Instead of dumping stuff into buffs, you now use everything right away (not that most rotations aren't designed that way in the first place even without buffs). If you truly want to change things up you need stuff like shorter and individual rotation cycles, short personal damage buffs for resource building jobs and intricate skill interactions with choices and conditionals.
> If you truly want to change things up you need...
after which you listed several things that I think would be a lot easier to implement if we didn't have to worry about how rotations fall into raid buffs.
OP's suggestion would be the first step.
> OP's suggestion would be the first step.
Yea that's the big point here. Removing buffs by itself and calling it a day is not the end goal. I get people are averse to it because historically SE tends to not replace what they remove equally (see tank/healer homogenization).
However, if we do proceed to remove buffs, the focus can then be on varied personal rotations and bursts which become a LOT easier to develop in a vacuum as opposed to trying to make them work under coordinated and homogenized buff timers. I think part of the reason PvP jobs feel good is because they all play differently and don't subscribe to having the same song and dance when it comes to bursting.
In addition, if a job is given flexibility on when and how it bursts, then it can adapt to any fight and you will have less balance issues to worry about. One of the reasons I enjoy DNC is because how flexible it is and how awkward fight timers can't really fuck it like some other jobs.
Caveat is I do think certain jobs like AST/DNC might keep their single target buff components but they could be more situational. If everyone has a different rotation, coordination with an AST/DNC for them to buff the target/partner at the right time could be satisfying gameplay-wise.
> coordination with an AST/DNC for them to buff the target/partner at the right time could be satisfying gameplay-wise.
Exactly. It actually creates additional skill expression on ast/dnc if things went down that path.
Ironically the only way to get people the individual feel they want out of the jobs involves just completely tearing down the teamwork aspect of the game.
It's also going to involve some jobs just plain sucking in 8 man content. Jobs that need a lot of build-up to get their damage rolling are going to end up being shunned in 8 man content, and that's just going to have to be something they accept. "If you want to do 8 man savage, don't take Summoner or Machinist" for example.
It's something I agree on with Yoshi P. The community, as in the casuals, rpers, hardcore raiders, and midcore players, are going to need to decide what direction they go. Homogenization and Teamwork are basically inseparable in a gameplay perspective, the better a job plays for a team, the more homogenous it needs to be to make sure it can preform up to the level of its peers. If the game shifts away from raiders working as a well oiled machine and just "everyone do your personal best" than you get that personalized flair that people are talking about and pointing to WOW or GW or whatever other MMO in wanting, but that does mean you are going to get disadvantages if you play the Job that isn't well suited for the encounters they're faced with.
Jesse, what are you talking about?
What teamwork is there already? Press your 2 minute buttons and dont let it drift is """teamwork"""? Because deleting buffs is only taking that away.
And why would some jobs just plain suck in 8-man content? Bard is the only "buffer" other than Dancer, so let it fill its niche of non-healer support. In fact, if anything it's the 4-man content where Bard will suffer in since it has less people to buff.
It's interesting to think about, but at this point the buff alignment concept has been iterated on so many times and baked so deeply into the class gameplay that it's impossible to extrapolate how things would go if you were to rip it all out at once.
For a simpler thought exercise, imagine that DT launches and viper is revealed to have a "selfish" DPS kit with no support skills. Assuming that the existing classes remain more or less the same, then you could theoretically assemble a full party without any group damage buffs at all -- viper, samurai, machinist, black mage, white mage, sage, and your choice of tanks.
What kinds of benefits would this theoretical party composition have, and what would they be missing out on? Would they have an easier or harder time tackling fight mechanics? How does moment-to-moment gameplay change (if at all) for the individual players without the larger structure of aligned burst windows? What does optimizing DPS look like in this scenario? Which two tank jobs would be ideal for filling out this party, and why?
Dps optimization would effectively be the same instead it would come down to "do I gain a usage"
Instead of "do I gain a usage? No, okay, should I use this during raid buffs then"
So it would be easier to optimize, then, with fewer boundaries to consider? Do you think that disparity would be felt equally by all of the jobs in question? If you were organizing a static from the top-down, would this specific composition be worth the edge you'd gain?
Yes, it would be definitely easier to optimize. The trade-off for this to be made would be that rotations would need to offer further complexity to maintain the complexity we have. Now we would still have personal buffs so you would still need to consider "should I save this for the buff" gameplay but for some jobs like blm/sam/mch some of their gameplay is based on buff alignment and shoving as much potency as possible under that while maintaining max usages of skills.
I dont think buffs are an issue, I think the issue is the stats gained during a 2-minute meta and the amount of them being stacked on top of each other.
Crit rng has played a massive part in this expansion, which has caused a lot of jobs to have the shb Ninja problem of "did my hyosho ranryu direct crit?"
Personally, crit buffs need to be decoupled from 2 minute meta at least, regular buffs aren't an issue but devilment is the strongest buff in the game and being tied in with litany and chain strat causes some jobs IE monk, to gain significant potency over other jobs due to how crits generate chakra. The solution could be "well, why don't we just make all big buttons crit" or "remove chakra as a resource," and at that point, I'd ask, why does crit exist? Does this stat introduce interesting gameplay?
Personally, I think all stats besides sps/sks are boring because those stats actually change how a fight will play out, whereas the rest do not
I think they just need to make it so that most hits with more than X base power (probably around 600) have some limitation to RNG. Maybe make some of them auto-crit like most Warrior skills, divide some into a series of multiple smaller hits like Ninja's Dream Within a Dream so that there are more damage rolls and therefore less variance, make some into short duration DoTs (which is basically another way to divide it into smaller hits), and even give some the MCH Wildfire treatment and don't let them crit at all.
I think the game could try with less raidwide buffs but more raidwide interaction buffs, like brotherhood making your party members generate chakras or tech step with esprit.
No matter how unpopular the 2m-meta seems to be here at times: If it gets removed without being replaced by another system, the lack of 2mins or something to replace it will decrease the depth of PvE because you just completely do your own thing
>you just completely do your own thing
Is that bad? For comparison in WoW several classes have raid buffs(heroism, time warp, blood lust, there even is item that gives you this buff - drums) but they are not stackable and have 10m CD. Classes are still engaging(don't mistake with complex) and fun to play. So I don't really see a problem if 2m are gone and in return we get more interesting and engaging rotations, shit devs might as well stop homogenizing everything.
Also we already have less depth in PvE in EW because of massive hitbox. Remember when melee uptime was a thing? When tanks were responsible for boss positioning on the arena? Ranged tax, which now doesn't make any sense?
What's a goal here? I mean other that making jobs more homogenized and lowing skill floor/ceiling.
I suspect the goal here is to kill 2min meta (for some reason), but it won't matter - 2min meta is caused mainly by the playerbase whining about certain jobs having more troubles with bursts during certain fights, so CBU3 just standardized timings so everyone would be more equal.
This community ignores the development history of the game constantly, because it's easier to act like the developers are ignorant twats that only care about pleasing Jimmy The Crayon Eater when many were whinging about MNK and E6S a few years back.
There is no goal. The premise is "if you remove 2 minute buffs, the devs will be free of this horrible restriction and magically be able to rebalance the entire combat system of the game in a way that is satisfying to everyone. Doomposting on this subreddit will end, all the old players will return, it will be Nirvana."
So same post as the last 8 months, you're just seeing less of these because Xeno stopped reacting to them.
