2 melee 2 ranged standard

[Galvuu]

You can't only balance around a realistic performance in a generic setting. I'm not strictly looking at the maximum log, but upper quartile in general, where Picto is performing extremely well. I admit that the highest levels of play do not impact most of the playerbase -- but as part of the playerbase that exists at the highest level of play, should the job's balance for me not matter at all? I don't think it's really fair to say "your way of playing doesn't matter," even if my way of playing isn't popular. I would absolutely hate it if jobs with high skill variances got buffed even more to the point where they're all you see in Savage farms and party finders. I think you could argue that, since balance does not matter for the 90% as you say, they should not even be considered for balance since they aren't engaging at a high enough level for their takes to matter anyway. I don't subscribe to that argument personally, since I think every player's perception matters, and no level of play is meaningless, whether it's high or low.

In the upper quartile, in extremes, PCT isn't first on any of the metrics until the 90% percentile, and even then, all the way to 95%, the lead is below 1% difference to the second and third places.
In NM, PCT has a 1.5% to 2.5% lead between 70 to 95% percentiles. The job is good, but people talk like it's 5.2 SMN. I played 5.2 SMN- PCT is nowhere near that level of dominance. It's over-represented because the other three casters are horrible at the moment. Comparing only the casters between each other isn't very productive, because three of them are performing terribly, and this only becomes evident when you compare all dps jobs across subroles. In fact, PCT-aside, melee is overperforming and all ranged are underperforming.
And it's not "your way of play doesn't matter". People need to realize that the top parses benefit from a combination of things:
- the individual player performing well (which is fine);
- the whole team performing well- performing their rotations, keeping uptime, aligning burst, aligning buffs... (which benefits PCT due to its buff);
- a pre-planned kill time (which disproportionately benefits burstiers jobs).
In addition to this, PCT also inherently has a lot of variance due to crit, with some casts doing literally 0 potency, and some doing 1k+. When you put it all in the pot together, you can see the top performers are skewed by these factors that will most likely not be present in your typical df/pf group, or be completely out of your hand. You can't control your crits, kill time is baically random, you can't control how your party plays and you can't make the not drift their buffs or kill themselves during burst windows. I've farmed pinks on extremes and had to deal with all of these- with no misplays, I often landed on low 90s because one or many of these things went wrong through no fault of my own. These factors must be present in everyone's mind for most jobs, but PCT is extremely sensitive to them, so you must consider them twofold when discussing it. People in the 90% percentile are usually pretty good at their job, so that's a good data point for "people who have decent mastery of the job". I will say that, in terms of pure mastery, it's likely that the top oranges/pinks are better than those at the 90%, but those confounding factors are highly present too, and it's next to impossible to balance for them.

And while job balance should matter at the every level, it should also reflect how relevant that level is. Meaning that the very top and the very bottom should be quartenary considerations for balance. The farther from the middle you are, the less it matters. And, thus, basing an argument on what happens in the top (or bottom) 5% percentiles isn't very useful. That was my point.

(On a different note, on something you said in your other post, PCT and RDM are comparable in terms of mobility- both have a cost to it, mind you- but both are also substantially more mobile than this abomination that's DT BLM. BLM atm is the least mobile and flexible by a mile)

[W00by]

My apologies on the quartile analysis! Your numbers look correct. However, there are some things I take issue with here:

The whole team does not have to perform well for you to parse well. It can help, of course. But in some cases, the whole team doing well actually hurts you because it can get you a worse kill time. I've had many parses this tier where I get a 99 while the rest of the team is doing blues and greens because they delayed the kill time to the end of burst, so that isn't necessarily true. You can still do well without a whole team.

If you are doing a purely statistical analysis, then yes, the middle should matter most because the middle has the most people in it. But you also have to consider whether or not the middle is actually engaging with the entire class. A big part of this thread has been an argument about whether or not low-end players are using the tools at their disposal. If they are not using the tools, how can the balance of these tools matter to them? The reason I say balance matters more at the higher end is because the higher end is where disparity in performance actually starts to matter.

Think about fighting games for a second. The "best character in the game" for a midcore player and a hardcore player will be very different. A brand new player might find the "best character in the game" useless because they are hard to play. But they are still the best character in the game, regardless, and should be balanced as such. Midcore player's concerns should not be ignored, but when players are not using the tools in the game, how can their opinions o the balance of these tools be said to matter as much as the players that are? It's a tricky balancing act, but you can't ignore the top anymore than you can ignore the bottom.

[Galvuu]

My apologies on the quartile analysis! Your numbers look correct. However, there are some things I take issue with here:

The whole team does not have to perform well for you to parse well. It can help, of course. But in some cases, the whole team doing well actually hurts you because it can get you a worse kill time. I've had many parses this tier where I get a 99 while the rest of the team is doing blues and greens because they delayed the kill time to the end of burst, so that isn't necessarily true. You can still do well without a whole team.

It really depends- I think a good point of comparison for PCT is ShB NIN. Because they're both very bursty jobs with high rdps/cdps and with a powerful raid buff. The multiplicative nature of raid buffs and how much PCT gains from them all stacking both in terms of adps (due to his burst) and getting rdps contribution from others (by putting their burst in their strong raid dps steroid) is very significant. So what you're saying is true- I've had oranges (and even pinks) with drifting buffs or people with weakness on the 2 min burst... but it was honestly because I crit a lot in burst myself. I've hard many runs (like... 95% of my runs) where I play as well as I can (better than many high oranges/pinks) but I get a purple because my team's buffs drifted/they died/I didn't crit. It's really out of my control. I can see an argument for the 95% performance to be considered, but I'd still weight it far lower than the 90% (and also the 80%). This was the case with ShB NIN too- your crit in opener and party bursting properly was a massive factor on your own performance and it was mostly out of your hands.

Think about fighting games for a second. The "best character in the game" for a midcore player and a hardcore player will be very different. A brand new player might find the "best character in the game" useless because they are hard to play. But they are still the best character in the game, regardless, and should be balanced as such. Midcore player's concerns should not be ignored, but when players are not using the tools in the game, how can their opinions o the balance of these tools be said to matter as much as the players that are? It's a tricky balancing act, but you can't ignore the top anymore than you can ignore the bottom.

My mental model for this is League, actually. I'm a ranked soloq player, basically. I know pro play exists and needs some balance, but it's very far-removed from the average player's experience. "Midcore concerns" (borrowing your expression here, but it illustrates the point well) become more important because the game is a cooperative element- you end up paired with these players, so now their contribution affects your gameplay/experience a lot and it's totally out of your hands. XIV leans even farther into the "midcore" part because it's purely cooperative (no pvp)- a big departure from the fighting game hypothetical. