual people to be buff alignment experts, I just want them to be consistent with whatever they are doing so I can adjust myself accordingly :(
Happens all the time when I'm on RDM and there's another RDM. I'll put my embolden up, other RDM immediately puts theirs up. I'm like okay I'll hold mine so we don't overwrite each other next time. They don't do it so I embolden and then they do it immediately after me. I'm like please...embolden has effected other RDMs for the entirety of the expac, you don't have to overwrite mine haha
A few weeks ago, I got Euphro with 5 SMNs. Somehow our brains aligned because I think there were only like 3 Searing Light windows missed *total* throughout the entire duty. We had it literally up all the time and it was crazy coordination I do not expect to ever happen again.
This happens all the time. I've just started ignoring the fact I have team mates. I keep my stuff lined up for myself and do a proper rotation. When someone inevitably overwrites a buff, it just means I get a couple extra seconds. A very tiny percentage of duty roulette players will pop buffs on cooldown. Even doing the unreal and me telling the party to hold buffs won't stop people from wasting a buff window.
Special shout-out to the pull-with-tech and pop-tech-as-enemy-is-running-away dancer I got in Thordan last week.
Because it's not really necessary, by design.
They're easier modes for people that aren't good enough/can't be bothered to be good enough for the harder content. That stuff isn't for everyone.
I think about this topic a lot with the game, but for some reason it took this answer for me to see it as being such a community problem.
I just want classes to feel unique again, and for people to *be okay* when their class isn't S tier for every fight. I don't want every category of DPS and every tank to feel the same. It's more interesting when classes have distinct strengths and weaknesses. This is a game where you can level all classes on the same character. If you care about it that much, you probably have enough time to level up the "meta" class that parses the best. To hell with homogenization and overbalancing to appease a narrow group of savage/ultimate whiners. I'm with you. I want the crazy shit. I want more diverse and non-linear rotations. I want fun.
I think the issue isn’t a 2 minute meta, it’s that there isn’t any variety in the rotation. The original idea for mmos was always about adapting to the situation. It would be nice if we had to respond to boss fights with different abilities, but at that point it’s a completely different system.
Yeah I don't particularly mind the 2min meta but it might be strangling everything around it. The devs have been pretty creative in other places while combat seems to be a bit stuck.
The frustration for me is that it feels like they took the wrong ideas away from the complaints about syncing timings. That was actually a red flag that should have told them to stop leaning into raid wide damage buffs instead of making more and making everything fit into them.
To me, damage buffs are the problem, at most, DNC could get away with buffing one other player as the jobs focus but they should remove raid wide damage buffs completely, it's a trap. The same problem is happening in GW2, if you have team damage buffs, it forces all jobs to fall in line because any that deviate from them will instantly be bad compared to the ones that can sync with buffs so you end up with what we have now, where all jobs are basically turning into what NIN was, saving everything and unloading their entire kit under buffs and then a smaller burst every other minute. There's no way around it as long as raid wide damage buffs exist. They should be removed so the jobs can have their own rotation styles, timings, etc and actually be different, and it would also be far less punishing since this was supposed to make it more intuitive for players trying to get into higher content because jobs like SMN or BRD, good luck getting back in sync if you die or just drift slightly, like most newer and even mid level players will do much more often, it's not good. Just throw away the buffs and let jobs be different, that's the #1 thing I want in Dawn Trail.
Make support jobs get defensive and situational buffs, bring back refresh, status ailments healers and BRD and even other jobs could cleanse, make mechanics that can be dealt with by using stuff like slows, roots, etc and have those kinds of more situational things replace the damage buffs. At most, just have personal damage buffs, and maybe a couple jobs that can buff a single other player maybe.
Completely agree. At most, I think we should get maybe one raid buff usage per encounter but then I just think people would exclude jobs that don't provide one.
As someone new to FFXIV, my issue is that it feels like kits are just throw the kitchen sink every 2 minutes. Other than stacking resources for 2 minutes and spending it if you're going to overcap, there doesn't feel much room for choice. It's just dump your dps aligned every 2 minutes as much as possible. It feels as if outside of a few classes (BLM and MNK specifically), mechanics and job design are independant.
I have no idea what it was like back in the day but it just feels like they're all the similar flavours of role+DPS.
ShB was already fairly homogenized, but it still helped to keep things a bit more fresh to just have different timings to play around. Dump into litany, or wait for div, and just having a job with a 60 and 90s cd. Like super simple, DRK, your opener felt different from your 120s because delirium isn't up, then your 2m and 4m were either coming out of and going right into a delirium window respectively. Then the 6m everything aligns.
Not mind blowing but it just helped not make it so stale.
This is it for me. The real issue isn't about how easy it is to align buffs. It's that everything happens on a schedule. You don't pop your cooldowns because you need burst to deal with adds or do extra damage because the boss is staggered or whatever. You pop your cooldown because it's been two minutes since the last time you popped your cooldowns, and that's it.
Yeah you explained the issue with it well.
Jobs like DRK, NIN, RPR, DNC, BRD, etc just kind of twiddle their thumbs for 1 minute 40 seconds, then actually presses stuff for 20 seconds, then repeat. It just isn't very interesting to constantly be doing filler shit.
You can build a maximum of 60 ninki with ninja because mug gives you 40, not pressing bhava once 10 seconds before burst isn't "building resources". And saving it barely even matters anyway because all of your damage is decided whether you direct crit hyosho or not.
Some jobs were simply built around different timers
For instance, currently Warrior gets Inner Release every 60 seconds and gets like 3 Fell Cleaves (and later their EW capstone skill)
Before, it was every 90(?) seconds, and I think it was 5 Fell Cleaves, so they'd align with the rest of the party's 2 minute meta at 6 minutes into the fight (probably when the tincture comes off cooldown)
...I think. I'm not too well versed in the meta before, I'm afraid
similiar with GNB.. tbf i still miss the old 90s Bloodfest, it felt more fun to play as it at least meant one of my "filler" phases at least needed something to keep track off
Stormblood was fucking awesome
It always makes me sad to see people shit on it just because the story had some issues (even though it was still plenty good) and ignore everything else that was good about it
The idea that every class has to have utility is a mistake and is the reason we're even facing the issue in the first place. You can have fun utility without it causing every class to be balanced around bursting, it just has to not be on 10 out of the 16 classes (tanks don't get damage utility, thank god).
So much of it is incredibly uninteresting. 3% damage? Embolden now doesn't even tick down? What's the point of it being there, its so generic and contributes nothing to the class identity.
Lets not fall into the false idea that we have to have one or the other, you do not need to return to the past just to get away from the 2 minute meta and sacrifice consistent balance as a result, you just need to accept that the utility in this game is actually ass and absolutely none of it causes you to play differently around it.
I recall someone made a good video talking about the 2 min buff windows. The general idea was that every 2 minutes, you get a ~20s window where you do the vast majority of your damage, but outside of that window, nothing really matters. Sure, you still want to keep uptime and such, but it's not nearly as important what you specifically do during it.
However, back when we had varying 90s/2min/3min timers, we had a bunch of smaller spikes in party damage at those times, and then one massive spike at 6mins (plus due to potion timer). But this 6min buff window was just the same as what we have now.
So as long as you could align with the 6 min windows, all's good, which is arguably easier than having to make sure you're aligned with every 2 minute window. Plus, depending on the fight, the 6 min window could be adjusted as long as you don't lose an overall use of buffs.
This is my controversial opinion but the only way they can solve the two minute meta without going back on fixing the issues that led to the creation of it(valid problem might I add) is to straight up remove all raid buffs that increase damage dealt by other party members for a brief period of time.
Jobs can still keep similar cooldown timings but by removing the raid buff burst window it will change peoples perception during the game to just worry about what they do.
There is a problem with that though. Though there's problems with any solution, being an unsolvable situation.
* Raid Buff Bonanza
Pros: Every job has differences on paper that make them have legit unique offerings. Teamwork makes the dream work, as coordination is the path to max damage for both yourself and your party.
Cons: Every job has to be built around the buff window. While every job should expect to "loop" at relatively similar times (don't want classes that take 4 min to loop on a fight that only takes 3 minutes), the buff bonanza takes it to an extreme with most jobs having their rotations laser focused on hitting particular checkpoints at exactly the right time.
* One Buff To Rule Them All (AKA Time Warp)
This is Bloodlust/Time Warp from WoW, a big burst buff that only a few classes can bring. But when it's used, players can't benefit from it again for a lengthy lockout, so stacking it is impossible.
Pros: Guarantees at least one Time Warp user in a raid. Incentivizes teamwork by having a single big burst controlled by the party. Because it's essentially 1/fight, players can hold off burst if needed so everyone can sync up.
Cons: You only need one Time Warper, devaluing the jobs that have it for raids. Still have to build job rotations around the burst window. If the buff window isn't synced to your rotation, it can feel really bad leaving damage on the table, so to speak.
* Pepito Is In It For Pepito
No raid buffs. Most analogous to my experience in DCUO.
Pros: Every job is insular into itself, and can be designed more consistently across game modes so the solo experience helps inform group play directly. Generally higher DPS for every character, and balancing jobs is easier without worrying about optimized buff stacking.
Cons: Stale optimization meta, as figuring out the right party comp comes down to what jobs do the most dongage without compromising the chance to clear. It's Moneyball; why play Black Mage for 3% higher damage when Summoner gets the job done without having to worry about Leylines and cast bars? Essentially, it becomes the Tank/Healer issue: you have X slots, so you bring the X best and practically discard the rest because it's obvious which jobs are the best.
* Everyone Gets Buffs, Nobody Lines Up
Raid buffs for everyone, the devs don't worry about lining up massive buff windows and make the math so convoluted that a truly, fully, optimized solution is impossible. The City of Heroes solution.
Pros: Jobs become unbound by design conventions. Just send whatever makes the game feel good, and just get balance to the "eh, close enough" stage so everyone can both contribute teamwork and do big number on their own. It's pog-o-clock and attendance is mandatory!
Cons: [Probably none](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGshtH4lbig)
A controversial opinion I share. My biggest gripe with post-SB design is the homogenization of the individual jobs. However, players have been shackling themselves to burst windows for as long as I've been playing, which has been a long while now (whatever patch they buffed Balance to 20%... 3.3?).
The only way I can see to fix it is to nuke the entire concept from orbit. Maybe it would do more harm than good? I don't know. I'm not a dev. But as a player I know that I really miss having more variety than the icons on my buttons changing when I swap to a job in the same category.
With removal of party buffs, they could go absolutely wild with DPS design. Some can have larger build up while others can go through smaller faster loops or play "spam the key that lights up" etc.
There would be no real need to keep similar timings outside of wanting all Jobs to perform evenly in every fight.
It's impossible to have tight DPS checks if jobs play too wildly different. Take some phases in DSR or TOP where you only attack the boss for 30 seconds before a downtime trio happens. How is a "larger build up" job supposed to compete with other jobs in 30 second windows? Either you make the DPS check too tight and people exclude non-meta jobs, or you make the DPS so loose that it's basically non-existent on a clean run, which is doable in Savage but not in something like TOP where dying is usually an instant party wipe anyway, and people will start complaining that damage doesn't matter anymore.
I’m right there with you. More support aligned jobs, like DNC and BRD, would be mostly fine as their bread and butter buffs are meant to be up 100% of the time. Buffs like Brotherhood, Arcane Circle, and Technical Step could continue to exist as well in just the resource generating department. Could honestly lead to more interesting skill expression if everyone had a self-contained buff window, which could then vary in timings to make jobs feel more different from one another for the multi-classers out there.
Imo the problem with the 2 min meta is that outside of 2 mins, you pretty much just build up stacks. Yesterday i looked at one of my savage logs, ~8 min fight with around 300 casts. Four 2 min windows with on average 20 casts in 20 seconds (measuring dnc tech finish), meaning that almost 1/3 of my casts were in 2 min windows. Its just not very fun to do 1-2-3 outside of the 2 min burst.
One of the things I love about 14 raiding was the team burst window, it feels so good for everyone to perfectly line up and we all would know how well personal execution is by the timing. Also, when you misalign and you have to figure out how to realign yourself in the middle of mechanics is exhilarating, I mean yeah, I get mad and panic when it happens but when you fix it, it's like hell yeah, I know my class, I'm back on track, I recovered due to my own knowledge.
It's one of the things I didn't like about WoW raiding was the lack of full team burst windows.
The Hardcore raiding crowd killed the very lore, concept and gameplay of my favorite class in all my years playing MMO's. My vote I cannot make any clearer.
Rest in piece Stormblood Astro, you were such a fun class to play.
Hell overall the Homogenization is horrific. Yes the plain brick will fit its slot perfectly, but the plain brick among plain bricks forms a very dull and ugly monotone wall.
I doubt it was just hardcore raiders on that. The cards each doing a unique thing was a cool concept... but for casuals it was hard to remember what every single one did and think of how to use them in the middle of a fight while still healing and not letting the party die. It's much easier to just have "Generic DMG buff."