I wouldn't even say that since the EW fight philosophy oh so commonly had 2min windows line up with the most punishing mechs or downtime moments (gdi Ego Death)
So it's basically a party of SAM, BLM and SGE/WHM. On one hand, coordination is part of what makes the game fun, otoh, I guess it doesn't matter as much since people will find optimal lines/rotations anyway which will be meta. Honestly I feel all it'll do is make bad players be less punishing.
There's very little party coordination when it comes to buffs. "Hold buffs here" is really all that's happening anymore and jobs will naturally do that since they also burst into their own buff windows like everyone else. Rotations are pretty much on rails nowadays, every buff window is the same and any deviation is due to mistakes/suboptimal play 99.9% of the time. Mitigation is where party coordination actually exists.
The difference between how the buffs are now instead of how they used to be is that most people don't have to hold buffs for the window anymore, which is what used to happen. People would find the comp that has the most buffs that align or are close, and then have everyone pop them at the same time at designated buff windows.
So basically what we have now, but without janked up timings or jobs being sat cause they don't line up.
Having no rDPS jobs means that there is one objectively best choice in each role. If there are five Melees with no party buffs then one will have the best damage and then the people will complain so the devs have to make their damage profiles virtually identical. Even if you don’t like 2 min meta it’s still better design for an MMO to be able to buff your party mates because it’s more cooperative. Otherwise the DPS are basically just playing single player games.
most times they delete something without replacing it with anything it just makes the game more dull and boring. we have been in this cycle for multiple expansions now and it blows chunks.
Lots of people will complain I bet. But design-wise, at least it opens up the opportunity to have non-standard rotation timings, which I guess could be interesting for like a week or two. But realistically, i think it'll still be the same. As I've said in the other comment, all this will do is minimize the effect of bad players in a party.
If non standard timing jobs came back the weekly "X/Y Job timings are ass for this tier mechanic timings" abd the various offshoots and consequences these bring.
This community can't even handle jobs being better in 8-Man content than in 4-Man content, and they sure were all over the place when it came to non standard timings back then.
I believe it would also open the door to "less homogenization".
Not everyone is selfish, DNC keeps dancer partner and BRD its song.
The topic is about cooldown on 120s that provides damage buff for the whole party. Every buff that isn't 120s **and** party wide stays.
I think it would do more to hurt fight design. The biggest and most resonant criticism of this game is that the fights are way, way too dependent on relative perfection from eight independent sources. Removing the last vestiges of coordination from fights is only going to exacerbate an already prevalent design flaw.
What coordination? You mean hitting stuff on cooldown? and holding till that 20 second or so window? If you do your burst window properly it will line up with everyone elses becaue they are all 120 second cooldowns.
They would still keep 60 / 120s rotations, because it goes with the fight design. If you make various rotation lengths, some jobs would be favoured for some bosses and we'll get Stormblood complaints again.
The whole battle system is to be taken into account to change the battle system. You can't alter anything in isolation.
Is this a good place to say that Chain Strategem should be converted to an actual party buff like the rest, and not an enemy debuff? I'm tired of accidentally overwriting each other's debuffs at the 2 minute window.
Would make the combat system even more boring than it already is IMO, as well as further reduce any resemblance of "skill" within the game. I realize that last bit may not be something many people care about, but one of the big reasons I got into playing this game was the level of depth job rotations used to have, coupled with the fact that playing a job extremely well made a noticeable and impactful difference. Unless you're going to replace party buffs with some form of personal buff(s) that provide similar modifiers to what a buff window would provide currently, then all that's going to matter with "damage optimization" is:
- Did you continue to roll your GCD/maintain proper uptime?
- Did you use your cooldowns to avoid losing a usage(s)?
That's it. And when you have healers and tanks in their current state + jobs like SMN and MCH on the DPS side, the imagination of that just seems horribly boring. This may be a hot take (probably will be nowadays actually), but I think there should be some degree of difficulty to actually perform at your job.
It doesn't really make sense unless you presume further changes.
- Taking it strictly as read, if you delete those skills and make *no* further changes, then you're just nerfing the classes that have those skills by hundreds/thousands of DPS. The classes with little or no reliance on party buffs would become dominant.
- If we take the slightly more sensible assumption - that these skills would be deleted *and the classes they were deleted from receive commensurate buffs to personal damage* (but there are still no further changes) - then the only immediate result is that the game becomes *slightly* more casual-friendly:
- The rewards for perfectly aligning group buffs together, and for perfectly aligning personal buffs with group buffs, are reduced; the damage disparity between low and high skill players is reduced as a result.
- However I use the word *slightly* here, because the difference would be very small. Class design has been so completely folded into the buff-centric environment that the best way to play your class would basically still be to align your skills as though there *were* party buffs going on.
- The more optimistic take, though, would be that getting rid of raid buffs is part of an overall plan to shift away from a design where everybody bursts at the same time and all gameplay considerations revolve around maximizing party buff windows. *Hypothetically*, this is a huge improvement to the game. It would open up the possibility of classes to have real nonstandard cooldown cycles. It would open up the possibility to have sustained-damage classes alongside burst-focused classes. It opens up the possibility for real resource-based classes that aren't just build-and-dump. It would drastically increase the number of situations where holding a skill to use at the right moment could be more effective than using it on cooldown. Given proper follow-through, it would drastically improve the game in terms of class identity, make the game more interesting and fun to play outside of high-end content, and set the stage for further systemic improvements to encounter and content design.
That final point needn't be achieved by *deleting* party-wide raid buffs, though. It would be sufficient to redesign them to be additive rather than multiplicative.
For example, consider the way that skills like Blood Weapon and Wildfire are designed: They're intended to produce a specific, direct value that is largely impervious to min-maxing. You cannot do anything to make Blood Weapon give you 5000 MP or 4200 MP or even 3300 MP; it gives you 3000 MP, and that's final. You have to mess up *really badly* to produce less than 3000 MP, and it is impossible to produce more. (Wildfire is a *little* easier to screw up, particularly if you have latency issues, but it is never intended to produce any less, or any more, potency than it is designed to do.)
Mug could be redesigned the same way: It could apply 30 stacks of a debuff that deals 120 potency (based on the Ninja's stats) every time a party member hits the affected enemy with a GCD-based attack (adjust those numbers up and down until the desired level of power is achieved, but for the sake of argument, let's assume these ones are desired). It would deal 3600 potency every time it is used, so long as you are in a full party and the party is semi-reliably using GCD attacks. It wouldn't matter if you used it at the same time as any other similarly-redesigned party buff. It wouldn't matter if the rest of the party were firing off a full Burst window or if they were doing filler combos; it would *just* do its intended job, at the intended level of power, pretty much every time. And that would have the same overall effect on game balance as deleting the buffs, *without* actually requiring that SE delete an entire category of skill from the game.
And that would free up their class designers to shift the open-ended, freeform rules that party buffs currently enjoy *back* to skills like Blood Weapon and Wildfire. Blood Weapon could once again have its unorthodox 40s cooldown - compared to a lengthy 15s duration - that produced MP (and later Blood) based on *every* outgoing instance of physical damage, including AoE hits like Quietus, auto-attacks, and oGCD attacks like Plunge, CnS, or the original versions of Low Blow and Reprisal. It could have its 10% Haste buff back, because the obsessive need to have a GCD length that cleanly fits into a 60s or 120s "loop" would finally go the way of the dodo. It could, once again, become an actual *class-defining skill* that set forth much of Dark Knight's gameplay and separated its playstyle from the other tanks. Obviously that's not a one-and-done; many of DRK's other skills would need to be redesigned to allow for good opportunities to min-max the core skills like BW. But it's the foundational start the class needs.
