2 melee 2 ranged standard

[Ayche]

It's a bad idea from a fight design standpoint. 2/2/2/2 design is built around the idea that there are going to be four jobs that are obligate melee ranged, so you're constrained to resolve mechanics in a way that let four players maintain contact with the boss. If you add in an additional ranged as 'fake melee', then they can be off in another arena while the remaining three melee range jobs have comfy access to the boss. You're essentially bypassing constraints that designers can place on mechanics.

Constraints are to the benefit of the players too. A sudden shift in the paradigm where one wing or even one raid encounter could no longer fit 4 melee roles into it would just create an unnecessary trap for the player base. And in the situation where all four melee roles cannot be easily solved for good uptime, you can always punt the paladin or any tank to the sidelines and make them do some ranged attacks in the corner.

In all honesty, it only sounds interesting as a thought experiment and probably not very exciting to play. Like I can also think about "what if we made a fight where a healer is never allowed to be near to their party, that would make using aoe heals so much harder!" but would that actually be fun?

[Chrome_Aerial]

i don't mind that standard as long its not forced in EVERY duty/trial/raid.
i do not like to be forced to play a certain class. i kinda wanna pick my own prefference.

though for some trials/raids i can deffinetly see the appeal of having set roles for certain mechanics.

[Supersnow845]

You are wrong here, Snow.

They didn't say "designed", they said "designated". They are two completely different verbs, although they look similar. They are saying DT could have launched with PCT in the physical ranged role and it would have made sense. Now you can look at this discussion again from the correct point of view and see how stupid it is (as you said).

Also, what the dungeon casters are saying (I don't mean it in a bad way, but none of them has a level cap PCT and one of them hasn't even unlocked it) is that you can press random buttons on PCT because it has "freedom". You are a serious caster, so you know there's plenty of planning on PCT, because it's a caster and planning your GCDs and oGCDs is part of basic caster gameplay. Unless you want to interrupt casts or botch your burst window, obviously.

You are correct I did read it wrong

Yes I seriously disagree with the implication it could be designated as a phys ranged, it’s still the second least mobile job in the game (maybe 3rd depending on where SCH falls) it just does have a lot of tools if you plan them in advance

But you are correct, you can’t just throw abilities out there and hope something sticks

[rewd]

You are correct I did read it wrong

Yes I seriously disagree with the implication it could be designated as a phys ranged, it’s still the second least mobile job in the game (maybe 3rd depending on where SCH falls) it just does have a lot of tools if you plan them in advance

But you are correct, you can’t just throw abilities out there and hope something sticks

Thank you, as I've said there are a lot of insane takes about casters lately. It is what it is.

[rewd]

Yeah ok if your only argument is ad hominem because you actually have nothing to back it up, please save yourself the embarrassment.

You should learn what an ad hominem is. That being said, I'll channel my inner pettiness now. Since our friend Valence here likes to spread misinformation on purpose, let's do some much needed fact-checking.

I can back up what I claimed, I did. I told you to check a job guide if you don't know how these jobs work and/or to check logs. You will find the answer there. Since you either know you are wrong or you are just lazy, I'll do all the work for you.

For reference, I'll use the top PCT log for EX1 and the second RDM log (because it has a more similar KT, 7:08 VS 7:33). Let's ignore Swiftcast because both jobs have it.

Unless I missed something, PCT was able to generate (not use) 60instant GCDs:

- 16 Holy in White
- 12 Comet in Black
- 24 Hammer combo hits
- 4 Rainbow Drip
- 4 Star Prism

Now, let's take a look at RDM:

- Melee combo + magic finishers were able to generate 78 instant GCDs
- An additional 20 instant GCDs were generated with Acceleration

The total is 98 without Dualcast. If we add Dualcast, RDM was able to generate, in a similar period of time, more than double the amount of instant GCDs compared to PCT.

Let's take a look at what you claimed, and let's emphasize it:

- The amount of insta casts is wild, way higher than BLM/RDM. 5 stacks of holy, swtfcast + canvas, comets, hammers, smudge on demand...

This is wrong. Blatantly wrong. Please, stop spreading misinformation, Valence.

Thank you.

[Galvuu]

- The amount of insta casts is wild, way higher than BLM/RDM. 5 stacks of holy, swtfcast + canvas, comets, hammers, smudge on demand...
- Absolute freedom on what to cast and when, anything can be swapped around without loss 99% of the time
- The beauty of the job is that every spell recast timer adjusts to leave a weave slot at the end no matter what, which is one of the biggest hurdles to BLM's mobility tools.

