Originally Posted by
eschatological
Is the bold true? I thought there was snapshotting of all DOTs in FFXIV, a mechanic I miss from WoW, where DOTs have largely become dynamic. As a MNK, I always want to fit in my Demolish under as many CDs as I can.
Or are you saying it's not as important because the buffs are so statically timed that it doesn't matter because you can snapshot your DOTs readily and easily every cycle?
One thing I've noticed about FFXIV is that there are no proc-chance buffs on aaaaaaaaaannnything. I know they cause RNG that drives people crazy in WoW when someone gets good procs, but the benefit of procced buffs (as opposed to buffs proactively applied by players on CD/by rotation) is it can potentially change your priorities/rotation while the buff is active, if the buff is strong enough. There have been procced buffs strong enough in WoW to even justify delaying your own CD slightly to line up with the buff, which is damn near crazy in FFXIV. That's the kind of stuff I miss from WoW gameplay.
ETA: the most FFXIV has in this regards is what people would call "pooling resources." IE, if you're a dancer, you try and save 4 feathers (but never overcapping feathers) for your buff windows.
ETA2: One thing that strikes me about FFXIV is how little I have to care about what the rest of my team is doing. You coordinate buffs (which is usuallly "pop them every 2 minutes, don't drift it") before the pull, and then the pull starts, and I don't think about my teammates again til the fight is over. If you need to spread while having an AoE marker on you, there's 8 spots to spread to, 4 in melee (for the two tanks and two melee), and 4 in ranged, and you just assign those spots, and you don't have to react to anything. This was a bigger problem in a game like, say, GW2, where the trinity has devolved into role-less classes, so you're just doing your rotation against a boss with 3 other people, but it's prevalent in FFXIV as well. Meanwhile, in WoW, to be a good endgame mythic raider, you need to be aware of what your team is doing at all times. Part of this is the larger group size - in a 20 man raid there might be up to 12-14 ranged+healers making things cramped - but a lot of it is that what your teammates do affects how you have to play. There's a lot of "drop off this bad area somewhere" in WoW, and it can change from pull to pull based on the randomly-placed boss mechanics (another thing that doesn't happen in FFXIV), so you have to adjust on the fly, both as the person dropping off, say, a Defile on Heroic Lich King, and as the people avoiding that person's Defile.