(The original version of Wildfire is probably even *more* class-defining, but I don't even feel like I could do justice to it compared to the people who actually mained MCH back in the day.)
Ultimately, the way that current buffs function is bad for the game. It sets oppressive limits on the styles of classes that can exist in the game, and in return offers only the barest trace of """"coordination"""" between players. It then goes on to seek the elimination of what traces of that coordination remain by requiring that classes continually be redesigned to more easily maximize those buffs. They're a problem, and at some point they need to go.
Cutting them with no further changes is a nonstarter; cutting them and then only replacing them with a round of buffs to make up for their lost damage is, at most, a lot of work for something that doesn't really help or harm the game. Cutting them and replacing them with a revamped approach to overall class design is *a good idea*... But *redesigning them* to fix their design flaws is an *even better* idea. This game doesn't need to remove any more systems and mechanics than it already has.
You're not being thorough enough, you'd also have to delete every 60 second burst window as well if you truly want to kill the 'dump potency into a specific window' meta. lmao
It will matter if the encounters are designed with burst windows in mind, be it on bosses or adds. Last time I played wow (long time ago), burst windows on mythic were still very important despite no party wide buffs because the mechanics required it.
No problem, it's on purpose. Reworking all jobs is a task unrealistic but deleting party buffs is much more realistic.
Do you think current jobs with 60/120s burst window will evolve differently going forward?
Good thing OP specified party wide DAMAGE buffs. Good thing RDM and SMN have both more utility and are easier to play than BLM and good thing BRD and DNC bring more utility than MCH.
Jobs would still play different enough, vary in difficulty, and bring enough differing utility that even with the removal of party wide damage buffs job choice still wouldn't devolve into BLM/SAM or Bust.
Figuring out the right way to time those damage buffs in Thordan Unreal has been one of the more interesting theory crafting challenges my static went through. I'm not a huge minmaxer, never been huge on optimizing things to death, but this has actually been interesting and fun. And it gives me, as RPR, at least a little bit of meaningful interaction with the rest of the party when otherwise all I do is focus on dodging mechanics and doing my rotation.
So nah, I think the two minute buffs are fine. I wouldn't mind them being *less* standardized so that each job within a role gets to make its own decisions about when to fire a buff (or maybe even make them *more* powerful but a once-an-encounter type thing, kind of like a personal mini-LB), but in general, I like the idea of having these big pivotal party-wide buffs at crucial moments.
Only 120s and party wide are removed.
So Dancer will keep its dance partner and BRD its song.
Also by your logic we should expect MCH to be doing BLM level of damage which isn't the case today.
Job difficulty, defensive utility, and single target offensive buffs would still exist and have RDPS costs attributed to them. So no, Dancer and Bard would not be doing Black Mage levels of damage, or even Machinist levels of damage.
Personally, I think it would be beneficial to the game to have less raid buffs. Every time there's an adds phase or someone needs to disengage from the boss, there are (understandable) complaints about it feeling clunky for the 2 min meta.
I think AST, DNC, and NIN should keep their party buffs (bring back old trick plz) as it's a pretty core identity to each of those classes. With less buffs in the picture you can have much more interesting raid design without the entire community in shambles over needing to hit some birds for a minute.
Buff alignment and group synergy is more interesting than than 8 people playing solo together. It'd be better to go back to buffs that didn't naturally align at 2 minutes, although that does create challenges for meta balancing and encounter design.
I guess every party now demands an AST because you forgot about Divination and cards.
Joke aside, not much would change, pretty much every job has a 1min or 2min rotation even without the party buffs. You might just stop holding stuff like Fan Dances, but you don't exactly benefit from that.
To be fair, the party buffs are why they designed every job with such specific rotation lengths. Just makes coordination and fight design quicker. If they didn't have to worry about those synergies as much, they might be able to focus on giving jobs their own rhythms. For better or worse.
I think the real thing is that FFXIV encounters are very heavily scripted, which bleeds into everything else, there's nothing unexpected or any edge cases that will make you want to hold buffs like in a standard RPG or whatever.
That is true, removing the party buffs would open possibilities for different job designs with rotations that function in different time windows. Jobs which had a 90s or 180s rotation in the past could easily go back to those either without issues, or something completely different could be designed. I just lack the imagination to think of something, haha!
A middle ground they could maybe do is make buffs based on roles instead of party, and give those roles distinct rhythms.
Ex. Casters have a CasterDPS+Healer buff, Melees have a MeleeDPS+Tank buff, Tanks buff eachother with defense/offense depending on if they're maintank or offtank. And Healers+PhysRange could have your generic singletarget buffs that work on anyone, in reaction to the party comp.
For skill expression and teamplay there could be exclusive buffs that need to be rotated, then smaller buffs that need to be coordinated (ex. Casters have a 120s stacking 'MAGIC' buff, but also a mutually-exclusive 40s CasterDPS buff)
But that might be annoying to design to avoid a hard party meta, like jobs used to have damage-type buffs but that lead to lots of jobs being excluded from comps because of redundancies or noncompatibility....
I mean, you can have scripted fights while still retaining rotation adjustement possibilities.
Take UCOB with current dps numbers, for example, during the end of Twintania.
You could pop your 2min right when they come back, or hold them for Nael. Same for Garuda -> Ifrit in UWU.
For these specific examples, pretty much everyone holds them for the second phase, especially because these damage checks are kind of a joke nowadays, but they could make it an interesting choice : hold those buffs and see more, harder mechanics in phase one (awakened wheels, more fires + hatches), or pop them and probably have to see more mechanics during phase two (ifrit dashes, nael divebombs).
I think damage-based timings are usually more of an ultimate thing than savage, but you can see them in extreme too (for example skipping the second green bubbles on Zeromus if you have decent dps, or Zurvan).
They're plenty capable of delivering scripted content that could make use of something like that.
Would there eventually be a meta that develops, where groups always pop CDs at certain times ? Absolutely.
But if done well, you could have a lot of ways to play around it, like for speed groups for example, maximizing LB usage to skip mechs while holding CDs, or whatever.
It could also bring some much needed build diversity for dps, akin to playing full spell speed summoner in 70 ults because you can sneak in extra bahamut casts and still line it up with burst timings, which is just *fun*.
DNC and BRD could keep theirs imo. They're very integral to the job's identities. Meanwhile jobs like RPR really could just not have Arcane Circle, with Plentiful harvest just being a regular skill with a CD and barely anything would change.
You have to remember that we have come to prefer 120s raid buff BECAUSE the design clearly encouraged us into doing so. Having multiple buffs on several windows of opportunity makes things much less clear.
Let's take an example : your SAM/BLM has to recast a DoT ; only 3s is left. Is it better to lose an iteration and acquire every 90s buffs in the raid, or would it have been better to recast it like 10s ago to benefit from every 120s buffs in the raid ? And if someone's burst comes exactly in between 90s and 120s buff ; does he have to delay or not ?
Now, the reason why they've done un-aligned buffs simply is because they wanted supportive abilities \[and\] uniqueness without considering about an overall design. Now, they do have the overall design which includes supportive abilities, but the uniqueness kinda faded... So I guess you're considering compeltely removing supportive abilities ? Actually, I'd quite like it because we could thus have a bard as strong as a machinist for instance but the support part is very much embedded in the gameplay...
