Let's Talk About Two-Minute Buff Windows and Their Effects on FFXIV



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50 thoughts on “Let's Talk About Two-Minute Buff Windows and Their Effects on FFXIV”

  1. It’s starting to sound like party damage buffs in general are becoming a problem.

    I’m not sure what the solution there should be. Do we need to go scorched-earth on damage buffs, making everything only buff the user (like Reaper’s debuff or Ninja’s new version of Trick Attack)? Would that overly remove a form of party interaction? And if that happened, what would it mean for Dancer, whose identity is wrapped up in buffing?

    Still though, damage buffs kind of centralize the game around capitalizing on them, making jobs that are timed right for that better, and fights that force downtime at those intervals feel awful.

    It’s kinda feeling similar to what happened with Scholar’s shields. They eventually had to rework how crits work with shields because Crit Adlo was basically breaking the design.

    I feel like shifting things to personal DPS buffs would possibly fix things like homogeneity, but it could also cause issues with rigidity. If your own rotation demands you use a buff at the right time to capitalize on it, that could be its own problem.

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  2. Turning every job into a 2 min burst job is the most boring homogenization you can possibly do. Basically, makes every job play the same and destroys job identity, making them reskins of each other…

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  3. I still think the idea of "community perception" is literally just "people in pfs parroting what big streamer said without the original context of it being week 1 savage raid tiers." It's especially noticabl3 when this is was a savage race compared to the Ultimate we got in 6.1 since most people were honestly more enamored by the spectical compared to how jobs were doing in those.

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  4. Started playing casters this tier. With how caster unfriendly encounters are considered playing summoner, but I honestly hate being stuck in phoenix (especially in non-raid content) and not being able to shift to bahamut if stuff phases/dies before expected, so have to decide if to use buff with bahamut and delay or use with phoenix and be sub-par. That completely ruins the job for me and just feels bad, so going back to other casters instead.

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  5. I have not played anything but some PvP since Endwalker came out (not enough free time), so do not know how the move to 2 minutes window "feels" like, but I do have some thoughts about as someone who uses macros. I know a lot of people frown upon macros, but I am playing with gamepad, so real estate for icons is somewhat limited, unless I want to switch to mouse/keyboard, and I am more of a casual player. But that's beside the point.
    The point is, that I previously setup macros in a way, that I [almost] always get a buff after using my 1st skill in a fight and then get another buff after every 3 skills (on average), plus some buffs being applied before more powerful attacks (for example, Life Surge is triggered after Vorpal Thrust, because I have an [almost] 100% guarantee, that I will be combo-ing Full Thrust right after). And I ordered the buffs from shortest cooldown to longest, which in the end created a rotation, in which I had at least 1 buff through majority of the fight. And while there were cases, when I essentially "wasted" a buff, because it got triggered too close to the end of the fight or phase, overall, I seemed to be passing all the checks in the content prior to Endwalker (although I rarely participated in Savage raids, especially right after they were released).
    Now, remembering how I structured my macros, strict 2 minutes windows would mean, that I will have longer windows of no buffs at all, which may be closer to what the devs currently want, but I would definitely feel as if I am not performing as good. Having some buff applied to me, whether offensive or defensive one, most of the time felt as I am utilizing every tool, that I have at my disposal, as often as I can. With 2 minutes, not sure I will be able to feel that way.
    On the other hand, my case could be solved by turning combos into 1-button skills, same as it's done in PvP. That would allow me to have more skills directly on the hotbar.

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  6. I think you have a very skewed idea of what "most" players think tbh. The current design is a lot better for the broad middle than what we had before. Balancing around the top folks doing first 2-3 week clears is not the way to go.

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  7. For me i really hate the 2 min Burst Windows. Specially as a SMN i am this Tier complete screwed. This Tier has so many Instances in the Fight where you Delay your 2min Burst super early in the Fight. And as a SMN with a Super Strict rotation i have no other Alternatives. I HAVE TO USE MY BURST its not that i want to use it.

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  8. Mch main here: used to love my job and allways feel like I was contributing where we didn't have a melee. Now I feel penalized and unvalued. So I quit it for ew.

    Yoship needs to start listening to us if he cares truely about his game. This doesn't just effect high end content . It effects how players treat eachother

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  9. I gotta admit after having been on a break for a year and thinking of getting back into it. Hearing this makes me VERY hesitant to return. My first thought is 'i do not need this'.

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  10. I don’t even play hardcore raids right now but I noticed becoming significantly more bored with GNB since the bloodfest change. Such a small change made such a big impact. Why?

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  11. I'm just ready for the next month or two when the extreme minority that always bitches about stupid shit like this finally admit that meta min maxing the game has burnt them out of the game quickly and they take Yoshi's advice and finally unsub again. Then maybe my youtube feed won't be polluted with stupid and pointless video game dramatics and my seldom trip to the subreddit doesn't end with me getting annoyed with the 200 players circle jerking each other about how unplayable and unbalanced the game is and how unacceptable it is.

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  12. They "blackmaged" the buff windows. All the downsides you had from playing blackmage. Like dying or screwing up your rotation, drifting your cooldowns etc. always was a really hard punish on blm. However if all the stars align your dps is fantastic and feels great Now, we also have this on the 2 minute Rotations for every job. Welcome to the party 😆

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  13. Admittedly, jobs that couldn’t make use of 2 mins are thrown under the bus kindof, but I cannot deny the joy of lining myself up perfectly for each 2 min buff windows. The sensation of doing the optimal rotation is strengthened dramatically because the stakes are so high (2 mins being so strong). Also hitting big number make happy chemical go brrr

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  14. I knew as soon as they made this adjustment to Ninja i knew i was going to hate it and i have instead of having one skill to babysit i have two, every two minutes which means id have to either hold my things til it comes up if i had a death.

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  15. The damage amplifier is too strong when you stack 5 or even more raid buffs. And make it almost impossible to balance between all jobs and all possible team line-ups(especially between raid-buff jobs and pure fire-output jobs).

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  16. I never liked the decision. I play DRG and NIN for high end and I really liked the way you had to decide when to go life phase based on buff cd and timers, we had a lot of fun with double life phases and now we simply delay every life phase and the job traded this fun aspect to a mess of double weaving and YOU CAN'T BE LATE FOR BURST.

    I really don't get it, you can teach players with good and advanced tutorials, why not do that? This is game design 101.

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  17. It flattens the game so much that it's actually boring, it's the purest form of meta.

    Also, it really favours and encourages the usage of mods, especially the ones that condense the entire rotation in a single button. Gameplay becomes Opener, 1-1-1…. until buffs come up then 2-2-2-… until buffs come down, 1-1-1…

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  18. The damage variant is craaazy. My non BiS ninja can hit a Hyosho from between 40k to 120k, the range is so ridiculous. The Warrior Treatment is incoming I guess LMAO

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  19. A bit of a controversial take here but in my opinion they should just get rid of raidwide buffs entirely.

    Or shift it to the ranged physical role and it being something more like that they have the buffs up constantly by just doing their rotation correctly.

    I also think that the raidbuffs are causing extremely rigid gameplay that honestly is annoying the crap out of me in current savage. Drk especially comes to mind when I think about this every 2 mins you have buttons to press then the next 1m30 secs it's mainly back to one-two-three …

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  20. 100% agree about how bad crit variance feels on a job. Playing summoner this tier, it feels awful to see a normal Akh Mohrn. A crit-direct hit on that skill hits for over twice the amount of a normal, and when that happens, you loose 30-40k every two minutes for just missing a crit.

    This is doubly true when they said iajutsu will just always crit to avoid variance yet every single job has one big nuke that we'd love to see always crit.

    Also I do think the bosses doing what they've done with bosses jumping away or doing big mechanics on 2 minute windows might have been intentional. It both challenges high skill players to decide how they want to handle things, but it also gives an opportunity for players who did mess up a change to realign. If, say, you died before devour in P5, now that time when the mechanic makes the boss untargetable lets you realign with the rest of the team for when it can be targeted.

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  21. To be honest i like the idea of 2 minute buffs is it a good one at the end of the day no it does help but it removes a lot of the skill ceiling of having to juggle all the buffs and making sure to align certain things together do i believe we should go back to that though not really really i want a middle ground at the very least and it might be hard to do but i dont like the over reliance of a 2 minute buff window i kind of wish we had more jobs that gave a buff at the 1 minute mark and maybe took a bit of the 2 minute buff damage window and placed it a bit into that 1 minute window because right now the only job that i believe has a 1 minute buff is ninja and ya thats basically it and i just mean a party buff i could be entirely wrong on the ninja buff it could be a personal buff but i just wish there were other timers that we had to make to be doing so it doesnt put this huge weight on a 2 minute buff

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  22. It's the law of unintended consequences in action. You decide to do something to fix one problem and think you have an easy solution, but because there are variables you either can't or didn't want to foresee, by fixing one problem you create 10 more as an unintended side effect. The devs are figuring this out the hard way.

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  23. I like how everybody couldn't shut the fuck up about how buff windows didn't align and how it made jobs more clunky to play, and then they addressed that, and now the problem is that buff windows align.

    This is the prime example of why a playerbase should have absolutely zero say in a game's core fundamental design, and also why a developer must have the fortitude and courage to put their foot down when the playerbase just comes up with all sorts of things and runs their mouth about stuff they frankly have no clue about.

    Overwatch was a game where this happened a lot. All it took was a couple lengthy Reddit posts, so the dev would act on them, and the game would be busted for weeks before the changes were either addressed with counter-balancing or reverted entirely.

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  24. Putting tank swap mechanics followed by raidwides during the 2 minute windows is the work of a deranged individual.

    I’m kidding of course but I completely agree that it doesn’t feel good when they consistently make the 2 minute window more annoying by placing these mechanics there.

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  25. The one thing that would make the most sense would be to buff Casters & Phys Ranged to deal as much damage as Melee, regardless if you bring utility or not.
    But in general I don't mind the 2-min meta.

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  26. The 2 min buff window creates a lot of weird issues like needing certain gcd speeds so you won't drift. You're hard penalized for messing up near one, and in party finder because there is no skill filter, everyone drifts anyway.

    And then for blackmage you can't really afford to drift because you need every bit of leylines uptime you can get, but then there is p8s where it's like if you get the dog first, all of your 2 minutes is going to be whack.

    And yeah balance issues entirely depending on how well your class plays into the two minute burst which everyone can see how well that didn't turn out that tier.

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  27. A bit off topic, but it's also worth mentioning that this tier especially has devalued ressing a ton since the fights mechanics are designed in such a way that they require basically the whole party being alive or you wipe. This is something that is pretty strict even for savage fights and also makes me question the value of having rdm/smn being able to res especially going forward if this is the intended design philosophy for savage from now on. Personally, I enjoy the challenge but it puts job utility on its edge whether or not said utility is actually worth it in the current design space. Same goes for pld utility which to be honest only sees some niche uses and if we would take the utility away it would not play any differently it would just mean fewer buttons on your bar.

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  28. While I'd like to see the 2-minute, party wide buff window meta reduce a bit. (Focus on stronger, flexible single target buffs akin to Eye, Devilment, Cards on different CDs)…

    I think the real trick is to utilise the charge system. It's made Perfect Balance so flexible (even if the goal is to fit everything into two minutes) and makes adapting over delayed bursts genuinely fun. It was interesting to utilise in Thordan too with all the downtime and weird phase push points.

    I imagine DRG with a charge system on High Jump may be feeling a lot more happy when they have to disconnect during the CD for example.