These are all wrong, but the third one is super wrong. Clipping your gcd is a minor loss (in fact, if you clip for a Triple and get a Despair and Flare Star under it, it's a gain, if you only get one, it's pps neutral). BLM having "healer casts" with recast being longer than cast doesn't help that much in mobility beyond letting you slide cast more easily and without a loss.
The real problem with BLM is that your so called "mobility tools" are also your burst tools. So, each time you blow a Xeno or a Triple outside of burst in a way where you won't have that charge for burst, you lost burst damage. In a vacuum, this isn't a problem- it becomes a problem because of the strictly enforced 2-min meta nonsense and the multiplicative nature of raid buffs.
I have no clue where you got this idea that "no weave slots" are a "big obstacle to BLM mobility".

rewd already corrected you on your take that RDM is more mobile than PCT in general anyway. It's definitely more mobile than RDM, but PCT definitely hurts a bit when you need to to stop-run-stop-run nonsense for 12 seconds or something (Honey B. classic). Holy in White need to be build anyway. But you're correct in saying that Smudge is very powerful. I've stated it somewhere else, but smudge should be the standard for caster mobility tools. They should make AM work like Smudge asap.

I fundamentally disagree that you have to balance around what people actually do without considering the high end at all.

You need to balance around a realistic performance in a generic setting. You can't look at top players in top groups, where they have a set kill time, voice comms, high level of performance and optimized strats and then balance around that. You also can't balance around people who can't even keep their gcds rolling.
Jobs, ultimately, need to be balanced around their most common use- df, pf and midcore groups. Because that's 90% of players. That's why looking at the top 5% logs for balance is a mistake, why looking at the max log is a terrible mistake, and why you shouldn't also care too much about what a player that only does msq and has a cpm of 15 does either.
A lot of people look at the 99% percentile and fail to understand that for 199/200 people you meet on the pf or df, balance for that level of play is meaningless. You cannot extrapolate that circumstance for most parties/kills. Or, at the very last, you shouldn't.

At any rate, on the original subject; the 2-2-2-2 fight design is, unfortunately, essential to the game. Mechanics must be designed around the assumption that there are 2 melee, because even though there might not be, there always could be 2 melee. If you design fights around 1 melee, 3 ranged, then any comp that wanted to run 2 melee would have to deal with the fact that one of those melee will be severely limited by mechanical design, which would not be the case for a 3 ranged comp in a fight designed around 2 melee. Since casters are not impacted by being close or far from the boss, mechanics must always be designed around however many melee they can accommodate. If fights were designed around 4 melee and you could bring all 4 DPS, then people would just bring whichever 4 jobs are the best right now and you wouldn't even see things like aiming DPS in the current meta (which is a separate problem, but still unfortunately the case).
2 melee design is to allow both double caster and double melee to work--it doesn't demand one or the other..

You can (and should) make the same argument about casters, because TOP p1/p6, SC1, and many other examples are absolutely horrible for casters exist right now. Or, honestly, let SE go wild and if you run 2x casters or 2x melee, the second of that subrole incurs a small penalty by dropping a gcd here and there (both HW and SB had examples of this and nobody died over it). Either way, the fight design isn't why you don't see 2x physical ranged- it's purely a damage differential because the role is underpowered at the moment due to bad balancing (well... so is the caster role, actually, which is why you also don't see much double caster at all).


This topic isn't even about Pictomancer, why the heck are we discussing it here? This job lives rent-free in most people's heads.
For Ramiee: I think enforcing double melee is crap, best meta was SB where you could do double caster and double melee, I wish SE added some manner of physical range synergy (like, some manner of buff that BRD or DNC gave to MCH that made it pop off) after rebalancing the roles a bit so double phys range was also a thing. Basically, the reason why double caster worked in late SB was because SMN+BLM had insane synergy. I still think we need a ranged-tax, but I also think the rdps between double caster/double melee compared to this hypothetical double phys ranged shouldn't be more than 2/3%, making it only slightly weaker.
But SE has no idea what they're doing with jobs soooo :>

[rewd]

These are all wrong, but the third one is super wrong. Clipping your gcd is a minor loss (in fact, if you clip for a Triple and get a Despair and Flare Star under it, it's a gain, if you only get one, it's pps neutral). BLM having "healer casts" with recast being longer than cast doesn't help that much in mobility beyond letting you slide cast more easily and without a loss.
The real problem with BLM is that your so called "mobility tools" are also your burst tools. So, each time you blow a Xeno or a Triple outside of burst in a way where you won't have that charge for burst, you lost burst damage. In a vacuum, this isn't a problem- it becomes a problem because of the strictly enforced 2-min meta nonsense and the multiplicative nature of raid buffs.
I have no clue where you got this idea that "no weave slots" are a "big obstacle to BLM mobility".

rewd already corrected you on your take that PCT is more mobile than RDM anyway. It's definitely more mobile than RDM, but PCT definitely hurts a bit when you need to to stop-run-stop-run nonsense for 12 seconds or something (Honey B. classic). Holy in White need to be build anyway. But you're correct in saying that Smudge is very powerful. I've stated it somewhere else, but smudge should be the standard for caster mobility tools. They should make AM work like Smudge asap.