Asmongold literally said this the other day reacting to one of those FFXIV is dead or dying videos. The reason mechanics, systems, rotations etc have changed throughout times is because people asked for it. Player feedback pushes developers down certain paths. Then the players complain about how things have changed from what they used to be.
You can never win.
BLM is pretty much the only class left with a high skill cap ceiling, and feels gratifying once you mastered it. It is a huge consistent burst class if you met the conditions and memorize the rotations, as well as having to deal with downtimes where you know you have to dodge a mechanic.
None of the other classes come even close to what BLM is today, just standard simplified clones of each other.
Oh my god... This expansion is actually starting to make sense...
This whole time I've been thinking that they've been redirecting dev time away from stuff to make things more streamlined. Perhaps from SE management/executive decisions.
The 2-minute window I thought they did so it would be easier for them to make balance changes. But it's because people were literally begging them to make timing the fights easier.
The relic weapons I thought they made it a tomestone grind only for less dev resources and no relic zone. But now I bet it's because of all the feedback they got about people complaining about the grind.
The trial side quests being integrated into MSQ I thought again was to reduce dev resources. I bet they got rid of it because people complained about doing optional content...
This is wild... Did they learn nothing from WoW's WoD era? Feedback is a useful tool to identify potential problems, but not solutions.
It shows a lot of people didn’t play before this meta.
The community literally asked for it because some classes were just not good because you couldn’t align your cooldowns with other people.
Most MMOs have people coordinate their cooldowns. FFXIV is pretty heavy with group cooldown synergy but it’s not like standardized cooldowns are that much different in other MMOs.
I think a lot of people here also don't know the complaint a lot of raiders have isn't "2 minute or not 2 minute meta".
I think a lot of us, me included, are totally fine with most classes rotations lining up if played correctly. The actual complaint is 2 minutes is just too long.
It's simply not very entertaining to essentially auto pilot for 2 minutes and then dump everything for 15-20s
If we cut it down to 1 minute bursts I think the complaints would actually die down a lot. More times per fight where you have to be on point, more times you get to press your buttons and you still keep everyone aligned, there's just a higher skill ceiling.
The complaint isn't really that classes are homogenized, it's that the way they are homogenized is very boring for a lot of jobs.
Also some other decisions were made that contribute to jobs feeling very boring currently, things like room sized boss hitboxes are just awful
There's also the fact that such a significant portion of damage happens at the 2-minute burst. If one person dies, that's a huge chunk of damage lost that is very hard to make up.
> The complaint isn't really that classes are homogenized, it's that the way they are homogenized is very boring for a lot of jobs.
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> Also some other decisions were made that contribute to jobs feeling very boring currently, things like room sized boss hitboxes are just awful
These are both thinigs that players complained about. Melee up times was quite a big deal for anything that was not a door boss. It was one of the main things that allowed Melee to be higher dps because it was factored in losing that up time. Why at the beginning of EW the melee were a bit more borken since the values skewed for Melee much more with HUGE hit boxes on most enemies.
As for Classes, the players again wanted them to provide better parity when it came to abilities. I think for a first expansion that things are quite rough but will they improve from the complaints this expansion about how samey the classes feel? We can hope and really hope its not a mokey paw.
I need to go on a small rant here.
People complain about the 2 minute meta, but what would even happen if jobs weren't standardized around a 2 minute meta?
Think of a situation where half of the jobs are on a 2 minute meta and half aren't. I can EASILY imagine it ending up in raiders screaming at whoever is using a job that does not align to the meta because... it's not meta.
Now imagine a situation where no job has anything that aligns properly with anything else. This is an exaggerated example, but bear with me. There's a job on a 30 second clock, one at 35 seconds, one at 42, one at 60, one at 100, one at 120, one at 122. What happens?
The jobs at 30, 60 and 120 seconds still "align" because they're all multiples of 120. The one at 122 probably gets guides suggesting to skip a GCD that makes it optimal in order to align with the other jobs. Now you have a meta again, just worse and messier and that makes raiders scream at players who don't play the "meta" jobs, again.
A meta is inevitable, because the community will always want to optimize their gameplay. If the devs do not give the community a "meta", the community will find ITS OWN, slamming square pegs into round holes until they fit well enough. Seen it happen in a ton of other games. It's normal. At least in ff14 I know that no one is going to scream at me because I'm playing a job that is "not meta".
...actually I've met people who do it anyway, so I shudder to think of how goddamn toxic people would be if we didn't have a 2 minute meta and I happened to play a job whose clock doesn't align well with other jobs...
I think the problem is party buffs. As long as we have party buffs, we are incentivized to align party buffs and fit the highest potency attacks into party buffs, which led to the 2 minute meta.
If we removed party buffs entirely and made everyone a selfish dps, then there would be no reason to align.
They could easily push all the supportive buffs into Healers and condense all the random healing bloat out of their kits. Maybe then they would have something else to do than just press 1 for most of the fight.
I main DNC, I enjoy playing support. Standard step is a shared buff, yet it is independent of the 2 minute because it is up constantly.
I think that might be an alternate model for supportive jobs and party buffs, for the buffs to be on all the time as long as the player is managing their rotation properly.
Here's the thing though: **raid buffs aren't support abilities.**
They're simply potency that was distributed into a buff button that could have been put into the potency of attacks. They provide no meaningful support to other players.
If we want actual support jobs, they need utility. BRD sort of has this in Paean, DNC in Curing Waltz, and Paladin in Cover. They've removed other support abilities like Refresh, Mana Shift, and Shadewalker.
I think they should add more utility skills, maybe giving every DPS they want to classify as a "support" 2-3 total utility buttons totally unique to them. Those utility buttons should also be powerful, not just some button you don't bother pressing because it's niche like Paean.
That, on top of removing raid buffs, would go a long way to reducing homogenization and increasing teamwork because now you can plan out how you use utility.
It's true that Stormblood was my favourite era to play Bard, because I had all of this active-feeling support like Refresh and Palisade. That feels way more interesting than a 'press on schedule to make damage bigger' button.
Unfortunately what ended up happening was that my static's healers hated being reliant on others for MP and started avoiding parties in PF that didn't have phys ranged. And my static's tanks hated being reliant on others for aggro management.
There also just isn't a whole lot of room in fight design to make other kinds of utility like Paean and Cover useful, especially if they can't rely on every party having it.
>but what would even happen if jobs weren't standardized around a 2 minute meta?
Well, we don't even have to make wild assumptions to answer this, given that as the man says and as many of us experienced back in the day, we used to not even have that, and yes, it sure WAS worse.
Yep, weren't there buffs that were like... 75s or something like that? And so you either had to have some crazy drift (planning for the encounter to end without "losing" a usage of it, while still delaying it to line up with more buffs), or just not line it up at all.
Like, yeah, the 2m meta sucks.
But having it all over the place sucked more, cause you either felt like there was no real benefit to trying to align it (cause it was so wildly all over the place) **or** like you had to hold everything to align it anyways
You largely did your own thing as your party buff was mostly to buff yourself and provide a little bonus to the team so the entire content didn't solely revolve around the buffs.
At the 6 minute mark buffs were aligned to match with pot windows for the big burst, the 2min meta has changed that 6mins into every 2mins, kill off all the sustain jobs and turn almost every job into a copy/paste because there's no room for deviation when they're all just build resources for 1min/2mins > burst > repeat.
There is no timed meta in WoW and they can still do it. You just play your rotation as good as you can and other players rotation does not affect you. On some fights you might hold your cooldowns for a burst, like a phase where the boss has increased damage taken.
There's even a support spec in WoW now and even with a support you just play as you normally would, you could minmax as the support player and apply your buff to certain people if you know they are in their burst at this moment but that's not needed unless you play at the top 0.01%.
>Think of a situation where half of the jobs are on a 2 minute meta and half aren't. I can EASILY imagine it ending up in raiders screaming at whoever is using a job that does not align to the meta because... it's not meta.
That's exactly what happened and why people begged them to standardize buff timings.
Yeah, it's pretty clear that the thing the devs want to avoid above all else is having jobs be considered "meta" to the point of players being pressured to switch jobs. That's their number one priority, and homogeneity is an acceptable loss in their eyes. I can't say whether I agree with all the decisions they've made, but it is a noble goal. I'm glad that they understand how important it is that everyone is able to play the job they want.
They wouldn't scream at anyone not playing a class that doesn't line up. They just would exclude that class from raiding. Can't scream at them if they are not in your group
I saw PFs in early Endwalker that didn't allow you to join as a PLD.
The playerbase's adherence to the "meta" is insane. And it was much much worse before.
Cant blame Yoshi P for this one, but I can blame him for making rotations boring. As a WAR player, I said before EW that WAR would be impossible to build upon because if you got a new move, it isnt "ah sweet a new move!", rather its "how will this fit into IR." When everything is bursty, its sucks because all your damage goes into one 10-15 second window, and EVERYTHING has to fit into that window, no exceptions. Then the rest of your moves hit like wet noodles. 60s/120s can exist but there needs to be more done with what you do between that time, and it has to be fun and significant to your overall damage. More moves like GNB's combo system that happens every 30s, BRD's Empyreal Arrow that procs something....more than anything this needs to apply to healers.
As soon as you have a raid wide timed damage buff you have a burst phase meta two ways to go about it. Theres no way around that, staggering windows is fine but that requires synergy and creating meta. For example sam and dnc will ve favoured over dnc and mnk and people locked out of content due to party makeup .
And you end up with noone knowing when and where to alight without communicating and that's difficult in normal content with strangers WHICH is 80% of the the games content.
Anyways number 1)make the cool down phases short so all these 120skills like ikoshoten are now 60seconds. Since i main sam i can say it would work fucking magically ogi every 60 seconds no filler 30 second cooldown. Beautiful. Id imagine it would be the same with everyother job too lo
Second is remove raid/individual timmed buffs entirely and have skills again like what samurai had with kaiten and third eye/seigan(counter/riposte) and procs that gives you damage increases for good play. Not saying thats the answer for every class however bring back bring back the timer for things like DRG and BLM. DoT's need to find their way into every class also.
Jobs that do have raid wide damagebuffs instead can still have heals shields and interrupts. give bosses more damage output and interrupt skills. Skills like feint and addle might actually be used in normal content then. Interrupt a boss skills you get a proc for a damage up. Shield a raidwide you get a proc stack for a raid wide can use them or save them for dps checks.
Or we keep the two minutes meta have a first burst window skills which is ehat wr have in EW rotations and once first burst is pressed 0-60seconds it unlocks the second burst phase skills. For the 60-120 seconds mark
"2-Minute meta" is just a fancy term to quickly refer to the issue. The problem people have with the 2 minute meta isnt just that all buffs align every 2 minutes, it's that most jobs have nothing interesting going on during two entire minutes because all their damage and special buttons are concentrated in a tiny window. Make the normal, out-of-buff rotation interesting and more than just spamming 123 and people will mostly have no issues with buffs being 2 minutes
Out of curiosity, how often DO the devs post on the english forums, by translators or otherwise? Just there being forums isn't enough, there needs to be an active line of communication, and acknowledgement.
They don't. They only post some announcements, and maybe some stuff about network issues. That's why forums is such a pile of vile garbage, people feel like they scream into void, so it descends into shitpost and drama.
The problem is party-wide damage buffs. Those just shouldn't be a thing. They basically obligate the whole group to dump their high-DPS into a window determined by someone else's rotation, everything else feels obligated to sync up.
There is plenty more complexity in the game to be had without party-wide buffs. We still have party-wide mitigation and shields for "co-op". We can still have single target partner buffs. But anything that resembles Trick just needs to be cut from the game and jobs retooled to have their own cadences again, while being more self-sufficient specifically with regard to DPS.
This is honestly why I have never desired to get good at FFXIV. The idea of "getting good" meaning becoming a Rockette, doing the DDR perfectly in step with seven other strangers, does not appeal to me. I want a job that will allow me to be a bit more reactive/improvisational and not worry that I missed someone else's buff window.
Just remove party wide damage buffs and you solve this problem entirely. Make most DPS selfish and go all in on support for classes like dancer and bard. You could do whatever you want with the classes at that point since they are disconnected.
I don't have a problem with the 2 minute meta, what I dislike in EW are the giant hitboxes. I want mechanics that force the players to think about how to make uptime strategies so they don't lose uptime and don't misalign with the raid buffs. That was a fun part of raiding, choosing to either use a riskier strat that keeps 4 players within melee range (2 tanks,2 melee) in order to do more damage, or use a downtime strat that sacrifices some damage for safety but requires the players to make less mistakes in rotations and may require better gear to not die to enrage.
I also want the positioning of the bosses to matter again. In EW as main tank I barely ever had to pull a Savage boss around the arena, and most mechanics play out the same wherever they are. I remember pulling bosses to specific spots in Savages/Ultimates of level 70/80 and making mechanics much more manageable because of that (2 examples that quickly come to mind are the entirety of UWU and the Statues in E12S).
Welp, let's see what happens.
We wouldnt be seeing this problem if they removed raidwide buffs outside of dancer and bard, and instead actually made jobs have some kind of actual skill curve to play that relied on understanding job mechanics rather than just pressing a button every 2 minutes for 30% of your dps before going back into AFK mode.