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  29. I'm not a huge fan of this strict 2min window as it's just way too punishing to mess up.. it actually feels like having a "job" in the game and it's less about playing for fun.
    Not only that but it just promotes perfect play more than anything and honestly if you just run stuff like 24man raids where people may die left and right, it just feels bad. I'm not sure who they wanted to target with this change cause it won't definitely be that one new casual player that has a 50% chance to die in new fights and even high chance to maybe panic misalign their rotation and then they just feel bad for the rest of the fight cause for most jobs, it just feels incredibly bad now if you screw up…

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  30. I don't really like this interdependency of my own rotation with everyone elses rotation. I also don't like having to find spots for 2-4 mitigation skills in/around a DRK two minute burst window (i.e. in P6S some of the Tankbusters line up with two minute windows, followed by a raidwide which means 1-2 additional mitigation skills to weave). Two minute windows used to be during mechanics for everyone, I guess they wanted to make it easier this tier but putting them on TBs is just stupid. When we had them during mechanics there was no problem with having to weave this much defensive shit in, for nobody. This could be fixed by making offensive oGCD animation locks and defensive oGCD animation locks seperate, i.e. giving you 2 offensive and 2 defensive oGCD slots, as long as you can press the buttons fast enough.

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  31. Critical Direct hits in the current game result in about 2x damage over a base hit, which is an entirely unholy damage swing. Considering how many raid buffs go out, and how empty damage can be outside of burst windows, you can end up with 20s of combat that do as much or more than 90s of combat otherwise.

    Having such consistent, MASSIVE spikes of damage built into the encounter via job design means falling out of them makes your team impotent, and getting bad RNG means you just lose some raids because half of your damage did not exist because "fuck you, I guess."

    I think that the viability of restarting pulls to fish for crits is just as bad as how much gear you can get by 8-alt gear mashing savage fights to get BiS in two weeks.

    Sure, it's not something most players are going to do due to time investment, but the fact that there is an optimal path through the game that is [ t h i s ] degenerate is not ok and indicates extremely flawed game design that should be addressed to maintain the health of the game.

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  32. In their effort to try and standardize the game and make "QoL" changes they think the players would like, they've actually made things worse than when jobs were less homogenous. They wanted to make everything 2 minutes so players didn't have to think about making party comps that align, but instead because of the multiplicative effect of buff stacking and everything aligning naturally, you HAVE to align or your damage is fucked.

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  33. The final burst window in P8S p1 is imo one of the most frustrating sections of any fight as tank. It basically throws a fairly powerful tankbuster(which requires a double tankswap) right into the middle of your 6m burst window. So of the ~15 second peak burst window, 2-3 GCDs are just needed to get all your mitigation up. Which especially as dark knight with all its weaving, just feels super akward and unless willing to screw over healer, results practicly always in a DPS loss.

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  34. I hate how focused the job design is on perfect alignment in general even outside of synchronizing raid buffs. Having your rotation be a perfect loop that you always want to execute exactly the same every time is already not interesting, but the fact that adhering to that loop means hitting cooldowns the MILLISECOND they light up so they don't drift makes it so unpleasant to actually play jobs. Perfectly setting up your skill speed and uptime so that you always have a weave window available, never having to think about HOW to use your cooldowns except just press them when they are up… and if you're ever delayed from using your stuff for even 1 second then congrats you are now desynced and your damage is fucked for the rest of the fight.

    The 2 minute burst shit just compounds that because it squeezes all the fast, interesting gameplay of rotations into tiny windows where all your biggest hits and buffs line up, and then the other 100 seconds are just filler, often just pressing 123 combos and not thinking about anything.

    TBH my ideal world would be one where combat was more random and reactive and you didn't need to worry about where exactly you will be in your rotation in 83 seconds time or how your buffs line up, instead you are constantly thinking about the best next button to push. But I think FF raiders would explode if the game was ever like that because they love being able to spreadsheet their entire rotation against the fight timeline.

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  35. 2 min windows and the crit variance in the same space creates a design dissonance that needs to be addressed by a major overhaul. in this state its not realistically possible to have varied playstyles between classes while maintaining balance.

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  36. Yeah my biggest peve is that every 2 minutes there's a mechanic that makes using buffs unoptimal. P5S has both double rush and Devour at 2/4 minutes respectively. And while you CAN hit the boss while it's dashing during double rush, it CAN and will eat it sometimes. Just this Tuesday I decided to try to not delay my 2 minutes for double rush and hit it after it finished its dashes and it was at the far side of the arena with my Plentiful Harvest and it went off, did damage, but did not give me my resources.

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