One important thing to note about mobility is that we can't really make broad statements such as "XY is more mobile/immobile". Different jobs have different movement profiles, different resources and different ways to stock them (if they can even do that). Movement also come in many different ways: for example, it can be 20s of interrupted movement, or it can be 1s of movement every 4s and so on.

You said that PCT is more mobile than RDM but Snow said that RDM is more mobile (specifically, they said PCT is the most immobile job after BLM), and I think both of you are wrong and right at the same time. It depends on the specific mechanic, if not overall fight, really. For what it's worth, I also find RDM more mobile, or if you prefer, easier to navigate. But one thing Valence said I do agree with is that there is a certain degree of subjectivity when it comes to movement.

Anyway, it's indeed weird that this evolved into a PCT discussion (again) but I can't take so many hot takes at once and I had to contribute to the topic derailment lol

[Galvuu]

snip.

I wrote it backwards actually- I meant to say that RDM in DT seems more mobile in general than PCT. Thank you for pointing it out, edited that error.
I didn't raid with RDM yet, so I might be wrong, but just looking at the numbers posted that seems to be the way...

[Ramiee]

I accidentally made another picto is op or SMN has too much instant casts thread again.

[W00by]

This is wrong. Blatantly wrong. Please, stop spreading misinformation, Valence.

Thank you.

The sheer amount of instant casts has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not they are actually useful instant casts. Pictomancer's instant casts are flexible and paired with a powerful mobility tool. The Holy in Whites and the Comet in Blacks can be spent almost anywhere (unless you are saving Comet for burst). The odd-minute hammer combos can similarly be spent anywhere you want, and you can even move the even minute ones out of burst if you really need to. You ignore the existence of Swiftcast, and that Swiftcast + Motif is a really, really strong tool, looking only at "textbook" instant casts that are always instant cast. Because these tools can be spent anywhere, they are stronger as mobility options than RDM's. Let's talk for a minute about the RDM tools that you discussed:

Melee combos for RDM are not always useful mobility tools. Two of them should always be spent in burst (and one of them absolutely MUST thanks to Manafication), so if the mechanics aren't falling under two minutes, RDM has less melee combos to use for mobility. There is also the restriction of melee access for the melee part of the combo to begin with, which is not necessarily very strict, but still a sizable movement restriction. As someone who has been raiding on RDM for years, the melee restriction occasionally does gatekeep you from accessing your combo and shouldn't be ignored (like in P10S or M2, recently). Similarly, Acceleration and Swiftcast are often used for DPS to prevent Fleche drift and cannot always be saved for mobility. You have to spend a Swiftcast in opener to prevent Contre Sixte from drifting, for example, so if you needed Swiftcast at the beginning of the fight, you either have to drift or do a different opener.

RDM's "Holy in White" is Enchanted Reprise, which is a strict and massive DPS loss that delays future melee combos. In comparison, Holy in White -- while a slight loss over the Aetherhues combo, which generates more Retractive Palette gauge -- isn't actively spending your resource, it's just slightly less potency if you would lose a CYM combo in the fight by using it. You can't use Enchanted Reprise nearly as freely.

Obviously, Dualcast gives RDM access to a lot of instant casts, but the majority of these instant casts come at entirely useless times you weren't moving anyways (most of a fight). When you're dualcasting DURING a mechanic, it's about as prohibitive as any other caster (except 0 resource BLM) and must be planned around, which, again, is harder because RDM's mobility tools have other movement or potency restrictions. There was a time that RDM was considered the least mobile caster despite Dualcast because the other casters had better access to mobility options. That time was Stormblood, and in UWU, there were certain mechanics RDM just had to drop uptime to do.

You've done your due diligence by looking at the amount of instant casts, but what you've failed to do is think about where these instant casts can be placed. Melee combos have movement and burst restrictions, Acceleration has to be used for your rotation and isn't strictly used for damage, and Dualcast itself is extremely unflexible and must be planned around in advance, and most of the instant casts you receive from it are hardly being used for mobility. Also, if we're going to compare oGCDs too, Smudge gives Picto tons of flexibility while RDM's Engagement and Corps-a-Corps offer even more movement restrictions, needing to be used in melee range or when a gap closer wouldn't kill you, respectively. RDM is hardly the beacon of mobility detractors think it is.

Since PCT's are more flexible, then there is certainly an argument that in some situations, PCT is more mobile than BLM or RDM. Of course, I think they're all at similar levels of (extremely high) mobility, and that movement restrictions for casters can almost entirely be mitigated by proactive planning and play.

You're going to do your favorite move and look at my profile to see if I'm some top parsing Picto, so I'll go ahead and add my sources here: my friend and raid teammate, Kurkee Brakzz, who is a pink- and orange-parsing Picto, helped me formulate this post and compare my RDM experiences with his Picto experiences. Therefore, please engage with the content of my argument to disprove me.