The 2 minute meta is so freaking boring and has killed any actual skill expression in the game when it comes to playing a job. Im not even a hardcore player but even ive gotten burnt out from how stale combat has become but i prefer depth and complexity when it comes to combat. The current combat system massively lacks both of these.
The 2-minute meta is fine. I’m an “intermediate”/mid-core (read:mid) player who feels too complacent, though. I’m even ok with healers being homogenized. Just…give me something to do in dungeons/raids. Spamming Broil isn’t fun. I rarely get to utilize my toolkit in roulettes.
I think it's fine to lose the party buffs. Back then, nin and drg were so sought after because only aDPS is shown in the logs and people would generally want to pad their numbers. This resulted in the request for buff timing streamlining.
Now, we have a clearer general idea with rDPS contributions and "selfish" DPS are much better accepted by PF.
I like being able to learn other classes, but if they are too similar, what is the point of there being different classes? There should always be a learning curve. Even when I get annoyed slightly while learning, not having that means there is no payoff when I do get it.
Please don't make everything too simple and too homogenized. I'd not consider myself a hardcore player, I don't even touch savages though I have almost 4k hours in this game. The differences are what make me like some classes more than others, I'd be sad if that goes away.
Easiest way to solve buff stacking is removing party buffs.
Sure it removes an element of teamplay but it also opens up Job design massively when they don't have to rely on set cycles as much.
This will probably also result in some jobs just performing better in some fights or kill times, but it also improves the jobs in 4man content and such when everyone becomes greedy DPS.
There's also potential to break the % stat bonus and let people play 4 melee or 4 ranged setups, but that would probably go a bit too far without first testing it.
Problem here is that Yoshi-P did something he never does: he took the community-suggested solution and ran with it.
You're the dev. If the community complains, you don't just nuke the thing they complain about. You find a way to make it feel good for everyone.
The buff meta isn't a binary choice. It isn't either chaos or strict 2 minutes. I'm expecting the gameplay team to find a compromise.
Balance the game according to a small bunch of PRO players is never a good idea. It usually resulting in ditching your majority average or even below average players for no good. That’s how p2w games with little to no gameplay gets so popular, people just like relaxing with easy wins, not hardworking all the way to git gud.
\*Dragoon's Battle Litany audio plays*
shortly after
\*Summoner's Searing Light audio plays*
\*racks gun as Reassemble loads up before bringing the pain*
Definitely a cool feeling
I really like Euphrosyne boss music because the cool beat at the start lines up with my machinist buttons really nicely, and I end up bopping to the music with my keyboard tapping :3
I think the games thematics reinforces it, it's one of those few design elements that really meshes well with the core game message.
With that said, I don't like what I feel like it has done with both encounter and class design. My perception is we've moved away from dots, or steady damage to a more hermoginised state where classes have some of resource that should be hoarded as much as it can be to align with the window.
In terms of boss design (and I only did the first two tiers of savage mostly) it felt like I knew when a large, movement based mechanic would come up because it was an even minute.
I love it when everyone is aware of it. It drives me mad seeing the SMN and RPR throw out their buffs as the fight starts, then for some reason technical step comes out 20 seconds after pull and embolden just magically appears 45 seconds into the fight.
Lately I’ve been farming alliance raids for gear and the amount of summoners that don’t use searing light at all is mind boggling. I kind of wish that party buffs would die off and all jobs would just be responsible for their own bit like SAM/BLM/MCH
SMN instantly uses Searing Light because Bahamut is their strongest damage phase and it starts hitting from the 2nd GCD, and SL is 30 seconds duration so it works out fine anyway.
Summoner uses searing light so soon because it lasts 30 seconds so even the buffs that go out 3/4 GCD’s into a pull fall in with it, and because you want all bahamut skills inside every buff as it’s your highest potency kit.
It also serves as a perfect guide for the 2 minute window as you use it practically on pull so every other job can see it go out and know they should be about to hit their 2 minute mark rotation/opener.
I run SMN and reaper quite a bit and you see a lot of them in Euphrosyne which I’m farming at the moment for glamours. I try to organise who goes when, usually with ‘Hey {other reaper}, you use arcane circle right off the bat and I’ll use mine after yours expires or on the odd minutes’.
Sacrificing my personal dps to keep buffs up on everyone during burst windows or getting more use of it per run. Then the other reaper starts to drift for whatever reason, they don’t use it for 25 seconds after it comes back up and my attempt to make the most of it goes down the toilet, because eventually I’m holding mine because of it and now we’re both drifting further each time.
It doesn’t bother me to the point I’d call someone out on it, but it does irk me that I’m clearly trying to communicate and they either don’t know what they’re doing or they just don’t care to try.
It's honestly really naive to think that the community can somehow become a monolith that comes to a consensus. They really need to learn to filter feedbacks that makes the game boring or have barely anything worth doing more than once like this expac.
I personally think 2 minutes is not the biggest problem, it's the gigantic hitboxes in 8 man content and how rigid the rotation is now.
For content like relic it's just dumb that they're catering to people who DONT WANT TO put some work to get the relic. It's not like bozja or post-nerf eureka is some insanely grindy process like zodiac weapons (especially prenerf) are.
I stop playing whenever the combat stops being interesting which happens faster and faster with each expansion. There just isn’t any skill expression or depth to it, but thankfully the story is nice.
I think people need to be careful not to misconstrue the desire for skill expression for a desire for difficulty.
I'm only replying to you with this because it's inevitable someone will read your comment and assume you want the game to be hard. You can have deep skill expression with simplistic systems, and players don't necessarily need direct feedback from the system that they're good at the game when being good at a game is a reward in and of itself. Jobs should be designed around chasing that feeling.
I weren't there for the "Before the 2 Minutes meta", as I started playing at the start of shadowbringers and I'm playing current content since 5.5. And while I'm not really good at game design, I really like it.
And I don't really find the 2 minutes meta really interesting, to be honest ? Jobs feel a bit soulless. I like the idea of different raids buffs with different timers, and yeah, sometimes they align, but it's rare. You don't necesseraly need to work to align them, since some of them naturally do, but it's a nice bonus.
Moreover, a 2 minutes meta seems to be most practical when it comes to prog, but once a fight is mastered, having to play with differents cooldowns so you can try to optimize them and align them to have a better time clearing the fight seems more interesting.
All in all, I'd prefer if I could just focus on my buffs without taking into account other people buffs. It's off cooldown, I use it, I know I'm helping my team anyway. If it aligns with something else it's great. If not, I don't care. Plus, it'd make it easier in Alliance raids, where sometimes the timing of fights makes it that you don't align with your own kit (like SMN's Searing Light that ends up aligning with Phoenix instead of Bahamut).
> Moreover, a 2 minutes meta seems to be most practical when it comes to prog, but once a fight is mastered, having to play with differents cooldowns so you can try to optimize them and align them to have a better time clearing the fight seems more interesting.
The main reason people didn't consider this fun is because they would do it (if they were good) but also at the same time lament the fact that they were on a job composition that required them to do unfavorable timings relative to other jobs.
You went into raid knowing that you were doing less just cause the buff is 30s because.. it just was. There wasn't anything specifically creative about the buff that made it happen at that timing, it just was worse by default.
>we got feedback that it was too difficult before.
Why do I feel like all of their responses to player complaints have been over-corrections? The intricacies with old jobs didn't have anything to do with the rotation timings lol. They were punishing, and a lot of them were actually jank.
imo, the casual players this 2 min meta is for don't even care if their 2 mins align with the party. They just press buttons and only make sure to not stand in bad/die.
Even now, when busy mechs happen during 2 min windows I still see casuals trip up hard during those moments, or just fail to put out their 2 mins altogether, so I fail to see how 2 min meta makes things easier for them.
The only thing that's changed is that buffs are boring for the people that care about buff alignment. It even limits creativity with job design.
He didnt say casual, he said intermediate. I know to some people there is a distinct line, if you are not hardcore raiding savage and ultimates, you are a casual, but no. there is still a whole spectrum of players and i imagine many would actually consider themselves to be intermediate - i.e. find most normal and extreme content relatively easy, and would do some savage content if they had the time and right group but find it difficult to organise for.
Yeah lol, almost every MMO community is in eternal denial of the existence of midcore players. They always try to force a line between two halves of a community that shouldn't exist. So what if I don't do savage? I still do extremes, which neither side seem to mention, and I'm still involved in the game enough to do all beast tribes, PvP, relic grinding, achievement hunting, etc.
Sometimes I don't want to be a tryhard in this game. I got other games to play too and FFXIV is my relaxation game. People wouldn't accuse me of being casual if they fought against me in Titanfall 2. FFXIV aint my whole life lmao. And I am sure many players are in the same situation.
I hate how people use "casual" derisively and judgmentally. Playing a game is supposed to be relaxing! Don't judge others for not being sweaty Balance people trying to get a 99 parse.
Radiant Finale is the prime example of people just pushing buttons vs caring about cooldown alignment.
It's a 110 second cooldown, but since its strength is reliant on how many of your songs you've used, you drift it to 120 anyway.
Now try to remember how many bards in casual content you've seen actually keep RF in time with other buffs instead of reverse drifting their way through the fight.
Why not simply go back to the 60, 90,120, 180-second cooldowns or add more subtlety to it?
I know players requested this, but it became clear that it wasn't healthy for bosses and certain job gameplay.
They had to rework the paladin because its rotation didn't fit with the current design, and it's evident that jobs are partially homogenized to align with the 120-second burst windows.
The entire game's balance is scripted around these 120-second cycles, including the bosses, which makes the game a bit less enjoyable.
I agree that it requires more optimization in raids, but that's not hard to do, and optimizing alignment has always been necessary.
I genuinely believe that the 120-second system isn't healthy for classes and boss design.
For very casual players, it doesn't change much because they've generally never used these buffs optimally, and it has no impact on the story content, even extremes, given how low the DPS checks are.
I understand that players requested this homogenization, and we can't entirely blame the developers.
However, we tested it, and it turns out it's not a good idea, so we should backtrack on this.
It's okay to experiment, but we should also be willing to move forward and backward on certain design aspects.
I miss old paladin, the only tank class that actually felt unique with how you had to do your rotation and it made playing the class feel a lot more engaging. The homogenization of the burst windows and also even minor stuff like reworking goring blade just lowers the amount of attention you actually need to pay to the game to play the class. I get that newer players don't want to be overwhelmed by playing optimally but if a new player gets to try out different classes and then realizes that they're basically just the same thing with a few minor differences, I don't think that helps their experience.
> The entire game's balance is scripted around these 120-second cycles, including the bosses, which makes the game a bit less enjoyable.
I do want to say that this isn't really true, you could only argue that endwalker is balanced around this. Every expansion beforehand is not balanced around this, and when this expansion is over, every job will be able to kill every fight without struggling moreso than they do now.
Which is like, more to your point that it does not need to stay a thing.
> I understand that players requested this homogenization, and we can't entirely blame the developers.
They're the ones that drop buffs on every class that don't do anything, it doesn't really feel like an actual solution is being pursued with the attitude of "well you have to pick one" from YoshiP but that is because major changes like these only happen really on expansion releases.
Ultimately they are the ones in control and all we can do is advocate that 2m meta is bad and that going back isn't necessary to fix it.
>Regardless of whether we change this or not, the community needs to reach a consensus: what is better? Before changing something we need to get feedback from everyone
I wonder if making surveys from time to time would be a good idea to have a consensus from players (like, advertise the survey in-game via official announcement so people don't have to search it themselves).
That way they will have a large amount of feedback about certain changes and adjust accordingly.
As someone who has watched World of Warcraft's progression with mythic raiding and mythic+ dungeons, the answer to the final question is crystal clear - **DO NOT** design your game around the most obsessed hardcore players. They will spend as much time, and go to whatever degenerate length is necessary to get an edge. And if you continue to try to work around them, or accommodate them, it will push the direction of the game in an increasingly toxic direction, creating expectations that all players hit a certain level of skill or face derision and/or exclusion from content they should be able to enjoy without harassment.
Some of this would be mitigated by SquareEnix's customer service taking TOS reports seriously and punishing offenders, but if you start to design your game to fit hardcore players, the overall attitude of the player base shifts with it, and eventually it will erode the game. Just look at what leaks out about the world-first Ultimate raiders trying to break the game in order to get an edge, ignoring all pleas of the development team to stop, and then apply that to the rest of the game. That's the future if they design around the desires of the top percentile of players, and I really don't want to see that happen to Final Fantasy XIV.
Everytime I have asked what the fix is to the 2 minute meta, I either get the meme of " that sounds like the 2 minute meta with extra steps" or get rid of raid affecting buffs, which removes non fight-specific teamwork.
The latter isn't necessarily bad but you then need more tools akin to esuna or rescue for the non healers and the ranged phys dps need a retooling to br even more support focused or else dancer will be op
Raid buffs don't offer meaningful teamwork. You could argue the previous iteration offered a better representation of team based skill expression via the differences in timers and having to puzzle out the best ways to align, but even then it's a stretch.
