The fifth FFXIV final has arrived, and The Omega Protocol (Final) is at present within the means of being methodically pulled aside by the very best gamers the MMORPG neighborhood has to supply as they try to be the primary group to beat it. Nonetheless, the encounter – launched with the discharge of FFXIV patch 6.31 – has brought about many teams to run right into a long-standing concern with the sport’s buff cap, reopening a dialogue across the limitation.
Put merely, you possibly can solely have 30 buffs and debuffs in your character at one time in FFXIV. Whereas which may look like a fairly sizable quantity for the common participant, it does come up in some content material – notably the more durable variants of encounters designed for twenty-four gamers or extra, equivalent to Delubrum Reginae (Savage) from the Shadowbringers enlargement.
In some circumstances, gamers have managed to take advantage of this buff cap to their profit – loading up on buffs to achieve the restrict in order that lethal debuffs equivalent to Doom aren’t utilized to their character when supposed. Historically, these situations have been handled via patches that gave key debuffs precedence to make sure that they’d nonetheless undergo as supposed.
With TOP (The Omega Protocol), nevertheless, groups are dealing with a special concern. Due to a mechanic referred to as ‘Hey, World’ that happens within the struggle’s third part, gamers have gotten loaded as much as the buff cap, that means that normal buffs utilized by many lessons such because the Monk’s Riddle of Hearth or the Black Mage’s Ley Traces are merely not making use of to the characters. Given the extremely difficult nature of FFXIV’s final encounters (designed to be the toughest content material within the recreation), this may be the distinction between success and failure.
It’s reached some extent the place many groups are selecting to steer away from lessons that depend on making use of too many buffs, with the likes of Dancer and Sage being pushed out of rivalry in favour of others. Gamers are even joking that that is the event group’s concession to the Machinist class, which has been disregarded of favour in latest high-end content material previous to the newest replace.
You’ll be able to watch one group realising what is going on within the VOD under, on the 12:39:06 mark. “No marvel we’re having DPS points,” one participant on the group exclaims with fun, “we’re dodging half our ****ing buffs!”
One other issue including to that is one thing gamers confer with as “the 2-minute meta” – adjustments that have been made with the FFXIV Endwalker enlargement that noticed the rotations of many lessons adjusted to line up buffs on a extra constant 2-minute cooldown cycle, in an try and easy out randomness. It’s a change that has been acquired with combined emotions; some gamers favor the consistency, whereas others say that it makes each job really feel an excessive amount of just like the others.
One aspect impact of that is that extra buffs are usually energetic without delay – certainly, that was by design on the a part of the builders. Nonetheless, for buff-heavy content material equivalent to TOP, it’s solely exacerbating the aforementioned downside. It’ll be fascinating to see whether or not this new wrinkle within the dialogue results in adjustments down the road – both to the best way the latest final works, or extra essentially affecting the buff cap. For now, although, groups seem to have discovered workarounds and are persevering with to push for completion.
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