Picto makes the game less fun

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Originally Posted by Carighan

Yeah, like this. Assuming the frankly silly 2-minute meta stays, Picto is overpowered due to the nature of that, and the medium~long-CD burst skills ought to be nerfed by medium amounts (so actually lose a whole lot of damage). OTOH, only mess with the potency, because the rest - the design - actually works much better in the context of modern combat-design in FFXIV than other jobs do, in particular other casters (so comparing Red Mage and Black Mage, Summoner is phys ranged if we're being honest).

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Red mage is another class that doesn’t get discussed often as to how they made it worse to try to fit it into a design it doesn’t match

Back in SB it had a very flat damage profile and it’s middling burst (which required a lot of setup since it was 80/80 and was much shorter ending at Verholy/verflare) could be put basically anywhere because it wasn’t available often and you basically gained nothing to ever hold it

To try to shove it into the 2 minute burst they made it so you just bursted 3 times in a row and added a tonne of finishers on top which were just more powerful to shift its prior towards bring burstier

PCT’s strengths lie in it playing to the modern encounter design better than them retroactively refitting wonky changes into the legacy jobs that dont work well in that design

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Originally Posted by Ramiee

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No, I included the entire quote. I just highlighted the parts that directly contradict each other, just to make it even more immediately obvious. You claim that 'PCT isn't a problem' and also admit that 'it's just blatantly overpowered' in the same sentence.

Current content encounter design hasn't even demonstrated PCT's full potential, simply due to the lack of targetless intermissions. And even in situations where PCT is the only buff providing job, it's still every bit as broken. The reason why all the other modern burst jobs can co-exist with sustained DPS jobs is because of resource systems. Resource systems make you work to earn your burst through uptime. PCT ignores this in how motifs are generated. That's not 'unique design', it's called ignoring design constraints. A job with an 'I win' button would be equally unique, and equally bad design.

Motifs need to change to have an uptime requirement, at bare minimum.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

No, I included the entire quote. I just highlighted the parts that directly contradict each other, just to make it even more immediately obvious. You claim that 'PCT isn't a problem' and also admit that 'it's just blatantly overpowered' in the same sentence.

Current content encounter design hasn't even demonstrated PCT's full potential, simply due to the lack of targetless intermissions. And even in situations where PCT is the only buff providing job, it's still every bit as broken. The reason why all the other modern burst jobs can co-exist with sustained DPS jobs is because of resource systems. Resource systems make you work to earn your burst through uptime. PCT ignores this in how motifs are generated. That's not 'unique design', it's called ignoring design constraints. A job with an 'I win' button would be equally unique, and equally bad design.

Motifs need to change to have an uptime requirement, at bare minimum.

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Its overpowered yes but thats not a problem with pictomancer its a problem with the job design, pictomancer is not this mythical villian that if you nerf will fix the job design issues, no BLM will still underperform because it can't burst properly, Phys range still suffer from lack of damage and PCT will still be one of the strongest jobs in the game unless its nerfed to do damage around the level of a phys range because its just so incredibly well scaling with the burst meta because it benfits insanely well from raid buffs from its core.
Sure add uptime requirement, it will still destroy all other DPS because of its burst is insane. Hell even if pictomancer was made to do no damage it won't make other jobs fun and the targets will switch from pictomancer to viper because im sure a lot of Samurais are not happy that a one button rotation job like Viper scales so much better with buffs then it. The games issues do not lie with one job, it lies with the core design around raid buffing every 2 minutes and deleting pictomancer wont fix that.
Your arguement about PCT not having a unique system is wrong, it charges attacks it can hold and use when it wants which would probably be more fun in a game without consistent bursts every 2 minutes, its actually really sad that now people who play this game want every job to be resource gaining and using instead of doing anything different.

I don't understand why there's so much aversion to utilizing nerfs in job balance in this game specifically. Every other game dev does it without issue. You recognize PCT is overpowered, but you'd sooner have all other jobs to be reworked just to accommodate it. Just fix the problem directly.

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With the release of 7.0, however, we noticed that the DPS of the new job Pictomancer clearly stood out from the other classes. We could have nerfed Pictomancer before the raid, but since many people liked playing it so much, we decided to bring the DPS of the other classes into line with that of Pictomancer. Source

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It's so tiring seeing the dev team predictably try to fix recurring problems like this with half-hearted upward flat potency buffs to all other jobs.

Either they'll do this incredibly slowly all expansion and PCT will perpetually dominate to the point that they start losing players, or they'll overcompensate in response to player outrage during FRU and PCT will be left underpowered for the next tier. This is all completely avoidable, as direct fix to the problem job in question is all that is required.

I think the point more centres on the fact that nerfing PCT while leading to PCT not being overpowered anymore doesn’t actually fix the wider balance issues at all nor do a lot of the offered suggestions around things like motifs needing targets consider the fact that core job design shouldn’t change when nerfing something

A lot of BLM’s have come in here and said “I feel bad that PCT does more damage than me while being easy”. That isn’t PCT’s fault, that’s the fault of BLM being a terrible burster in a burst heavy innate design. If we nerfed PCT down to NIN level tomorrow it would be back above BLM next tier anyway because it feeds into buffs so well, we have evidence of this with how well the healers scale over the course of the expansion.