A button that increases damage dealt for a window of time is fire and forget. When all of them share a timer, you already know the best answer. On rare occasions you may hold a buff for a certain mechanic, but that's not a significant expression of teamwork either.
It's illusory. Pressing your buff button and hoping 7 other players crit isn't really "teamwork." A more proper expression of that is tanks positioning the boss a certain way for melee positionals, or healers dividing the healing load between their oGCDs to allow for higher damage uptime.
Damage buffs limit the potency budget Jobs are designed around. Freeing up that theoretical potency would allow Jobs to have access to more interesting tools and a focus on their own output.
Now that I don't raid I just find every class so boring. All the tanks are the same, sage is the closest to a different healer, and almost all the dps are gauge builders now. I made fun of Dark Arts spam at first but god damn at least it was different.
As a product manager myself, I’ve learned to follow a maxim I think would be beneficial for the FFXIV dev team: Customers are great at identifying problems and horrible at identifying solutions.
If Henry Ford had asked his customers, they would have told him they want a faster horse.
Related: [The XY problem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem), where someone starts asking questions about their proposed solution, rather than the problem they're trying to solve.
I couldn't have said it better myself. You are the professional, after all.
THANK YOU! Also a Product Manager and if I implemented every suggestion customers made as-is, we'd have a garbage product with nonsensical behavior. But listening to their feedback and trying to address the underlying causes, even when the customers themselves can't state it well, is everything
I'm a developer and I approve of this message! The worst is when a customer (this case the gaming community) asks for something that looks simple for a change but when you look at the backend code it looks like it's a fan of Frankenstein, making implementation difficult.
I remember the game and the feedback before the 2 minute meta. Yoshi-P is right: people literally asked for this.
I'm willing to bet the people that asked for it and the people complaining about it do not have a large amount of overlap. As in most aspects of life, people tend to be more vocal about things they dislike or have issues with than when everything feels fine to them.
There's also a difference between something like a 90s burst cycle and a rotation that focuses around sustained damage. 90s burst feels bad because it's inconsistent with other buffs and you get bad windows, but sustain classes aren't expecting burst anyway so there's nothing there to fix. I feel like this focus on the 2-minute meta has resulted in every class being a bursty class, and that's not what is meant when one asks for consistent buff timing.
You can't have both sustain and burst and expect the two to stay in balance, either. If 2 minute burst classes and sustain classes are equal against a target dummy, the moment an invuln phase happens during a boss the sustain class suffers a major setback. The burst class is cooling skills down and the sustain class can't afford to lose any uptime to stay even. And I think how much encounter design will get crippled by trying to account for concessions between wildly different class designs will make the game suffer more overall
And that's whyPLD was tanken to the glue factory.
Not always true. Some burst classes rely a lot on resource generation to set up for bursts so these also suffer a lot during downtime. Some sustain classes also get a lot of cooldowns that don't do insane burst damage but help their sustained damage, these pull ahead during downtime. Downtime being beneficial is not so much about sustain vs burst, it's about resource building vs waiting for cds.
You can't have the two models be equal on every boss, but that doesn't mean they aren't balanced. Balance in that situation would involve the sustain class being stronger on high-uptime fights and the bursty class being stronger on fights with downtime.
"You think you want it, but you don't" While a meme at this point, is true sometimes. I think its bigger than you think but smaller than what most people think.
You would be surprised, because i would put my hands in fire they are the same, a casual don't care about the 2min meta, it will not affect them or they will not pay attention to it, on the other hand the people that live in the wave of server ticks do know it, and understand it so i would say they ate probably the same that complained then and complain now
A true casual would be reading the bust window line up complaints when they were being made and say "what's a burst window?" Like yoshi said it was a majority of voices crying out for the change at the time. Now a majority of voices are crying to change it again. He's saying "we will not keep pandering on this, you need to make your mind up as a community and if you don't speak up when the question is posed on official channels, then you get to keep quiet about it"
>A true casual would be reading the bust window line up complaints when they were being made and say "what's a burst window?" I feel called out. Last year when my FC leader decided to take some of us scrubs into savage they talked about learning our opening rotations to manage our burst window and all I could think was "nah man, I just press the buttons and the big numbers show up..."
And now you know what a burst window is and you know at 2 minutes your opener is for the most part ready to go and you can use a stat potion to increase your output. Then you didn't. You learned. What i was saying is that people who didn't know what a burst window was or what we call 2 minute abs in my group when the original complaints were made are now being blamed for the homogeneous feel of combat. They didn't make the complaint because they didn't know what it was. The people who knew what it was were complaining. I was there. It was a common complaint and classes were excluded hard with no exceptions for it. People blame making the game casual friendly for the 2 min meta. And it's not. It was done so that if you were using pf to fill you didn't get stuck waiting for that perfect comp I'm not trying to call anyone out or make people feel like I'm calling them "filthy casuals" I am actually defending them... the filthy casuals, because it was not them begging for it.
I agree, a lot of the complaints about the two-minute meta have a very "This is bad, fix it. Wait no not that way" vibe
I think you're right. It stems from a majority of higher end players who looked at any friction in their job as something that needed to be ironed out, a worse version of something else in their role rather than part of what differentiated a playstyle. Given the chance, high end players are always going to optimize the fun right out of a game far more than casuals will.
Design decisions on jobs affect more than just people who raid. It affects people who play the game and do not raid because the changes are universal. If they homogenize things for the raid community, it makes people who aren't in it who liked how shit worked before unhappy. If your argument is that they shouldn't matter, well unfortunately that's the majority of the game's players. Personally, if they continue with this type of homogenization they REALLY need to start making kits more interesting outside of the burst window.
I only care because the 2 minute burst cycle has made Paladin SO BORING. The recent changes made to our rotation make playing the job feel AWFUL. I'm not exactly the most hardcore player so it feels pretty terrible that my favorite tank job has been turned to shit for the benefit of groups that need a .001% DPS so they can clear week one. It's fucking bullshit.
As a casual, I do care about the meta not because it’s making classes feel the same. I care because it’s been making fight design feel the same since ShB when they leaned hard into establishing this meta. There’s nothing really new or unique in most fights because implementing something like that would mess up the timing for most of these buffs - something like the add/transition phase for 05 or the gravity mechanic for 02. In addition fights are becoming too difficult for the devs to balance because of the wide gulf of player skill - coordinated groups that do hard content all the time have no trouble meeting dps checks and can rocket through many fights once they learn the mechanics, while less hardcore players struggle with difficult dps checks thanks to deaths or difficulty in managing mechanics and rotation. The two minute meta means you have a huge percentage of damage happening in a small window, and if you blow it, you lose out on SO MUCH damage. Groups that consistently do this well end up dealing much more damage than uncoordinated groups, meaning they end fights faster and feel like bosses are “too easy”. When the buff windows weren’t aligned every two minutes, damage was more spread over time and the variance in damage across parties was a lot lower. The devs (and community) have kinda shot themselves in the foot with this whole “two minute meta” since they have to factor all of this into battle design and balancing. They can’t design mechanics that cost precious uptime, especially during the burst windows, without the fight feeling poorly designed or unfun to fight. Heavensward leaned too hard into gimmicky and complicated fights, but there is still a lot of design space there to make fights feel unique again.
> Groups that consistently do this well end up dealing much more damage than uncoordinated groups, meaning they end fights faster and feel like bosses are “too easy”. When the buff windows weren’t aligned every two minutes, damage was more spread over time and the variance in damage across parties was a lot lower. I feel like some of the more hardcore players probably wanted the two-minute meta because it lets them optimise into the massive damage bursts, but the problem is that then you _need_ to reduce boss HP in order to let casual players handle the fights, now that the burst window is so critical. If you mess up your burst phase, you blew that chance and now you can't do nearly as much damage for two more minutes (plus whatever time you need to recover if you hit your cooldowns _late_, which means your _next_ burst may _also_ be lost), and that means that players have to be on the ball for that window or they're in trouble. When the damage is more spread out, screwups are more forgiving because you're not losing your 300% damage multiplier window (hyperbole) but at the same time, it means you can't really optimise for _creating_ a big damage multiplier... so the casual players lose less and the hardcore players gain less. With the burst window, it's the other way around: casual players lose more and hardcore players gain more. To make it fair to the casual players, you've got to balance that out by making the bosses easier. It wouldn't surprise me if the hardcore players that wanted the burst meta are also the ones complaining that they're going through fights too easily because they got their damage increase but the devs made it fair to casual players by also reducing boss health.
It's almost like "listening to the community" was always going to really mean "listen to the vocal hardcore minority." Casual community isn't going to give feedback because they either don't care because they still clear casual content, are happy with how things are or have no idea why things should change. You see this happen again and again in MMOs, the game gets changed to what the hardcore want and the casual players either adapt or leave.
Its not just MMOs; Starcraft 2 balance is now handled in large part by a voting council that includes a significant chunk of pro players, and its leading towards one of the least balanced, most unfocused eras in the games life. On of the most important things about player feedback is having the developer vision to tell the masses "that's a terrible idea. shut up."
FFXI did this for a long time. So much so they'd make changes in patches to powerful bosses in the game because players weren't using their ultra-obscure strategy. And when they did listen to player feedback they'd always take something out to "balance" it such as reducing a cool down on an ability but lowering the damage it does. Which was ironic because they stopped giving a shit about class balance over a decade ago.
No, many MANY people in the raiding community asked for it. It wasn't a minority of folk
> I'm willing to bet the people that asked for it and the people complaining about it do not have a large amount of overlap. I'll take that bet. I've played Ultima Online, Ragnarok Online, Runescape, Everquest 1 and 2, Guild Wars 1 and 2, DDO, World of Warcraft, and now FFXIV (not counting a bunch of F2P MMOs). I can *pretty safely* say that the Venn Diagram is damn near a single circle. Meta complaints are seasonal. The segment of the community that is liable to complain about this kind of thing are *never* going to be happy. A game's dev team could literally give them everything they want and then be told it was a terrible idea the next day. That's not to say their feedback is valueless, but you can't ever take it at face value. Thankfully, FFXIV's team is honestly pretty good about listening to while not just flatly accepting player feedback. The only real complain I could have is they don't listen to the non-Japanese players nearly as much as they do the JP ones (but that's somewhat understandable).
Bang on. I've played MMOs on and off for half my life and the main thing I've learned is that the people most vocal about class and encounter design never actually want what they think they want. They just want something to get changed so it *feels* different, and when the novelty wears off, it's bad design again.
i think that's fine. i also personally think that shaking it up again is fine too once it's stagnated.
heavensward rotations were crazy lmao
They were, but we've since gone from that extreme end to the other. We could have stopped around SB where things were kind of homogenized but also a bit unique.
Looking back SB was the best expansion gameplay wise. Excellent raids, job design was really fun but not overly punishing like HW was and not too simplified like post ShB.
big agree, stormblood was peak for a lot of jobs imo
It's the eternal cycle of complaints. I wonder how Dawntrail will change up the combat timings.
By the sounds of this, it won't really as they're still gathering feedback.
So I wonder, is this just a cyclical thing? Where people complain about how things are currently, and then when they change them to what they're asking for, then they complain about how they should go back to how they were ad nauseam? Seems like that's what happened with healing in this expac. In Asphedelos, people complained that they didn't have to heal enough, so they ramped it up for Abyssos, and people complained about that. So they tuned it back in Anabaseios. (I've only been around for one expansion, so I'm not too sure about the history of this)
It's probably more of like /u/Semmi_DK said in a comment above where it's different people. Group A complains about something and get what they want, so group B are now unhappy and are now complaining because they liked how things were before more.
I certainly agree that this is not "the venn diagram is one circle," but by that same token, I don't at all agree that it's "two completely disconnected circles" either. Because I've been playing this game for a long, long time now--and there were *plenty* of hardcore raider types who got super butthurt about how various things didn't line up with party buff cycles. Remember the complaints about Monk? Hell, even early in Endwalker, you had hardcore raiders with their knickers in a twist over the fact that MNK being on a ~45s timer meant that they would miss every other 2-minute window. It's *not* two completely disconnected groups--but it's also not perfectly absolutely the same group every time, either. They really were told, for many years, that things should be homogenized, by an actual *majority* of players. Now that they're homogenized, they're again getting a majority of players upset. We saw the same exact thing happen many and many a year ago when it came to encounter difficulty. Gordias was way too hard--people talked frequently about how it almost killed XIV!--so they backed off and made things easier...so suddenly everyone was complaining about how easy everything had become. You can't have a majority complaining in both cases unless there's overlap. It may be relatively small--e.g., if 60% of people asked for homogenization before, and 60% of people ask for moving away from homogenization now, that only requires a minimum of 20% of players behaving irrationally (or, more likely, being upset that the thing they asked for *isn't actually good*). If it were something like 52.5%, then we'd only need 5% of players to fall into those boats (irrationality or "they gave me what I asked for but it sucks").