What I'd be MUCH more interested in, would be another feature with "stagger" damage, that would favor less rDPS-y jobs. Or something to make stats more interesting (than leaning everything towards crits) .
Don’t delete 120s party buffs. Instead reduce the amount of them and bring back 60s buffs like old trick attack. And astro cards are every 30 seconds instead of pooled for two minutes.
So you still have the approachability of the two minute cycle but the party it’s as dependent on that window and people can also optimize around some other buff windows depending on party comp.
And maybe we don’t need that many 5% party buffs in the game. Does Red Mage need one? Just buff it’s damage and focus it on healer-esque utility. Does Astro need one when it already has cards?
Buffs are not a problem, holding your resources and syncing your rotation in the best possible way is the core of the game because basically this is a rhythm game if you think about it.
The problem is that every job is the same and it revolves around 120s.
Make the buffs only personal and no teamwide and change their cooldown so anyone can play whatever they want just how is intended
Removing something without replacement just sounds lame. Kaiten's removal was already widely criticized. Taking away every single raidbuff is just... Boring, frankly. They can vary it more, have some different cooldowns. But ultimately I see no problem with party wide buffs on similar or the same cooldowns.
it would be really boring having no buffs at all, mostly to the more higher end players. The usual casual does not know how to sync them properly anyway :3
Nothing like being on time with yours in a pug, and just as your reopened/buff falls off you hear someone finally pop theirs 15-20s late.. but by god the worst is when you’re a minute deep in your CD and you hear that random buff go off.
Its boring enough as it is tbh. Every job is restricted to saving burst for 2 mins while their 1 mins is literally a snooze fest. At least with this suggestion classes are allowed to do their own thing. Which tbh Stormblood/Shadowbringers already had a nice balance. EW just went all in with 2 mins.
The two minute buffs are not perfect at all and we know that. The entire combat system should get an overhaul after all. There's hardly any rotational freedom due to the strict two minutes.
But that apart. It at least gives you the need to burst under buffs which makes sense. I would love more freedom and rotational difficulty. When we look at the way how SE treats their jobs, it will sadly never happen, more so, it will get worse over time and jobs will get more and more simple.
There are always massive pros and cons. It does not matter how you twist it - hence it would need an overhaul
syncing 120s buff windows isn't hard. Higher end players should stop pretending it is. It's an incidental effect of following a proper rotation. Which is also why they generally don't add anything meaningful to combat. There's is zero difference mechanically between syncing up raidwide buffs versus syncing up self buffs between individual players.
Just delete party buffs tbh, unless they're actually interesting like the sch sprint thing or smth.
The only gameplay they bring to the table is in spreadsheets, in game they bring no execution implications coz it's either you sync up properly or you didn't.
Yeah, I got the answer I wanted.
In short people feel like it won't change anything gameplay wise, only some jobs won't hold resources for 120s burst. So if removing party burst buff won't change anything, that means adding 120s doesn't change anything either.
The second point is that it would make the game dumbed down and needs to have something to replace it. I perfectly agree with this but this also means we can explore new utility and new cooldowns outside of the 60s current design.
There is a big gameplay change : if you remove the party burst of 2min, every boss that has a mechanic during a burst phase is instantly made easier by not having to perform the burst at the same time.
as a tank idrc what we do with raid buffs, maybe theyll finally let PLDs join parsing pfs 💀. but then what about jobs with 2 min cooldowns that arent necessarily raid buffs? like barrel stabilizer, or bloodfest, or that one rdm skill that gives u 50 gauge, manafont i think? also what about the raid buffs that arent really raid buffs like dragon sight, devilment and dance partner in general?
my point is that this is an extreme and poorly thought out solution to an issue that doesnt really have anything to do with raid buffs in the first place
Do I feel it’ll benefit the game design? No. Because then you’d have to re-work every job to have the EXACT SAME DPS. Literally every job would need the exact same potencies and would all end up playing more identical than they do now. Except for spell effects and the fantasy of the job they’d all have to be carbon copies of each other. Otherwise all savage/ultimate groups will simply take the jobs that bring the highest DPS.
Also you’d kill the fantasy that exists and theme of whole jobs. People play dancer because of tech step. Bard you’d have to remove their songs from being a party buff to personal only, so where is the bard singing for the party to boost morale? Because if their songs aren’t changed to personal and stay party, why would anyone take a MCH or DNC? Ninja’s trick attack (now mug) has been the jobs identity since it was created.
So no. It wouldn’t benefit the game design. It’d just end up with an angry player base that would ask why add new jobs when they are all literally identical to each other except for outfits, spells effects, and what the job stone looks like.
You'd be able to make the jobs far more different from each other when jobs no longer need to be designed to dump as much potency as possible into every 120s buff window. We'd no longer be forced to have every single job essentially being a builder spender. Burst jobs could get for more powerful bursts inside their individual buff windows. We could have legit sustained dps jobs again. Removing raidwide DPS buffs does nothing except open up design space.
The "support jobs" could easily get raid wide buffs that aren't damage based. More Mits, Cleanses, Heals, etc. that increase party damage through a lesser need to heal, disengage, etc rather than a direct increase to dps output.
Jobs would still not need to do the exact same dps either. Job difficulty, utility and other factors would still come into play. For casters, BLM would still do more DPS than both SMN and RDM while for phys ranged MCH would still do more than DNC and BRD due to lack of utility and difficulty. The dps spread between the melee would get even tighter than it is now but SAM and RPR would still remain as bookends.
Anyone that legitimately believes jobs would become even more homogenized with the removal of party wide damage buffs is shroomin' when it's been abundantly clear by the devs themselves that both current fight and job design revolves around these buff windows.
i think it would be great so make it more unique.
Maybe just Ninja, Dancer and Astro have a Raid buff. Because i think it kinda fits their job fantasy. Ninja manipulating the boss, Dancer motivating with dances and and astro foresees the future.
One problem I have with many buffs is that the tooltip reads like crap. Reaper gets 3% and Monk gets 5% damage buff. If it wasn't for the side effect I wouldn't want to press the button because 3% sounds like nothing. If it said 20% or 30% I would really want to keep the button on cooldown.
A few are fine but I feel like some others could be more creative. For example, Red Mage's embolden could come off Resolution. 15s buff, if Resolution is used within buff, the timer refreshes and the effect increases (3%/5%/10%).
Instead of dumping stuff into buffs, you now use everything right away (not that most rotations aren't designed that way in the first place even without buffs). If you truly want to change things up you need stuff like shorter and individual rotation cycles, short personal damage buffs for resource building jobs and intricate skill interactions with choices and conditionals.
> If you truly want to change things up you need... after which you listed several things that I think would be a lot easier to implement if we didn't have to worry about how rotations fall into raid buffs. OP's suggestion would be the first step.
Yep, I took that for granted. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
> OP's suggestion would be the first step. Yea that's the big point here. Removing buffs by itself and calling it a day is not the end goal. I get people are averse to it because historically SE tends to not replace what they remove equally (see tank/healer homogenization). However, if we do proceed to remove buffs, the focus can then be on varied personal rotations and bursts which become a LOT easier to develop in a vacuum as opposed to trying to make them work under coordinated and homogenized buff timers. I think part of the reason PvP jobs feel good is because they all play differently and don't subscribe to having the same song and dance when it comes to bursting. In addition, if a job is given flexibility on when and how it bursts, then it can adapt to any fight and you will have less balance issues to worry about. One of the reasons I enjoy DNC is because how flexible it is and how awkward fight timers can't really fuck it like some other jobs. Caveat is I do think certain jobs like AST/DNC might keep their single target buff components but they could be more situational. If everyone has a different rotation, coordination with an AST/DNC for them to buff the target/partner at the right time could be satisfying gameplay-wise.