Nerfing PCT but changing nothing about the core design of the buff meta won’t fix BLM’s problems, it won’t fix phys ranged doing less damage than melee even when melee have awful uptime and it won’t fix VPR dominating the melee despite being easier than SMN

I’m not opposed to nerfing some aspects of PCT (though absolutely not changing how the motifs work) but people are way too quick to act like PCT is the entire cause of the reason why this tier is so terribly balanced when it’s only a minor contributor

What they could do is like cut the potencies of all muses in half or so, but make them all auto direct hit crit.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

I don't understand why there's so much aversion to utilizing nerfs in job balance in this game specifically. Every other game dev does it without issue. You recognize PCT is overpowered, but you'd sooner have all other jobs to be reworked just to accommodate it. Just fix the problem directly.

It's so tiring seeing the dev team predictably try to

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Here I'll write it super clearly in short sentences:

Nerf PCT = Band aid fix
Remove 2 minute meta = Fixing the entire issue

I would prefer it if we stopped having reworks constantly and just fix the entire issue by changing CD timers.

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

I think the point more centres on the fact that nerfing PCT while leading to PCT not being overpowered anymore doesn’t actually fix the wider balance issues at all nor do a lot of the offered suggestions around things like motifs needing targets consider the fact that core job design shouldn’t change when nerfing something

A lot of BLM’s have come in here and said “I feel bad that PCT does more damage than me while being easy”. That isn’t PCT’s fault, that’s the fault of BLM being a terrible burster in a burst heavy innate design. If we nerfed PCT down to NIN level tomorrow it would be back above BLM next tier anyway because it feeds into buffs so well, we have evidence of this with how well the healers scale over the course of the expansion.

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Burst and continuous DPS can definitely coexist under the current game design. If you want to understand this, just look at what happened with M1S over the weeks. We've seen VPR/MNK trade off against DRG/NIN/SAM on a weekly basis. VPR is currently one of the weakest melee on that fight, with a 2.0% representation in the top 50 fastest clears in contrast to DRG's 31% and SAM's 25% (PCT has 100% representation - no other casters were used at all). That's purely a function of fight length. As ilvl goes up, fight duration shortens to the point where you clear on your 6 minute potion burst. That's like the zenith of burst-orientated jobs, which is what we see now.

Now if you look at M2S in comparison, it's a completely different story. VPR is the strongest melee in that fight, and has about 27.6% representation in the top 50 fastest clears (PCT has 94.2%). That's not surprising either, because kill times are between 7-8 minutes (i.e. between burst windows). So dealing continuous DPS gives you the chance to catch up and overtake jobs with heavier burst (PCT aside). In fact, you can predict VPR and MNK's usage in the top 50 fastest clears based entirely on fight length. I think when a system is closely balanced, you'll see natural trade-offs between these job damage types without one job being always on top for all fights.

It's not really the magnitude of PCT's burst that worries me. There are some intrinsic problems with this, the obvious one being a lot of damage variance, which may point to a need for more Crit/DH caps on burst actions. But I think the real issue is going to happen when you have fight designs with forced downtime and no target. That's where PCT will be truly uncontested, because it will have a full burst where even other burst jobs won't be able to build resources. That's why motifs are a big part of the underlying problem. I don't think flat potency changes can fix this.

In short, I don't think that you can balance PCT by just titrating average DPS, because the size of the discrepancy will be very much fight dependent. This is why we have resource-gated burst systems, to ensure that your ability to burst is still at least partially a byproduct of uptime. Motif casts should be uptime dependent and should require a target.

None of the melee DPS have remotely as large of a magnitude of burst difference between their burst and their downtime as PCT and BLM, honestly the closest comparison you’d get is comparing SGE to AST in which AST just scales better and better throughout the expansion and is totally unaffected by downtime because its burst is reliant on draw which doesn’t need a target and divination which is just a CD. You can nerf AST now but it’ll just scale straight back to being dominant in half an expansion because it’s a factor of the burst meta not just its own damage capacity, the way the burst CD’s work on all jobs also means you will never “skip” a burst so jobs that play into burst will always scale better. Flat profiles are always playing catch up in this meta because the job design means you can save burst to always align it, that’s the core of the problem. If an 8 minute fight has only 1 minute 20 seconds of uptime across the fight you’ll just do 4 20 second bursts, if it’s 8 minutes full uptime you’ll still do 4 20 second burst but then you add filler. The 2 minute meta needs to go because this was always going to happen to BLM when they introduced a non flat caster that isn’t arbitrarily handicapped by raise like SMN is

As for the suggestion of motifs need a target that’s simply a point of “1 ultimates every 2 years doesn’t justify destroying the best received job since SB”, if you are going to nerf PCT that’s absolutely the last thing you should do because not everyone wants their favourite job destroyed to balance an ultimate

The real issue is that we just have way too many motifs, and a good option could be to cut them down back to no charges each, but that would remove a big part of the job's flexibility. On the other hand, a lot of other jobs don't have that luxury and have had to content with not drifting important GCDs. Still, redistribute the potency all across the board without making the motifs an actual damage loss, and remove 1 charge from the creature one would be a good start in my opinion.

And frankly I know it's gonna make people laugh but you don't even need ultimates to already see what the math and experience shows, and what you can already see in dungeons when it comes to downtime. Ultimates have rarely been very well balanced. For instance, DSR was an absolute joke of balance back then between jobs, and they didn't bother adjusting for it.