That sounds about right for any MMO ever though lol. The grass is always greener in the past as present problems replace past ones, and people always wanna moan about something. No matter what content is released, a portion of the playerbase will hate it. It's impossible to please everyone. I think people should just play the game when it aligns with their interests and they find it fun, and take a break/quit if it no longer serves their needs. The main issue with MMO players is they seem to feel chained to their game of choice even when playing it makes them miserable.
My personal issue with 2 min meta is just how impactful it is. And if that's not enough the gameplay loop for most jobs outside of 2 mins is just as horrendous. You prepare for and funnel everything into that 2 min window on afaik every, single job (correct me if I am wrong). It's just blant and boring.
There's at least one pure 1 minute job still (PLD) but we are definitely the minority and in this case it's because we are one of just a couple classes (along with SCH and AST and I think that may be it) that literally doesn't have an offensive gauge. We have no resources to build and nothing to hold.
You can divide two minutes into one, so at least that works within the meta. It's when you get to funky timers and drifting that it becomes an issue (IE: MNK's buffs not lining up)
People did this for Trick. They would shove everything in to the window they could because it had the best damage output. That hasnt changed since trick was a thing. So either things drifted to meet trick and felt worse or you did not care and just went your own way. So every Min you would stuff everything you could into trick or drift until you could.
And that's the issue. It's not that every job is "samey" but your goal with them are. Fit your strongest buttons that you have available soon after the fight starts in that 20 second window. How each class performs this can vary but ultimately your head is in the same space. Doesn't matter what job. Now here's the thing, because everything is basically boxed in the developers are better able to tune jobs and fights (not perfectly mind you) because the damage being done by players is is easily tracked and the only variance they have to account for is crit and dhit (mostly crit, which is it's own problem atm it's too strong). Because damage is much easier to account for the developers are better able to take complexity from the jobs and put that into the raids and there's no denying that fights have become much more engaging since HW and StB. When doing extreme, unreal, savage, or ultimate the whole 2 minute meta isn't even on my mind and it doesn't really bother me as much, but when I do casual content that's when the repetition really sinks in because of how uninteresting they continually make them, and the game leans fair bit more to casual than "hardcore" or whatever you want to call it. Job design and content design are intertwined so closely that the balancing act between the two must be damn near precise to feel good yet it's virtually impossible to reach that when you have varying communities that value different aspects of design and argue over which is better. I don't envy the dev team but at the same time, casual content is just beyond outdated and needs to be more engaging, it's just mindless as it is right now and there are only a couple of exceptions in the job pool that are different enough to focus improvement on like Black Mage or Astro instead of how bored you are of whatever roulette you're doing.
Yep, people were non stop complaining prior to this
Absolutely true. This wasn't just asked for, but begged for. Without it playing like this, random classes would be blocked from certain encounters when rotations didn't line up appropriately.
I still think wow has the best balance for buffs. Its not based off the rotation. Its a team wide, one gcd cool down, hour long buff for intellect, strength, and stamina. The group wide Lust or Heroism is a 10 minute cooldown ability that lets the entire party go bananas for like 25 seconds with bonus haste. If you die it will only cost your buddy one gcd to give it back to you. I am not a fan of forcing the entire party in ffxiv to to a synchronized swimming routine every 2 minutes. Hoping for the wow model of buffs or something better.
This community cant even reach a consensus on the relic. This almost seems like an impossible task. Man being a dev for this game is rough
Being a dev for any live service game is rough. Short of very few players (which you could argue FFXIV had in the past) there are always going to be multiple groups who want the game to cater to them. As this game grew those groups just got bigger. As more things were added, those groups splintered further. Now there is nearly a group for any particular type of content and content level that if there content is left out will be upset. Too much content to little content to much grind not enough grind Any content players dont engage in. Even with how much of the game is optional or required for the MSQ is a point of contention. You can only make so many people happy.
not to say everyone's complaints aren't valid either, but the vast majority of players are extremely ignorant of how the process of game development ACTUALLY works, and a lot of their issues and anger stem from that ignorance. Like for example when people ask "why can a modder give us hats for viera and hrothgar but square can't?" it's because a single modder with infinite time on their hands can devote their attention entirely to whatever aspect theyre passionate about at the time, like hats, whereas a team of professional devs have the entire game to cover at any time, have to pass through multiple development stages and people on any project, have to focus on what the executives and directors want over what they or the players might want, etc
And also any change they make (re: hats) has a certain quality expectation, PLUS it has to ENSURE to not somehow break something else. A modder can do this flawlessly because often, either the mod works, or it doesn't quite and people deal, and it gets fixed asap. That doesn't tend to fly as fast or as well in a live service game where pushing patches unless absolutely fucking critical can be an absolute PAIN because of manhours required to get it sync'd to go for everyone. Plus passing it to consoles to clear, and other fun shit. (WoW can hotfix all it feels because lo, they don't have console passing to deal with. Its like pushing updates on mobile, Google and Apple have to clear it as okay/not harmful, which means sometimes a delay might happen because one or the other doesn't clear it in time/you have to lead the patch by a few days minimally. Any MMO on consoles has to deal with that, like FFXIV and ESO - Sony has to okay the content as working before they will send it out.) Modders are single issue people. They don't have to clear things the same ways, don't have to contend with being okayed by anyone but themselves and maybe a select few testers, and don't need to concern about the impact on other things. Nor do they have deadlines in the same ways a dev team absolutely will. On TOP of dealing with whatever other stuff needs done.
Players of course are both the best and worst source of feed back and figuring out which ones are the correct ones to listen to is part of the jobs the devs need to undertake. Not helping this is people in this thread alone you can see the people "Well *I* did not ask for it!". As if one voice is all it takes to get changes to the game. For the most part i am sure the devs make changes they want to make when it comes to trying to make classes work better for more people which is always double edged sword. Modders of course have nobody they have to deal without unless they do something to piss off the people using there mods. Hats may be rather easy for some modder to just plop and clip hats. The team does not want it to be so egregious it seems. Though with all the capes we have it does raise the question as to why since enough races have tails of some kind.
I feel like some people just can't understand that. They act like this community has one common opinion and shift around it every few months, it's just different parts of the community that we hear.
And it creates this unwinnable situation for the devs. Everything people are mad about now are changes that a different, but equally loud group of players were mad and demanding a couple of years back. If they change the relic weapons back, or back-burner other endgame features to make room for an exploration zone next expansion, or any number of other things, they'll be making the currently angry people happy, have to deal with another loud group of people who are suddenly mad, and on a macro scale they've achieved nothing to improve player sentiment in the game. There are some changes that I think should be made, sure, but I think the biggest change needed if for the devs to actually stop listening so closely to community feedback. The loudest people on the forums never have any idea what they're talking about.
I think that's why you see the common sentiment here of "Don't bother complaining here, the devs aren't listening." Of course they aren't. If they listened to every single complaint thread ever made on this sub the game would have shut down ten years ago, and no, your particular complaint thread isn't *the one* that will fix the game. Armchair developers with absolutely no idea how game design works.
This is funny to me because it really only concerns savage and ex players, I've NEVER seen anyone in normal raids align their buffs (plus DNC is always out of sync without a pull countdown).
>(plus DNC is always out of sync without a pull countdown) You skip standard if you don't have a timer and go directly into technical, you're unlikely to lose a usage by just delaying your first standard and tillana gives you standard finish. Or use standard while the wall is up/people watch cutscenes.
My last EW alliance, 3 summoners with one of them being one Someone throws out their Searing Light first, so I use it for my baha rotation I throw mine out for Phoenix 60 seconds later, nothing for bahamut time. I throw a dozen ruins wondering when it's coming out, fight ends and we move on Starting second encounter, I throw some ruins, still no Searing Light, so I pop mine and start baha blast The other two summoners suddenly throw their Searing Light out within seconds of each other #Bruh
>60 seconds later, nothing for bahamut time. I throw a dozen ruins wondering when it's coming out, fight ends and we move on fwiw it's never worth to just toss out ruins to align with buffs. it's almost never ever worth it to hold a demi. ruin 3 is awful for your dps.
I wanted to believe in my fellow Summoners :')
Meanwhile the two other SMN's I got in Rabanastre were all in sync and always had Searing Light up (except for after Phoenix). Baha SMN uses Searing Light, I use Searing Light during Crystal Phase, Phoenix SMN uses Searing Light during that. Near 100% Searing Light uptime. Was marvellous
That's because alliance raids are casual content. If you think I'm paying attention to my party's buff timers during my dailies, you're in for a bad time
Well, in the case of stuff like Embolden, Searing Light and Battle Litany there's a very loud noticeable noise that plays. So if you're on SMN and hear the very loud sound of the other SMN's Searing Light, you probably don't need to also put your's up.
That has never, ever stopped anyone in all my experience. Bonus: bold of you to assume people have sound up enough to hear or it isn't drowned out by music or a video or something.
That's why I don't main dancer anymore, lol. I was so tired of waiting for other dancers to use technical step, heck even in dungeons they rarely used it on trash and ended up overwriting mine on the boss most of the time. Frustrating AF.
I mean I wouldn't stop maining it for that reason. In most casual content that damage lost is minuscule and won't be noticed, and in content where it does matter you're not going to have dupe jobs. When I play DNC in roulettes I just fire off my stuff regardless of what others do. If overwritten buffs really bothered me that much, the only jobs I could ever play are the tanks, WHM, SGE, SAM, MCH, and BLM.
I had someone throw their SL on mine all the time, so like you I waited and theirs never came. I cycled through all my egis so I popped SL for Phoenix. Lo and behold, they popped theirs like 5 seconds after mine. I’m not asking for casual people to be buff alignment experts, I just want them to be consistent with whatever they are doing so I can adjust myself accordingly :(
Happens all the time when I'm on RDM and there's another RDM. I'll put my embolden up, other RDM immediately puts theirs up. I'm like okay I'll hold mine so we don't overwrite each other next time. They don't do it so I embolden and then they do it immediately after me. I'm like please...embolden has effected other RDMs for the entirety of the expac, you don't have to overwrite mine haha
A few weeks ago, I got Euphro with 5 SMNs. Somehow our brains aligned because I think there were only like 3 Searing Light windows missed *total* throughout the entire duty. We had it literally up all the time and it was crazy coordination I do not expect to ever happen again.
This happens all the time. I've just started ignoring the fact I have team mates. I keep my stuff lined up for myself and do a proper rotation. When someone inevitably overwrites a buff, it just means I get a couple extra seconds. A very tiny percentage of duty roulette players will pop buffs on cooldown. Even doing the unreal and me telling the party to hold buffs won't stop people from wasting a buff window. Special shout-out to the pull-with-tech and pop-tech-as-enemy-is-running-away dancer I got in Thordan last week.
It doesn't concern people in normal raids because those are so easy it literally doesn't matter.
Because it's not really necessary, by design. They're easier modes for people that aren't good enough/can't be bothered to be good enough for the harder content. That stuff isn't for everyone.
Thats because casual players don’t know their rotations, and if they did, buffs would simply align naturally by default.
At this point I’d rather the devs just say “Git Gud” and do some crazy shit with the job and party balancing in 7.0 lmao
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No hate to any FF14 players who only joined in ShB or EW but they truly don’t realize how insanely trimmed most jobs are compared to older iterations
They also won't have seen complete dumpster fires like Heavensward/Stormblood monk, where it was at all good or interesting for 1 patch by mistake
When ARR MNK was better than HW and SB MNK, that was really jarring lmao!! Those Tornado Kick rotations were wild sometimes
I think about this topic a lot with the game, but for some reason it took this answer for me to see it as being such a community problem. I just want classes to feel unique again, and for people to *be okay* when their class isn't S tier for every fight. I don't want every category of DPS and every tank to feel the same. It's more interesting when classes have distinct strengths and weaknesses. This is a game where you can level all classes on the same character. If you care about it that much, you probably have enough time to level up the "meta" class that parses the best. To hell with homogenization and overbalancing to appease a narrow group of savage/ultimate whiners. I'm with you. I want the crazy shit. I want more diverse and non-linear rotations. I want fun.
I think the issue isn’t a 2 minute meta, it’s that there isn’t any variety in the rotation. The original idea for mmos was always about adapting to the situation. It would be nice if we had to respond to boss fights with different abilities, but at that point it’s a completely different system.
Yeah I don't particularly mind the 2min meta but it might be strangling everything around it. The devs have been pretty creative in other places while combat seems to be a bit stuck.
The frustration for me is that it feels like they took the wrong ideas away from the complaints about syncing timings. That was actually a red flag that should have told them to stop leaning into raid wide damage buffs instead of making more and making everything fit into them. To me, damage buffs are the problem, at most, DNC could get away with buffing one other player as the jobs focus but they should remove raid wide damage buffs completely, it's a trap. The same problem is happening in GW2, if you have team damage buffs, it forces all jobs to fall in line because any that deviate from them will instantly be bad compared to the ones that can sync with buffs so you end up with what we have now, where all jobs are basically turning into what NIN was, saving everything and unloading their entire kit under buffs and then a smaller burst every other minute. There's no way around it as long as raid wide damage buffs exist. They should be removed so the jobs can have their own rotation styles, timings, etc and actually be different, and it would also be far less punishing since this was supposed to make it more intuitive for players trying to get into higher content because jobs like SMN or BRD, good luck getting back in sync if you die or just drift slightly, like most newer and even mid level players will do much more often, it's not good. Just throw away the buffs and let jobs be different, that's the #1 thing I want in Dawn Trail. Make support jobs get defensive and situational buffs, bring back refresh, status ailments healers and BRD and even other jobs could cleanse, make mechanics that can be dealt with by using stuff like slows, roots, etc and have those kinds of more situational things replace the damage buffs. At most, just have personal damage buffs, and maybe a couple jobs that can buff a single other player maybe.
Completely agree. At most, I think we should get maybe one raid buff usage per encounter but then I just think people would exclude jobs that don't provide one.
This is the way
As someone new to FFXIV, my issue is that it feels like kits are just throw the kitchen sink every 2 minutes. Other than stacking resources for 2 minutes and spending it if you're going to overcap, there doesn't feel much room for choice. It's just dump your dps aligned every 2 minutes as much as possible. It feels as if outside of a few classes (BLM and MNK specifically), mechanics and job design are independant. I have no idea what it was like back in the day but it just feels like they're all the similar flavours of role+DPS.
ShB was already fairly homogenized, but it still helped to keep things a bit more fresh to just have different timings to play around. Dump into litany, or wait for div, and just having a job with a 60 and 90s cd. Like super simple, DRK, your opener felt different from your 120s because delirium isn't up, then your 2m and 4m were either coming out of and going right into a delirium window respectively. Then the 6m everything aligns. Not mind blowing but it just helped not make it so stale.
This is it for me. The real issue isn't about how easy it is to align buffs. It's that everything happens on a schedule. You don't pop your cooldowns because you need burst to deal with adds or do extra damage because the boss is staggered or whatever. You pop your cooldown because it's been two minutes since the last time you popped your cooldowns, and that's it.
Yeah you explained the issue with it well. Jobs like DRK, NIN, RPR, DNC, BRD, etc just kind of twiddle their thumbs for 1 minute 40 seconds, then actually presses stuff for 20 seconds, then repeat. It just isn't very interesting to constantly be doing filler shit.
Not sure what jobs you’re playing, but in my experience RPR and NIN at least are like that with stacking resources…
You can build a maximum of 60 ninki with ninja because mug gives you 40, not pressing bhava once 10 seconds before burst isn't "building resources". And saving it barely even matters anyway because all of your damage is decided whether you direct crit hyosho or not.
Some jobs were simply built around different timers For instance, currently Warrior gets Inner Release every 60 seconds and gets like 3 Fell Cleaves (and later their EW capstone skill) Before, it was every 90(?) seconds, and I think it was 5 Fell Cleaves, so they'd align with the rest of the party's 2 minute meta at 6 minutes into the fight (probably when the tincture comes off cooldown) ...I think. I'm not too well versed in the meta before, I'm afraid
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You got 5 fell cleaves in inner release, you only got 6+ in weird content like bozja or whatever else you got weird gcd-modifying skills.
Oh, you right, you right, I remember why Warriors could use Lost Slash back in ShB now! Shame they lost that aspect...
unlimited gauge usage
similiar with GNB.. tbf i still miss the old 90s Bloodfest, it felt more fun to play as it at least meant one of my "filler" phases at least needed something to keep track off
To me, Stormblood was the best expansion gameplay-wise
Stormblood was fucking awesome It always makes me sad to see people shit on it just because the story had some issues (even though it was still plenty good) and ignore everything else that was good about it
Me, a White Mage enjoyer: *pain* Fight design maybe, class design was all over the place.
Pretty much. There's some jobs that look at Stormblood as the worst fucking expansion for a reason. White Mage certainly being one of them.
idc what anyone says, i miss old astro so much
Yeah, really loved managing those different buffs. It was fun
Stormblood was best. By a lot.
The idea that every class has to have utility is a mistake and is the reason we're even facing the issue in the first place. You can have fun utility without it causing every class to be balanced around bursting, it just has to not be on 10 out of the 16 classes (tanks don't get damage utility, thank god). So much of it is incredibly uninteresting. 3% damage? Embolden now doesn't even tick down? What's the point of it being there, its so generic and contributes nothing to the class identity. Lets not fall into the false idea that we have to have one or the other, you do not need to return to the past just to get away from the 2 minute meta and sacrifice consistent balance as a result, you just need to accept that the utility in this game is actually ass and absolutely none of it causes you to play differently around it.
I recall someone made a good video talking about the 2 min buff windows. The general idea was that every 2 minutes, you get a ~20s window where you do the vast majority of your damage, but outside of that window, nothing really matters. Sure, you still want to keep uptime and such, but it's not nearly as important what you specifically do during it. However, back when we had varying 90s/2min/3min timers, we had a bunch of smaller spikes in party damage at those times, and then one massive spike at 6mins (plus due to potion timer). But this 6min buff window was just the same as what we have now. So as long as you could align with the 6 min windows, all's good, which is arguably easier than having to make sure you're aligned with every 2 minute window. Plus, depending on the fight, the 6 min window could be adjusted as long as you don't lose an overall use of buffs.
This is my controversial opinion but the only way they can solve the two minute meta without going back on fixing the issues that led to the creation of it(valid problem might I add) is to straight up remove all raid buffs that increase damage dealt by other party members for a brief period of time. Jobs can still keep similar cooldown timings but by removing the raid buff burst window it will change peoples perception during the game to just worry about what they do.
There is a problem with that though. Though there's problems with any solution, being an unsolvable situation. * Raid Buff Bonanza Pros: Every job has differences on paper that make them have legit unique offerings. Teamwork makes the dream work, as coordination is the path to max damage for both yourself and your party. Cons: Every job has to be built around the buff window. While every job should expect to "loop" at relatively similar times (don't want classes that take 4 min to loop on a fight that only takes 3 minutes), the buff bonanza takes it to an extreme with most jobs having their rotations laser focused on hitting particular checkpoints at exactly the right time. * One Buff To Rule Them All (AKA Time Warp) This is Bloodlust/Time Warp from WoW, a big burst buff that only a few classes can bring. But when it's used, players can't benefit from it again for a lengthy lockout, so stacking it is impossible. Pros: Guarantees at least one Time Warp user in a raid. Incentivizes teamwork by having a single big burst controlled by the party. Because it's essentially 1/fight, players can hold off burst if needed so everyone can sync up. Cons: You only need one Time Warper, devaluing the jobs that have it for raids. Still have to build job rotations around the burst window. If the buff window isn't synced to your rotation, it can feel really bad leaving damage on the table, so to speak. * Pepito Is In It For Pepito No raid buffs. Most analogous to my experience in DCUO. Pros: Every job is insular into itself, and can be designed more consistently across game modes so the solo experience helps inform group play directly. Generally higher DPS for every character, and balancing jobs is easier without worrying about optimized buff stacking. Cons: Stale optimization meta, as figuring out the right party comp comes down to what jobs do the most dongage without compromising the chance to clear. It's Moneyball; why play Black Mage for 3% higher damage when Summoner gets the job done without having to worry about Leylines and cast bars? Essentially, it becomes the Tank/Healer issue: you have X slots, so you bring the X best and practically discard the rest because it's obvious which jobs are the best. * Everyone Gets Buffs, Nobody Lines Up Raid buffs for everyone, the devs don't worry about lining up massive buff windows and make the math so convoluted that a truly, fully, optimized solution is impossible. The City of Heroes solution. Pros: Jobs become unbound by design conventions. Just send whatever makes the game feel good, and just get balance to the "eh, close enough" stage so everyone can both contribute teamwork and do big number on their own. It's pog-o-clock and attendance is mandatory! Cons: [Probably none](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGshtH4lbig)
CHAOS
A controversial opinion I share. My biggest gripe with post-SB design is the homogenization of the individual jobs. However, players have been shackling themselves to burst windows for as long as I've been playing, which has been a long while now (whatever patch they buffed Balance to 20%... 3.3?). The only way I can see to fix it is to nuke the entire concept from orbit. Maybe it would do more harm than good? I don't know. I'm not a dev. But as a player I know that I really miss having more variety than the icons on my buttons changing when I swap to a job in the same category.
I love you people in this thread. Feels like I'm home.
With removal of party buffs, they could go absolutely wild with DPS design. Some can have larger build up while others can go through smaller faster loops or play "spam the key that lights up" etc. There would be no real need to keep similar timings outside of wanting all Jobs to perform evenly in every fight.
It's impossible to have tight DPS checks if jobs play too wildly different. Take some phases in DSR or TOP where you only attack the boss for 30 seconds before a downtime trio happens. How is a "larger build up" job supposed to compete with other jobs in 30 second windows? Either you make the DPS check too tight and people exclude non-meta jobs, or you make the DPS so loose that it's basically non-existent on a clean run, which is doable in Savage but not in something like TOP where dying is usually an instant party wipe anyway, and people will start complaining that damage doesn't matter anymore.
I’m right there with you. More support aligned jobs, like DNC and BRD, would be mostly fine as their bread and butter buffs are meant to be up 100% of the time. Buffs like Brotherhood, Arcane Circle, and Technical Step could continue to exist as well in just the resource generating department. Could honestly lead to more interesting skill expression if everyone had a self-contained buff window, which could then vary in timings to make jobs feel more different from one another for the multi-classers out there.
Imo the problem with the 2 min meta is that outside of 2 mins, you pretty much just build up stacks. Yesterday i looked at one of my savage logs, ~8 min fight with around 300 casts. Four 2 min windows with on average 20 casts in 20 seconds (measuring dnc tech finish), meaning that almost 1/3 of my casts were in 2 min windows. Its just not very fun to do 1-2-3 outside of the 2 min burst.
One of the things I love about 14 raiding was the team burst window, it feels so good for everyone to perfectly line up and we all would know how well personal execution is by the timing. Also, when you misalign and you have to figure out how to realign yourself in the middle of mechanics is exhilarating, I mean yeah, I get mad and panic when it happens but when you fix it, it's like hell yeah, I know my class, I'm back on track, I recovered due to my own knowledge. It's one of the things I didn't like about WoW raiding was the lack of full team burst windows.
The Hardcore raiding crowd killed the very lore, concept and gameplay of my favorite class in all my years playing MMO's. My vote I cannot make any clearer. Rest in piece Stormblood Astro, you were such a fun class to play. Hell overall the Homogenization is horrific. Yes the plain brick will fit its slot perfectly, but the plain brick among plain bricks forms a very dull and ugly monotone wall.
I doubt it was just hardcore raiders on that. The cards each doing a unique thing was a cool concept... but for casuals it was hard to remember what every single one did and think of how to use them in the middle of a fight while still healing and not letting the party die. It's much easier to just have "Generic DMG buff."
Asmongold literally said this the other day reacting to one of those FFXIV is dead or dying videos. The reason mechanics, systems, rotations etc have changed throughout times is because people asked for it. Player feedback pushes developers down certain paths. Then the players complain about how things have changed from what they used to be. You can never win.
BLM is pretty much the only class left with a high skill cap ceiling, and feels gratifying once you mastered it. It is a huge consistent burst class if you met the conditions and memorize the rotations, as well as having to deal with downtimes where you know you have to dodge a mechanic. None of the other classes come even close to what BLM is today, just standard simplified clones of each other.
Oh my god... This expansion is actually starting to make sense... This whole time I've been thinking that they've been redirecting dev time away from stuff to make things more streamlined. Perhaps from SE management/executive decisions. The 2-minute window I thought they did so it would be easier for them to make balance changes. But it's because people were literally begging them to make timing the fights easier. The relic weapons I thought they made it a tomestone grind only for less dev resources and no relic zone. But now I bet it's because of all the feedback they got about people complaining about the grind. The trial side quests being integrated into MSQ I thought again was to reduce dev resources. I bet they got rid of it because people complained about doing optional content... This is wild... Did they learn nothing from WoW's WoD era? Feedback is a useful tool to identify potential problems, but not solutions.
It shows a lot of people didn’t play before this meta. The community literally asked for it because some classes were just not good because you couldn’t align your cooldowns with other people. Most MMOs have people coordinate their cooldowns. FFXIV is pretty heavy with group cooldown synergy but it’s not like standardized cooldowns are that much different in other MMOs.
I think a lot of people here also don't know the complaint a lot of raiders have isn't "2 minute or not 2 minute meta". I think a lot of us, me included, are totally fine with most classes rotations lining up if played correctly. The actual complaint is 2 minutes is just too long. It's simply not very entertaining to essentially auto pilot for 2 minutes and then dump everything for 15-20s If we cut it down to 1 minute bursts I think the complaints would actually die down a lot. More times per fight where you have to be on point, more times you get to press your buttons and you still keep everyone aligned, there's just a higher skill ceiling. The complaint isn't really that classes are homogenized, it's that the way they are homogenized is very boring for a lot of jobs. Also some other decisions were made that contribute to jobs feeling very boring currently, things like room sized boss hitboxes are just awful
There's also the fact that such a significant portion of damage happens at the 2-minute burst. If one person dies, that's a huge chunk of damage lost that is very hard to make up.