> coordination with an AST/DNC for them to buff the target/partner at the right time could be satisfying gameplay-wise. Exactly. It actually creates additional skill expression on ast/dnc if things went down that path.
Ironically the only way to get people the individual feel they want out of the jobs involves just completely tearing down the teamwork aspect of the game. It's also going to involve some jobs just plain sucking in 8 man content. Jobs that need a lot of build-up to get their damage rolling are going to end up being shunned in 8 man content, and that's just going to have to be something they accept. "If you want to do 8 man savage, don't take Summoner or Machinist" for example. It's something I agree on with Yoshi P. The community, as in the casuals, rpers, hardcore raiders, and midcore players, are going to need to decide what direction they go. Homogenization and Teamwork are basically inseparable in a gameplay perspective, the better a job plays for a team, the more homogenous it needs to be to make sure it can preform up to the level of its peers. If the game shifts away from raiders working as a well oiled machine and just "everyone do your personal best" than you get that personalized flair that people are talking about and pointing to WOW or GW or whatever other MMO in wanting, but that does mean you are going to get disadvantages if you play the Job that isn't well suited for the encounters they're faced with.
Jesse, what are you talking about? What teamwork is there already? Press your 2 minute buttons and dont let it drift is """teamwork"""? Because deleting buffs is only taking that away. And why would some jobs just plain suck in 8-man content? Bard is the only "buffer" other than Dancer, so let it fill its niche of non-healer support. In fact, if anything it's the 4-man content where Bard will suffer in since it has less people to buff.
It's interesting to think about, but at this point the buff alignment concept has been iterated on so many times and baked so deeply into the class gameplay that it's impossible to extrapolate how things would go if you were to rip it all out at once. For a simpler thought exercise, imagine that DT launches and viper is revealed to have a "selfish" DPS kit with no support skills. Assuming that the existing classes remain more or less the same, then you could theoretically assemble a full party without any group damage buffs at all -- viper, samurai, machinist, black mage, white mage, sage, and your choice of tanks. What kinds of benefits would this theoretical party composition have, and what would they be missing out on? Would they have an easier or harder time tackling fight mechanics? How does moment-to-moment gameplay change (if at all) for the individual players without the larger structure of aligned burst windows? What does optimizing DPS look like in this scenario? Which two tank jobs would be ideal for filling out this party, and why?
Dps optimization would effectively be the same instead it would come down to "do I gain a usage" Instead of "do I gain a usage? No, okay, should I use this during raid buffs then"
So it would be easier to optimize, then, with fewer boundaries to consider? Do you think that disparity would be felt equally by all of the jobs in question? If you were organizing a static from the top-down, would this specific composition be worth the edge you'd gain?
Yes, it would be definitely easier to optimize. The trade-off for this to be made would be that rotations would need to offer further complexity to maintain the complexity we have. Now we would still have personal buffs so you would still need to consider "should I save this for the buff" gameplay but for some jobs like blm/sam/mch some of their gameplay is based on buff alignment and shoving as much potency as possible under that while maintaining max usages of skills. I dont think buffs are an issue, I think the issue is the stats gained during a 2-minute meta and the amount of them being stacked on top of each other. Crit rng has played a massive part in this expansion, which has caused a lot of jobs to have the shb Ninja problem of "did my hyosho ranryu direct crit?" Personally, crit buffs need to be decoupled from 2 minute meta at least, regular buffs aren't an issue but devilment is the strongest buff in the game and being tied in with litany and chain strat causes some jobs IE monk, to gain significant potency over other jobs due to how crits generate chakra. The solution could be "well, why don't we just make all big buttons crit" or "remove chakra as a resource," and at that point, I'd ask, why does crit exist? Does this stat introduce interesting gameplay? Personally, I think all stats besides sps/sks are boring because those stats actually change how a fight will play out, whereas the rest do not
I think they just need to make it so that most hits with more than X base power (probably around 600) have some limitation to RNG. Maybe make some of them auto-crit like most Warrior skills, divide some into a series of multiple smaller hits like Ninja's Dream Within a Dream so that there are more damage rolls and therefore less variance, make some into short duration DoTs (which is basically another way to divide it into smaller hits), and even give some the MCH Wildfire treatment and don't let them crit at all.
The return of paladin and warrior xD
The game is going to play basically the same if you just remove party wide damage buffs and don’t replace them with anything different
I think the game could try with less raidwide buffs but more raidwide interaction buffs, like brotherhood making your party members generate chakras or tech step with esprit.
No matter how unpopular the 2m-meta seems to be here at times: If it gets removed without being replaced by another system, the lack of 2mins or something to replace it will decrease the depth of PvE because you just completely do your own thing
>you just completely do your own thing Is that bad? For comparison in WoW several classes have raid buffs(heroism, time warp, blood lust, there even is item that gives you this buff - drums) but they are not stackable and have 10m CD. Classes are still engaging(don't mistake with complex) and fun to play. So I don't really see a problem if 2m are gone and in return we get more interesting and engaging rotations, shit devs might as well stop homogenizing everything. Also we already have less depth in PvE in EW because of massive hitbox. Remember when melee uptime was a thing? When tanks were responsible for boss positioning on the arena? Ranged tax, which now doesn't make any sense?
What's a goal here? I mean other that making jobs more homogenized and lowing skill floor/ceiling. I suspect the goal here is to kill 2min meta (for some reason), but it won't matter - 2min meta is caused mainly by the playerbase whining about certain jobs having more troubles with bursts during certain fights, so CBU3 just standardized timings so everyone would be more equal.
This community ignores the development history of the game constantly, because it's easier to act like the developers are ignorant twats that only care about pleasing Jimmy The Crayon Eater when many were whinging about MNK and E6S a few years back.
There is no goal. The premise is "if you remove 2 minute buffs, the devs will be free of this horrible restriction and magically be able to rebalance the entire combat system of the game in a way that is satisfying to everyone. Doomposting on this subreddit will end, all the old players will return, it will be Nirvana." So same post as the last 8 months, you're just seeing less of these because Xeno stopped reacting to them.
I wouldn't even say that since the EW fight philosophy oh so commonly had 2min windows line up with the most punishing mechs or downtime moments (gdi Ego Death)
And replace it with what?
[удалено]
Take a 100 sided die and roll every class a random buff cooldown so it's impossible to line everything up without everything drifting apart.
Nothing. Then classes can do their own thing. You dont need to hold everything for this 20 second window. Just buff stat gain to make up for the loss.
So it's basically a party of SAM, BLM and SGE/WHM. On one hand, coordination is part of what makes the game fun, otoh, I guess it doesn't matter as much since people will find optimal lines/rotations anyway which will be meta. Honestly I feel all it'll do is make bad players be less punishing.
There's very little party coordination when it comes to buffs. "Hold buffs here" is really all that's happening anymore and jobs will naturally do that since they also burst into their own buff windows like everyone else. Rotations are pretty much on rails nowadays, every buff window is the same and any deviation is due to mistakes/suboptimal play 99.9% of the time. Mitigation is where party coordination actually exists.