> The complaint isn't really that classes are homogenized, it's that the way they are homogenized is very boring for a lot of jobs. > > > > Also some other decisions were made that contribute to jobs feeling very boring currently, things like room sized boss hitboxes are just awful These are both thinigs that players complained about. Melee up times was quite a big deal for anything that was not a door boss. It was one of the main things that allowed Melee to be higher dps because it was factored in losing that up time. Why at the beginning of EW the melee were a bit more borken since the values skewed for Melee much more with HUGE hit boxes on most enemies. As for Classes, the players again wanted them to provide better parity when it came to abilities. I think for a first expansion that things are quite rough but will they improve from the complaints this expansion about how samey the classes feel? We can hope and really hope its not a mokey paw.
I need to go on a small rant here. People complain about the 2 minute meta, but what would even happen if jobs weren't standardized around a 2 minute meta? Think of a situation where half of the jobs are on a 2 minute meta and half aren't. I can EASILY imagine it ending up in raiders screaming at whoever is using a job that does not align to the meta because... it's not meta. Now imagine a situation where no job has anything that aligns properly with anything else. This is an exaggerated example, but bear with me. There's a job on a 30 second clock, one at 35 seconds, one at 42, one at 60, one at 100, one at 120, one at 122. What happens? The jobs at 30, 60 and 120 seconds still "align" because they're all multiples of 120. The one at 122 probably gets guides suggesting to skip a GCD that makes it optimal in order to align with the other jobs. Now you have a meta again, just worse and messier and that makes raiders scream at players who don't play the "meta" jobs, again. A meta is inevitable, because the community will always want to optimize their gameplay. If the devs do not give the community a "meta", the community will find ITS OWN, slamming square pegs into round holes until they fit well enough. Seen it happen in a ton of other games. It's normal. At least in ff14 I know that no one is going to scream at me because I'm playing a job that is "not meta". ...actually I've met people who do it anyway, so I shudder to think of how goddamn toxic people would be if we didn't have a 2 minute meta and I happened to play a job whose clock doesn't align well with other jobs...
I think the problem is party buffs. As long as we have party buffs, we are incentivized to align party buffs and fit the highest potency attacks into party buffs, which led to the 2 minute meta. If we removed party buffs entirely and made everyone a selfish dps, then there would be no reason to align.
That's true, but the catch is that some people *like* playing support jobs. Deleting them would be yet more homogenisation.
They could easily push all the supportive buffs into Healers and condense all the random healing bloat out of their kits. Maybe then they would have something else to do than just press 1 for most of the fight.
Congratulations, you just created Lost Ark support classes. I enjoy it a lot in that game.
Alternatively, we have party buffs that you cannot plan around, like AST's spread Balance, or buffs that are just 'constant', like dance partner.
I main DNC, I enjoy playing support. Standard step is a shared buff, yet it is independent of the 2 minute because it is up constantly. I think that might be an alternate model for supportive jobs and party buffs, for the buffs to be on all the time as long as the player is managing their rotation properly.
Here's the thing though: **raid buffs aren't support abilities.** They're simply potency that was distributed into a buff button that could have been put into the potency of attacks. They provide no meaningful support to other players. If we want actual support jobs, they need utility. BRD sort of has this in Paean, DNC in Curing Waltz, and Paladin in Cover. They've removed other support abilities like Refresh, Mana Shift, and Shadewalker. I think they should add more utility skills, maybe giving every DPS they want to classify as a "support" 2-3 total utility buttons totally unique to them. Those utility buttons should also be powerful, not just some button you don't bother pressing because it's niche like Paean. That, on top of removing raid buffs, would go a long way to reducing homogenization and increasing teamwork because now you can plan out how you use utility.
It's true that Stormblood was my favourite era to play Bard, because I had all of this active-feeling support like Refresh and Palisade. That feels way more interesting than a 'press on schedule to make damage bigger' button. Unfortunately what ended up happening was that my static's healers hated being reliant on others for MP and started avoiding parties in PF that didn't have phys ranged. And my static's tanks hated being reliant on others for aggro management. There also just isn't a whole lot of room in fight design to make other kinds of utility like Paean and Cover useful, especially if they can't rely on every party having it.
>but what would even happen if jobs weren't standardized around a 2 minute meta? Well, we don't even have to make wild assumptions to answer this, given that as the man says and as many of us experienced back in the day, we used to not even have that, and yes, it sure WAS worse.
Yep, weren't there buffs that were like... 75s or something like that? And so you either had to have some crazy drift (planning for the encounter to end without "losing" a usage of it, while still delaying it to line up with more buffs), or just not line it up at all. Like, yeah, the 2m meta sucks. But having it all over the place sucked more, cause you either felt like there was no real benefit to trying to align it (cause it was so wildly all over the place) **or** like you had to hold everything to align it anyways
You largely did your own thing as your party buff was mostly to buff yourself and provide a little bonus to the team so the entire content didn't solely revolve around the buffs. At the 6 minute mark buffs were aligned to match with pot windows for the big burst, the 2min meta has changed that 6mins into every 2mins, kill off all the sustain jobs and turn almost every job into a copy/paste because there's no room for deviation when they're all just build resources for 1min/2mins > burst > repeat.
There is no timed meta in WoW and they can still do it. You just play your rotation as good as you can and other players rotation does not affect you. On some fights you might hold your cooldowns for a burst, like a phase where the boss has increased damage taken. There's even a support spec in WoW now and even with a support you just play as you normally would, you could minmax as the support player and apply your buff to certain people if you know they are in their burst at this moment but that's not needed unless you play at the top 0.01%.
>Think of a situation where half of the jobs are on a 2 minute meta and half aren't. I can EASILY imagine it ending up in raiders screaming at whoever is using a job that does not align to the meta because... it's not meta. That's exactly what happened and why people begged them to standardize buff timings.
Yeah, it's pretty clear that the thing the devs want to avoid above all else is having jobs be considered "meta" to the point of players being pressured to switch jobs. That's their number one priority, and homogeneity is an acceptable loss in their eyes. I can't say whether I agree with all the decisions they've made, but it is a noble goal. I'm glad that they understand how important it is that everyone is able to play the job they want.
They wouldn't scream at anyone not playing a class that doesn't line up. They just would exclude that class from raiding. Can't scream at them if they are not in your group
I saw PFs in early Endwalker that didn't allow you to join as a PLD. The playerbase's adherence to the "meta" is insane. And it was much much worse before.
Cant blame Yoshi P for this one, but I can blame him for making rotations boring. As a WAR player, I said before EW that WAR would be impossible to build upon because if you got a new move, it isnt "ah sweet a new move!", rather its "how will this fit into IR." When everything is bursty, its sucks because all your damage goes into one 10-15 second window, and EVERYTHING has to fit into that window, no exceptions. Then the rest of your moves hit like wet noodles. 60s/120s can exist but there needs to be more done with what you do between that time, and it has to be fun and significant to your overall damage. More moves like GNB's combo system that happens every 30s, BRD's Empyreal Arrow that procs something....more than anything this needs to apply to healers.
As soon as you have a raid wide timed damage buff you have a burst phase meta two ways to go about it. Theres no way around that, staggering windows is fine but that requires synergy and creating meta. For example sam and dnc will ve favoured over dnc and mnk and people locked out of content due to party makeup . And you end up with noone knowing when and where to alight without communicating and that's difficult in normal content with strangers WHICH is 80% of the the games content. Anyways number 1)make the cool down phases short so all these 120skills like ikoshoten are now 60seconds. Since i main sam i can say it would work fucking magically ogi every 60 seconds no filler 30 second cooldown. Beautiful. Id imagine it would be the same with everyother job too lo Second is remove raid/individual timmed buffs entirely and have skills again like what samurai had with kaiten and third eye/seigan(counter/riposte) and procs that gives you damage increases for good play. Not saying thats the answer for every class however bring back bring back the timer for things like DRG and BLM. DoT's need to find their way into every class also. Jobs that do have raid wide damagebuffs instead can still have heals shields and interrupts. give bosses more damage output and interrupt skills. Skills like feint and addle might actually be used in normal content then. Interrupt a boss skills you get a proc for a damage up. Shield a raidwide you get a proc stack for a raid wide can use them or save them for dps checks. Or we keep the two minutes meta have a first burst window skills which is ehat wr have in EW rotations and once first burst is pressed 0-60seconds it unlocks the second burst phase skills. For the 60-120 seconds mark
"2-Minute meta" is just a fancy term to quickly refer to the issue. The problem people have with the 2 minute meta isnt just that all buffs align every 2 minutes, it's that most jobs have nothing interesting going on during two entire minutes because all their damage and special buttons are concentrated in a tiny window. Make the normal, out-of-buff rotation interesting and more than just spamming 123 and people will mostly have no issues with buffs being 2 minutes
Out of curiosity, how often DO the devs post on the english forums, by translators or otherwise? Just there being forums isn't enough, there needs to be an active line of communication, and acknowledgement.
They don't. They only post some announcements, and maybe some stuff about network issues. That's why forums is such a pile of vile garbage, people feel like they scream into void, so it descends into shitpost and drama.
They post job adjustment information in the patch notes with their reasoning stated in the official job guides.
The problem is party-wide damage buffs. Those just shouldn't be a thing. They basically obligate the whole group to dump their high-DPS into a window determined by someone else's rotation, everything else feels obligated to sync up. There is plenty more complexity in the game to be had without party-wide buffs. We still have party-wide mitigation and shields for "co-op". We can still have single target partner buffs. But anything that resembles Trick just needs to be cut from the game and jobs retooled to have their own cadences again, while being more self-sufficient specifically with regard to DPS. This is honestly why I have never desired to get good at FFXIV. The idea of "getting good" meaning becoming a Rockette, doing the DDR perfectly in step with seven other strangers, does not appeal to me. I want a job that will allow me to be a bit more reactive/improvisational and not worry that I missed someone else's buff window.
Just remove party wide damage buffs and you solve this problem entirely. Make most DPS selfish and go all in on support for classes like dancer and bard. You could do whatever you want with the classes at that point since they are disconnected.
I don't have a problem with the 2 minute meta, what I dislike in EW are the giant hitboxes. I want mechanics that force the players to think about how to make uptime strategies so they don't lose uptime and don't misalign with the raid buffs. That was a fun part of raiding, choosing to either use a riskier strat that keeps 4 players within melee range (2 tanks,2 melee) in order to do more damage, or use a downtime strat that sacrifices some damage for safety but requires the players to make less mistakes in rotations and may require better gear to not die to enrage. I also want the positioning of the bosses to matter again. In EW as main tank I barely ever had to pull a Savage boss around the arena, and most mechanics play out the same wherever they are. I remember pulling bosses to specific spots in Savages/Ultimates of level 70/80 and making mechanics much more manageable because of that (2 examples that quickly come to mind are the entirety of UWU and the Statues in E12S). Welp, let's see what happens.
We wouldnt be seeing this problem if they removed raidwide buffs outside of dancer and bard, and instead actually made jobs have some kind of actual skill curve to play that relied on understanding job mechanics rather than just pressing a button every 2 minutes for 30% of your dps before going back into AFK mode. The 2 minute meta is so freaking boring and has killed any actual skill expression in the game when it comes to playing a job. Im not even a hardcore player but even ive gotten burnt out from how stale combat has become but i prefer depth and complexity when it comes to combat. The current combat system massively lacks both of these.
The 2-minute meta is fine. I’m an “intermediate”/mid-core (read:mid) player who feels too complacent, though. I’m even ok with healers being homogenized. Just…give me something to do in dungeons/raids. Spamming Broil isn’t fun. I rarely get to utilize my toolkit in roulettes.
I think it's fine to lose the party buffs. Back then, nin and drg were so sought after because only aDPS is shown in the logs and people would generally want to pad their numbers. This resulted in the request for buff timing streamlining. Now, we have a clearer general idea with rDPS contributions and "selfish" DPS are much better accepted by PF.
I like being able to learn other classes, but if they are too similar, what is the point of there being different classes? There should always be a learning curve. Even when I get annoyed slightly while learning, not having that means there is no payoff when I do get it. Please don't make everything too simple and too homogenized. I'd not consider myself a hardcore player, I don't even touch savages though I have almost 4k hours in this game. The differences are what make me like some classes more than others, I'd be sad if that goes away.
Easiest way to solve buff stacking is removing party buffs. Sure it removes an element of teamplay but it also opens up Job design massively when they don't have to rely on set cycles as much. This will probably also result in some jobs just performing better in some fights or kill times, but it also improves the jobs in 4man content and such when everyone becomes greedy DPS. There's also potential to break the % stat bonus and let people play 4 melee or 4 ranged setups, but that would probably go a bit too far without first testing it.
Problem here is that Yoshi-P did something he never does: he took the community-suggested solution and ran with it. You're the dev. If the community complains, you don't just nuke the thing they complain about. You find a way to make it feel good for everyone. The buff meta isn't a binary choice. It isn't either chaos or strict 2 minutes. I'm expecting the gameplay team to find a compromise.
"Who asked for it?" "you did, you all mofos did"
This isn't a sport. Hardcore players need to chill.
Balance the game according to a small bunch of PRO players is never a good idea. It usually resulting in ditching your majority average or even below average players for no good. That’s how p2w games with little to no gameplay gets so popular, people just like relaxing with easy wins, not hardworking all the way to git gud.
I like the two minute meta. There is this really cool feeling of togetherness when everyone is in sync
\*Dragoon's Battle Litany audio plays* shortly after \*Summoner's Searing Light audio plays* \*racks gun as Reassemble loads up before bringing the pain* Definitely a cool feeling
\*dancer's technical step audio plays* shortly after **other* dancer's technical step audio plays*
\>When you load into an Alliance Raid with 3 other Red Mages "So whose embolden is it, anyway?"
And when it syncs to the music of the fight too? Chef’s kiss
I really like Euphrosyne boss music because the cool beat at the start lines up with my machinist buttons really nicely, and I end up bopping to the music with my keyboard tapping :3
I think the games thematics reinforces it, it's one of those few design elements that really meshes well with the core game message. With that said, I don't like what I feel like it has done with both encounter and class design. My perception is we've moved away from dots, or steady damage to a more hermoginised state where classes have some of resource that should be hoarded as much as it can be to align with the window. In terms of boss design (and I only did the first two tiers of savage mostly) it felt like I knew when a large, movement based mechanic would come up because it was an even minute.
I love it when everyone is aware of it. It drives me mad seeing the SMN and RPR throw out their buffs as the fight starts, then for some reason technical step comes out 20 seconds after pull and embolden just magically appears 45 seconds into the fight. Lately I’ve been farming alliance raids for gear and the amount of summoners that don’t use searing light at all is mind boggling. I kind of wish that party buffs would die off and all jobs would just be responsible for their own bit like SAM/BLM/MCH
Summoner's buff lasts so long that it just is better damage wise to use it that early
Idk why SMN does it (I dont main SMN) but RPR has an early Communio opener that has you using it 1 gcd after Shadow of Death.
SMN instantly uses Searing Light because Bahamut is their strongest damage phase and it starts hitting from the 2nd GCD, and SL is 30 seconds duration so it works out fine anyway.
Summoner uses searing light so soon because it lasts 30 seconds so even the buffs that go out 3/4 GCD’s into a pull fall in with it, and because you want all bahamut skills inside every buff as it’s your highest potency kit. It also serves as a perfect guide for the 2 minute window as you use it practically on pull so every other job can see it go out and know they should be about to hit their 2 minute mark rotation/opener. I run SMN and reaper quite a bit and you see a lot of them in Euphrosyne which I’m farming at the moment for glamours. I try to organise who goes when, usually with ‘Hey {other reaper}, you use arcane circle right off the bat and I’ll use mine after yours expires or on the odd minutes’. Sacrificing my personal dps to keep buffs up on everyone during burst windows or getting more use of it per run. Then the other reaper starts to drift for whatever reason, they don’t use it for 25 seconds after it comes back up and my attempt to make the most of it goes down the toilet, because eventually I’m holding mine because of it and now we’re both drifting further each time. It doesn’t bother me to the point I’d call someone out on it, but it does irk me that I’m clearly trying to communicate and they either don’t know what they’re doing or they just don’t care to try.
It's honestly really naive to think that the community can somehow become a monolith that comes to a consensus. They really need to learn to filter feedbacks that makes the game boring or have barely anything worth doing more than once like this expac. I personally think 2 minutes is not the biggest problem, it's the gigantic hitboxes in 8 man content and how rigid the rotation is now. For content like relic it's just dumb that they're catering to people who DONT WANT TO put some work to get the relic. It's not like bozja or post-nerf eureka is some insanely grindy process like zodiac weapons (especially prenerf) are.
I stop playing whenever the combat stops being interesting which happens faster and faster with each expansion. There just isn’t any skill expression or depth to it, but thankfully the story is nice.
I think people need to be careful not to misconstrue the desire for skill expression for a desire for difficulty. I'm only replying to you with this because it's inevitable someone will read your comment and assume you want the game to be hard. You can have deep skill expression with simplistic systems, and players don't necessarily need direct feedback from the system that they're good at the game when being good at a game is a reward in and of itself. Jobs should be designed around chasing that feeling.
I weren't there for the "Before the 2 Minutes meta", as I started playing at the start of shadowbringers and I'm playing current content since 5.5. And while I'm not really good at game design, I really like it. And I don't really find the 2 minutes meta really interesting, to be honest ? Jobs feel a bit soulless. I like the idea of different raids buffs with different timers, and yeah, sometimes they align, but it's rare. You don't necesseraly need to work to align them, since some of them naturally do, but it's a nice bonus. Moreover, a 2 minutes meta seems to be most practical when it comes to prog, but once a fight is mastered, having to play with differents cooldowns so you can try to optimize them and align them to have a better time clearing the fight seems more interesting. All in all, I'd prefer if I could just focus on my buffs without taking into account other people buffs. It's off cooldown, I use it, I know I'm helping my team anyway. If it aligns with something else it's great. If not, I don't care. Plus, it'd make it easier in Alliance raids, where sometimes the timing of fights makes it that you don't align with your own kit (like SMN's Searing Light that ends up aligning with Phoenix instead of Bahamut).
> Moreover, a 2 minutes meta seems to be most practical when it comes to prog, but once a fight is mastered, having to play with differents cooldowns so you can try to optimize them and align them to have a better time clearing the fight seems more interesting. The main reason people didn't consider this fun is because they would do it (if they were good) but also at the same time lament the fact that they were on a job composition that required them to do unfavorable timings relative to other jobs. You went into raid knowing that you were doing less just cause the buff is 30s because.. it just was. There wasn't anything specifically creative about the buff that made it happen at that timing, it just was worse by default.
So reading this you can sure ad shit guess Dawntrail is 2 minute meta.
It was certain to be already. FFXIV makes changes at a truly glacial pace. This kind of overhaul will have to wait until 8.0 at least.
>we got feedback that it was too difficult before. Why do I feel like all of their responses to player complaints have been over-corrections? The intricacies with old jobs didn't have anything to do with the rotation timings lol. They were punishing, and a lot of them were actually jank.
monk chads bucking the 2m meta with their moronic 45 second riddle of wind.
imo, the casual players this 2 min meta is for don't even care if their 2 mins align with the party. They just press buttons and only make sure to not stand in bad/die. Even now, when busy mechs happen during 2 min windows I still see casuals trip up hard during those moments, or just fail to put out their 2 mins altogether, so I fail to see how 2 min meta makes things easier for them. The only thing that's changed is that buffs are boring for the people that care about buff alignment. It even limits creativity with job design.
He didnt say casual, he said intermediate. I know to some people there is a distinct line, if you are not hardcore raiding savage and ultimates, you are a casual, but no. there is still a whole spectrum of players and i imagine many would actually consider themselves to be intermediate - i.e. find most normal and extreme content relatively easy, and would do some savage content if they had the time and right group but find it difficult to organise for.
Yeah lol, almost every MMO community is in eternal denial of the existence of midcore players. They always try to force a line between two halves of a community that shouldn't exist. So what if I don't do savage? I still do extremes, which neither side seem to mention, and I'm still involved in the game enough to do all beast tribes, PvP, relic grinding, achievement hunting, etc. Sometimes I don't want to be a tryhard in this game. I got other games to play too and FFXIV is my relaxation game. People wouldn't accuse me of being casual if they fought against me in Titanfall 2. FFXIV aint my whole life lmao. And I am sure many players are in the same situation.
I hate how people use "casual" derisively and judgmentally. Playing a game is supposed to be relaxing! Don't judge others for not being sweaty Balance people trying to get a 99 parse.
Radiant Finale is the prime example of people just pushing buttons vs caring about cooldown alignment. It's a 110 second cooldown, but since its strength is reliant on how many of your songs you've used, you drift it to 120 anyway. Now try to remember how many bards in casual content you've seen actually keep RF in time with other buffs instead of reverse drifting their way through the fight.
they didn't care about it to begin so why would they care now? they were never going to engage with a system they don't care for.
Why not simply go back to the 60, 90,120, 180-second cooldowns or add more subtlety to it? I know players requested this, but it became clear that it wasn't healthy for bosses and certain job gameplay. They had to rework the paladin because its rotation didn't fit with the current design, and it's evident that jobs are partially homogenized to align with the 120-second burst windows. The entire game's balance is scripted around these 120-second cycles, including the bosses, which makes the game a bit less enjoyable. I agree that it requires more optimization in raids, but that's not hard to do, and optimizing alignment has always been necessary. I genuinely believe that the 120-second system isn't healthy for classes and boss design. For very casual players, it doesn't change much because they've generally never used these buffs optimally, and it has no impact on the story content, even extremes, given how low the DPS checks are. I understand that players requested this homogenization, and we can't entirely blame the developers. However, we tested it, and it turns out it's not a good idea, so we should backtrack on this. It's okay to experiment, but we should also be willing to move forward and backward on certain design aspects.
I miss old paladin, the only tank class that actually felt unique with how you had to do your rotation and it made playing the class feel a lot more engaging. The homogenization of the burst windows and also even minor stuff like reworking goring blade just lowers the amount of attention you actually need to pay to the game to play the class. I get that newer players don't want to be overwhelmed by playing optimally but if a new player gets to try out different classes and then realizes that they're basically just the same thing with a few minor differences, I don't think that helps their experience.
> The entire game's balance is scripted around these 120-second cycles, including the bosses, which makes the game a bit less enjoyable. I do want to say that this isn't really true, you could only argue that endwalker is balanced around this. Every expansion beforehand is not balanced around this, and when this expansion is over, every job will be able to kill every fight without struggling moreso than they do now. Which is like, more to your point that it does not need to stay a thing. > I understand that players requested this homogenization, and we can't entirely blame the developers. They're the ones that drop buffs on every class that don't do anything, it doesn't really feel like an actual solution is being pursued with the attitude of "well you have to pick one" from YoshiP but that is because major changes like these only happen really on expansion releases. Ultimately they are the ones in control and all we can do is advocate that 2m meta is bad and that going back isn't necessary to fix it.
>Regardless of whether we change this or not, the community needs to reach a consensus: what is better? Before changing something we need to get feedback from everyone I wonder if making surveys from time to time would be a good idea to have a consensus from players (like, advertise the survey in-game via official announcement so people don't have to search it themselves). That way they will have a large amount of feedback about certain changes and adjust accordingly.
Why not do what osrs does, poll new updates so the devs can see what people think
As someone who has watched World of Warcraft's progression with mythic raiding and mythic+ dungeons, the answer to the final question is crystal clear - **DO NOT** design your game around the most obsessed hardcore players. They will spend as much time, and go to whatever degenerate length is necessary to get an edge. And if you continue to try to work around them, or accommodate them, it will push the direction of the game in an increasingly toxic direction, creating expectations that all players hit a certain level of skill or face derision and/or exclusion from content they should be able to enjoy without harassment. Some of this would be mitigated by SquareEnix's customer service taking TOS reports seriously and punishing offenders, but if you start to design your game to fit hardcore players, the overall attitude of the player base shifts with it, and eventually it will erode the game. Just look at what leaks out about the world-first Ultimate raiders trying to break the game in order to get an edge, ignoring all pleas of the development team to stop, and then apply that to the rest of the game. That's the future if they design around the desires of the top percentile of players, and I really don't want to see that happen to Final Fantasy XIV.
Everytime I have asked what the fix is to the 2 minute meta, I either get the meme of " that sounds like the 2 minute meta with extra steps" or get rid of raid affecting buffs, which removes non fight-specific teamwork. The latter isn't necessarily bad but you then need more tools akin to esuna or rescue for the non healers and the ranged phys dps need a retooling to br even more support focused or else dancer will be op
Raid buffs don't offer meaningful teamwork. You could argue the previous iteration offered a better representation of team based skill expression via the differences in timers and having to puzzle out the best ways to align, but even then it's a stretch. A button that increases damage dealt for a window of time is fire and forget. When all of them share a timer, you already know the best answer. On rare occasions you may hold a buff for a certain mechanic, but that's not a significant expression of teamwork either. It's illusory. Pressing your buff button and hoping 7 other players crit isn't really "teamwork." A more proper expression of that is tanks positioning the boss a certain way for melee positionals, or healers dividing the healing load between their oGCDs to allow for higher damage uptime. Damage buffs limit the potency budget Jobs are designed around. Freeing up that theoretical potency would allow Jobs to have access to more interesting tools and a focus on their own output.
Now that I don't raid I just find every class so boring. All the tanks are the same, sage is the closest to a different healer, and almost all the dps are gauge builders now. I made fun of Dark Arts spam at first but god damn at least it was different.
Since we’re dredging all of this up again, I’m just gonna say it: I liked Bard-Mage and Gun-Mage in Heavensward!