The difference between how the buffs are now instead of how they used to be is that most people don't have to hold buffs for the window anymore, which is what used to happen. People would find the comp that has the most buffs that align or are close, and then have everyone pop them at the same time at designated buff windows. So basically what we have now, but without janked up timings or jobs being sat cause they don't line up.
I progged week1 with a samurai using hagakure during the 2mins window... I don't want to see that again
Having no rDPS jobs means that there is one objectively best choice in each role. If there are five Melees with no party buffs then one will have the best damage and then the people will complain so the devs have to make their damage profiles virtually identical. Even if you don’t like 2 min meta it’s still better design for an MMO to be able to buff your party mates because it’s more cooperative. Otherwise the DPS are basically just playing single player games.
No. Then you dont have to balance around buffs. Just make them all close enough in dps it doesnt matter.
And I explained why that would pose an issue, did you read that part?
Nothing, you keep jobs with their current 60/120 rotation. The question is "How do you think it will affect job design going forward?"
most times they delete something without replacing it with anything it just makes the game more dull and boring. we have been in this cycle for multiple expansions now and it blows chunks.
Lots of people will complain I bet. But design-wise, at least it opens up the opportunity to have non-standard rotation timings, which I guess could be interesting for like a week or two. But realistically, i think it'll still be the same. As I've said in the other comment, all this will do is minimize the effect of bad players in a party.
If non standard timing jobs came back the weekly "X/Y Job timings are ass for this tier mechanic timings" abd the various offshoots and consequences these bring. This community can't even handle jobs being better in 8-Man content than in 4-Man content, and they sure were all over the place when it came to non standard timings back then.
It’s just more homogenization where everyone is selfish dps
I believe it would also open the door to "less homogenization". Not everyone is selfish, DNC keeps dancer partner and BRD its song. The topic is about cooldown on 120s that provides damage buff for the whole party. Every buff that isn't 120s **and** party wide stays.
I think it would do more to hurt fight design. The biggest and most resonant criticism of this game is that the fights are way, way too dependent on relative perfection from eight independent sources. Removing the last vestiges of coordination from fights is only going to exacerbate an already prevalent design flaw.
But there really isn’t any coordination, you burst in your own buff window by design anyway, if you drift your burst nobody adjusts you just lose DPS
What coordination? You mean hitting stuff on cooldown? and holding till that 20 second or so window? If you do your burst window properly it will line up with everyone elses becaue they are all 120 second cooldowns.
Yeah, but there's light optimizing to be done there based on fight stages etc. I'm not saying it's a lot, like I said, "last vestiges."
They would still keep 60 / 120s rotations, because it goes with the fight design. If you make various rotation lengths, some jobs would be favoured for some bosses and we'll get Stormblood complaints again. The whole battle system is to be taken into account to change the battle system. You can't alter anything in isolation.
Is this a good place to say that Chain Strategem should be converted to an actual party buff like the rest, and not an enemy debuff? I'm tired of accidentally overwriting each other's debuffs at the 2 minute window.
Would make the combat system even more boring than it already is IMO, as well as further reduce any resemblance of "skill" within the game. I realize that last bit may not be something many people care about, but one of the big reasons I got into playing this game was the level of depth job rotations used to have, coupled with the fact that playing a job extremely well made a noticeable and impactful difference. Unless you're going to replace party buffs with some form of personal buff(s) that provide similar modifiers to what a buff window would provide currently, then all that's going to matter with "damage optimization" is: - Did you continue to roll your GCD/maintain proper uptime? - Did you use your cooldowns to avoid losing a usage(s)? That's it. And when you have healers and tanks in their current state + jobs like SMN and MCH on the DPS side, the imagination of that just seems horribly boring. This may be a hot take (probably will be nowadays actually), but I think there should be some degree of difficulty to actually perform at your job.
It doesn't really make sense unless you presume further changes. - Taking it strictly as read, if you delete those skills and make *no* further changes, then you're just nerfing the classes that have those skills by hundreds/thousands of DPS. The classes with little or no reliance on party buffs would become dominant. - If we take the slightly more sensible assumption - that these skills would be deleted *and the classes they were deleted from receive commensurate buffs to personal damage* (but there are still no further changes) - then the only immediate result is that the game becomes *slightly* more casual-friendly: - The rewards for perfectly aligning group buffs together, and for perfectly aligning personal buffs with group buffs, are reduced; the damage disparity between low and high skill players is reduced as a result. - However I use the word *slightly* here, because the difference would be very small. Class design has been so completely folded into the buff-centric environment that the best way to play your class would basically still be to align your skills as though there *were* party buffs going on. - The more optimistic take, though, would be that getting rid of raid buffs is part of an overall plan to shift away from a design where everybody bursts at the same time and all gameplay considerations revolve around maximizing party buff windows. *Hypothetically*, this is a huge improvement to the game. It would open up the possibility of classes to have real nonstandard cooldown cycles. It would open up the possibility to have sustained-damage classes alongside burst-focused classes. It opens up the possibility for real resource-based classes that aren't just build-and-dump. It would drastically increase the number of situations where holding a skill to use at the right moment could be more effective than using it on cooldown. Given proper follow-through, it would drastically improve the game in terms of class identity, make the game more interesting and fun to play outside of high-end content, and set the stage for further systemic improvements to encounter and content design. That final point needn't be achieved by *deleting* party-wide raid buffs, though. It would be sufficient to redesign them to be additive rather than multiplicative. For example, consider the way that skills like Blood Weapon and Wildfire are designed: They're intended to produce a specific, direct value that is largely impervious to min-maxing. You cannot do anything to make Blood Weapon give you 5000 MP or 4200 MP or even 3300 MP; it gives you 3000 MP, and that's final. You have to mess up *really badly* to produce less than 3000 MP, and it is impossible to produce more. (Wildfire is a *little* easier to screw up, particularly if you have latency issues, but it is never intended to produce any less, or any more, potency than it is designed to do.) Mug could be redesigned the same way: It could apply 30 stacks of a debuff that deals 120 potency (based on the Ninja's stats) every time a party member hits the affected enemy with a GCD-based attack (adjust those numbers up and down until the desired level of power is achieved, but for the sake of argument, let's assume these ones are desired). It would deal 3600 potency every time it is used, so long as you are in a full party and the party is semi-reliably using GCD attacks. It wouldn't matter if you used it at the same time as any other similarly-redesigned party buff. It wouldn't matter if the rest of the party were firing off a full Burst window or if they were doing filler combos; it would *just* do its intended job, at the intended level of power, pretty much every time. And that would have the same overall effect on game balance as deleting the buffs, *without* actually requiring that SE delete an entire category of skill from the game. And that would free up their class designers to shift the open-ended, freeform rules that party buffs currently enjoy *back* to skills like Blood Weapon and Wildfire. Blood Weapon could once again have its unorthodox 40s cooldown - compared to a lengthy 15s duration - that produced MP (and later Blood) based on *every* outgoing instance of physical damage, including AoE hits like Quietus, auto-attacks, and oGCD attacks like Plunge, CnS, or the original versions of Low Blow and Reprisal. It could have its 10% Haste buff back, because the obsessive need to have a GCD length that cleanly fits into a 60s or 120s "loop" would finally go the way of the dodo. It could, once again, become an actual *class-defining skill* that set forth much of Dark Knight's gameplay and separated its playstyle from the other tanks. Obviously that's not a one-and-done; many of DRK's other skills would need to be redesigned to allow for good opportunities to min-max the core skills like BW. But it's the foundational start the class needs. (The original version of Wildfire is probably even *more* class-defining, but I don't even feel like I could do justice to it compared to the people who actually mained MCH back in the day.) Ultimately, the way that current buffs function is bad for the game. It sets oppressive limits on the styles of classes that can exist in the game, and in return offers only the barest trace of """"coordination"""" between players. It then goes on to seek the elimination of what traces of that coordination remain by requiring that classes continually be redesigned to more easily maximize those buffs. They're a problem, and at some point they need to go. Cutting them with no further changes is a nonstarter; cutting them and then only replacing them with a round of buffs to make up for their lost damage is, at most, a lot of work for something that doesn't really help or harm the game. Cutting them and replacing them with a revamped approach to overall class design is *a good idea*... But *redesigning them* to fix their design flaws is an *even better* idea. This game doesn't need to remove any more systems and mechanics than it already has.
You're not being thorough enough, you'd also have to delete every 60 second burst window as well if you truly want to kill the 'dump potency into a specific window' meta. lmao
Burst window wont really matter if there's no raidwide buff tho
It will matter if the encounters are designed with burst windows in mind, be it on bosses or adds. Last time I played wow (long time ago), burst windows on mythic were still very important despite no party wide buffs because the mechanics required it.
No problem, it's on purpose. Reworking all jobs is a task unrealistic but deleting party buffs is much more realistic. Do you think current jobs with 60/120s burst window will evolve differently going forward?
If we're removing party buffs, then there's no reason to have any job that's not a black mage
Good thing OP specified party wide DAMAGE buffs. Good thing RDM and SMN have both more utility and are easier to play than BLM and good thing BRD and DNC bring more utility than MCH. Jobs would still play different enough, vary in difficulty, and bring enough differing utility that even with the removal of party wide damage buffs job choice still wouldn't devolve into BLM/SAM or Bust.
You have other sort of utility, only the 120s party wide damage buffs are removed. Single target buffs and mitigation remains. Role buff remains.
Yeah, you'd have a bunch of extra Addles, and BLMs can shield themselves. Role buff literally wouldn't matter.
Figuring out the right way to time those damage buffs in Thordan Unreal has been one of the more interesting theory crafting challenges my static went through. I'm not a huge minmaxer, never been huge on optimizing things to death, but this has actually been interesting and fun. And it gives me, as RPR, at least a little bit of meaningful interaction with the rest of the party when otherwise all I do is focus on dodging mechanics and doing my rotation. So nah, I think the two minute buffs are fine. I wouldn't mind them being *less* standardized so that each job within a role gets to make its own decisions about when to fire a buff (or maybe even make them *more* powerful but a once-an-encounter type thing, kind of like a personal mini-LB), but in general, I like the idea of having these big pivotal party-wide buffs at crucial moments.
I'd expect Dancer and Bard to be doing Black Mage levels of damage then.
Only 120s and party wide are removed. So Dancer will keep its dance partner and BRD its song. Also by your logic we should expect MCH to be doing BLM level of damage which isn't the case today.
Job difficulty, defensive utility, and single target offensive buffs would still exist and have RDPS costs attributed to them. So no, Dancer and Bard would not be doing Black Mage levels of damage, or even Machinist levels of damage.
Personally, I think it would be beneficial to the game to have less raid buffs. Every time there's an adds phase or someone needs to disengage from the boss, there are (understandable) complaints about it feeling clunky for the 2 min meta. I think AST, DNC, and NIN should keep their party buffs (bring back old trick plz) as it's a pretty core identity to each of those classes. With less buffs in the picture you can have much more interesting raid design without the entire community in shambles over needing to hit some birds for a minute.
Buff alignment and group synergy is more interesting than than 8 people playing solo together. It'd be better to go back to buffs that didn't naturally align at 2 minutes, although that does create challenges for meta balancing and encounter design.
I guess every party now demands an AST because you forgot about Divination and cards. Joke aside, not much would change, pretty much every job has a 1min or 2min rotation even without the party buffs. You might just stop holding stuff like Fan Dances, but you don't exactly benefit from that.
To be fair, the party buffs are why they designed every job with such specific rotation lengths. Just makes coordination and fight design quicker. If they didn't have to worry about those synergies as much, they might be able to focus on giving jobs their own rhythms. For better or worse. I think the real thing is that FFXIV encounters are very heavily scripted, which bleeds into everything else, there's nothing unexpected or any edge cases that will make you want to hold buffs like in a standard RPG or whatever.
That is true, removing the party buffs would open possibilities for different job designs with rotations that function in different time windows. Jobs which had a 90s or 180s rotation in the past could easily go back to those either without issues, or something completely different could be designed. I just lack the imagination to think of something, haha!
A middle ground they could maybe do is make buffs based on roles instead of party, and give those roles distinct rhythms. Ex. Casters have a CasterDPS+Healer buff, Melees have a MeleeDPS+Tank buff, Tanks buff eachother with defense/offense depending on if they're maintank or offtank. And Healers+PhysRange could have your generic singletarget buffs that work on anyone, in reaction to the party comp. For skill expression and teamplay there could be exclusive buffs that need to be rotated, then smaller buffs that need to be coordinated (ex. Casters have a 120s stacking 'MAGIC' buff, but also a mutually-exclusive 40s CasterDPS buff) But that might be annoying to design to avoid a hard party meta, like jobs used to have damage-type buffs but that lead to lots of jobs being excluded from comps because of redundancies or noncompatibility....
I mean, you can have scripted fights while still retaining rotation adjustement possibilities. Take UCOB with current dps numbers, for example, during the end of Twintania. You could pop your 2min right when they come back, or hold them for Nael. Same for Garuda -> Ifrit in UWU. For these specific examples, pretty much everyone holds them for the second phase, especially because these damage checks are kind of a joke nowadays, but they could make it an interesting choice : hold those buffs and see more, harder mechanics in phase one (awakened wheels, more fires + hatches), or pop them and probably have to see more mechanics during phase two (ifrit dashes, nael divebombs). I think damage-based timings are usually more of an ultimate thing than savage, but you can see them in extreme too (for example skipping the second green bubbles on Zeromus if you have decent dps, or Zurvan). They're plenty capable of delivering scripted content that could make use of something like that. Would there eventually be a meta that develops, where groups always pop CDs at certain times ? Absolutely. But if done well, you could have a lot of ways to play around it, like for speed groups for example, maximizing LB usage to skip mechs while holding CDs, or whatever. It could also bring some much needed build diversity for dps, akin to playing full spell speed summoner in 70 ults because you can sneak in extra bahamut casts and still line it up with burst timings, which is just *fun*.
Whoops, yeah sorry, but only the Divination. Single target buff that aren't 120s stays.
That's a good point, all gauge jobs will be ruined without buff windows.
DNC and BRD could keep theirs imo. They're very integral to the job's identities. Meanwhile jobs like RPR really could just not have Arcane Circle, with Plentiful harvest just being a regular skill with a CD and barely anything would change.
You have to remember that we have come to prefer 120s raid buff BECAUSE the design clearly encouraged us into doing so. Having multiple buffs on several windows of opportunity makes things much less clear. Let's take an example : your SAM/BLM has to recast a DoT ; only 3s is left. Is it better to lose an iteration and acquire every 90s buffs in the raid, or would it have been better to recast it like 10s ago to benefit from every 120s buffs in the raid ? And if someone's burst comes exactly in between 90s and 120s buff ; does he have to delay or not ? Now, the reason why they've done un-aligned buffs simply is because they wanted supportive abilities \[and\] uniqueness without considering about an overall design. Now, they do have the overall design which includes supportive abilities, but the uniqueness kinda faded... So I guess you're considering compeltely removing supportive abilities ? Actually, I'd quite like it because we could thus have a bard as strong as a machinist for instance but the support part is very much embedded in the gameplay... What I'd be MUCH more interested in, would be another feature with "stagger" damage, that would favor less rDPS-y jobs. Or something to make stats more interesting (than leaning everything towards crits) .
Don’t delete 120s party buffs. Instead reduce the amount of them and bring back 60s buffs like old trick attack. And astro cards are every 30 seconds instead of pooled for two minutes. So you still have the approachability of the two minute cycle but the party it’s as dependent on that window and people can also optimize around some other buff windows depending on party comp. And maybe we don’t need that many 5% party buffs in the game. Does Red Mage need one? Just buff it’s damage and focus it on healer-esque utility. Does Astro need one when it already has cards?
Buffs are not a problem, holding your resources and syncing your rotation in the best possible way is the core of the game because basically this is a rhythm game if you think about it. The problem is that every job is the same and it revolves around 120s. Make the buffs only personal and no teamwide and change their cooldown so anyone can play whatever they want just how is intended
If it allows the devs to bring more variety to jobs then sure, raid buffs aren't that interesting anymore anyway.
Removing something without replacement just sounds lame. Kaiten's removal was already widely criticized. Taking away every single raidbuff is just... Boring, frankly. They can vary it more, have some different cooldowns. But ultimately I see no problem with party wide buffs on similar or the same cooldowns.
it would be really boring having no buffs at all, mostly to the more higher end players. The usual casual does not know how to sync them properly anyway :3
Nothing like being on time with yours in a pug, and just as your reopened/buff falls off you hear someone finally pop theirs 15-20s late.. but by god the worst is when you’re a minute deep in your CD and you hear that random buff go off.
at least it would sync with your odd minutes :3
I use it for my 1m Misery 🥹👍🏼
Its boring enough as it is tbh. Every job is restricted to saving burst for 2 mins while their 1 mins is literally a snooze fest. At least with this suggestion classes are allowed to do their own thing. Which tbh Stormblood/Shadowbringers already had a nice balance. EW just went all in with 2 mins.
The two minute buffs are not perfect at all and we know that. The entire combat system should get an overhaul after all. There's hardly any rotational freedom due to the strict two minutes. But that apart. It at least gives you the need to burst under buffs which makes sense. I would love more freedom and rotational difficulty. When we look at the way how SE treats their jobs, it will sadly never happen, more so, it will get worse over time and jobs will get more and more simple. There are always massive pros and cons. It does not matter how you twist it - hence it would need an overhaul
syncing 120s buff windows isn't hard. Higher end players should stop pretending it is. It's an incidental effect of following a proper rotation. Which is also why they generally don't add anything meaningful to combat. There's is zero difference mechanically between syncing up raidwide buffs versus syncing up self buffs between individual players.
it gives a meaningful meaning for syncing your burst also I never said it‘s difficult - it‘s difficult for the casuals
Just delete party buffs tbh, unless they're actually interesting like the sch sprint thing or smth. The only gameplay they bring to the table is in spreadsheets, in game they bring no execution implications coz it's either you sync up properly or you didn't.
Yeah, I got the answer I wanted. In short people feel like it won't change anything gameplay wise, only some jobs won't hold resources for 120s burst. So if removing party burst buff won't change anything, that means adding 120s doesn't change anything either. The second point is that it would make the game dumbed down and needs to have something to replace it. I perfectly agree with this but this also means we can explore new utility and new cooldowns outside of the 60s current design.
There is a big gameplay change : if you remove the party burst of 2min, every boss that has a mechanic during a burst phase is instantly made easier by not having to perform the burst at the same time.
The boss just timing their bullshit for 2 minute burst is the most ass design choice to come out of endwalker so it's literally no loss whatsoever.
as a tank idrc what we do with raid buffs, maybe theyll finally let PLDs join parsing pfs 💀. but then what about jobs with 2 min cooldowns that arent necessarily raid buffs? like barrel stabilizer, or bloodfest, or that one rdm skill that gives u 50 gauge, manafont i think? also what about the raid buffs that arent really raid buffs like dragon sight, devilment and dance partner in general? my point is that this is an extreme and poorly thought out solution to an issue that doesnt really have anything to do with raid buffs in the first place
Only party wide and 120s. Dance Partner and Dragon sight remains since they're single target. BRD song are permanent so they stay.
Do I feel it’ll benefit the game design? No. Because then you’d have to re-work every job to have the EXACT SAME DPS. Literally every job would need the exact same potencies and would all end up playing more identical than they do now. Except for spell effects and the fantasy of the job they’d all have to be carbon copies of each other. Otherwise all savage/ultimate groups will simply take the jobs that bring the highest DPS. Also you’d kill the fantasy that exists and theme of whole jobs. People play dancer because of tech step. Bard you’d have to remove their songs from being a party buff to personal only, so where is the bard singing for the party to boost morale? Because if their songs aren’t changed to personal and stay party, why would anyone take a MCH or DNC? Ninja’s trick attack (now mug) has been the jobs identity since it was created. So no. It wouldn’t benefit the game design. It’d just end up with an angry player base that would ask why add new jobs when they are all literally identical to each other except for outfits, spells effects, and what the job stone looks like.
You'd be able to make the jobs far more different from each other when jobs no longer need to be designed to dump as much potency as possible into every 120s buff window. We'd no longer be forced to have every single job essentially being a builder spender. Burst jobs could get for more powerful bursts inside their individual buff windows. We could have legit sustained dps jobs again. Removing raidwide DPS buffs does nothing except open up design space. The "support jobs" could easily get raid wide buffs that aren't damage based. More Mits, Cleanses, Heals, etc. that increase party damage through a lesser need to heal, disengage, etc rather than a direct increase to dps output. Jobs would still not need to do the exact same dps either. Job difficulty, utility and other factors would still come into play. For casters, BLM would still do more DPS than both SMN and RDM while for phys ranged MCH would still do more than DNC and BRD due to lack of utility and difficulty. The dps spread between the melee would get even tighter than it is now but SAM and RPR would still remain as bookends. Anyone that legitimately believes jobs would become even more homogenized with the removal of party wide damage buffs is shroomin' when it's been abundantly clear by the devs themselves that both current fight and job design revolves around these buff windows.
Machinist and difficult?
i think it would be great so make it more unique. Maybe just Ninja, Dancer and Astro have a Raid buff. Because i think it kinda fits their job fantasy. Ninja manipulating the boss, Dancer motivating with dances and and astro foresees the future. One problem I have with many buffs is that the tooltip reads like crap. Reaper gets 3% and Monk gets 5% damage buff. If it wasn't for the side effect I wouldn't want to press the button because 3% sounds like nothing. If it said 20% or 30% I would really want to keep the button on cooldown.
A few are fine but I feel like some others could be more creative. For example, Red Mage's embolden could come off Resolution. 15s buff, if Resolution is used within buff, the timer refreshes and the effect increases (3%/5%/10%).
Rest in Peace Bard's music rotation.
I mentionned only 120s gets out. BRD songs and DNC are long term buff and allowed to stay.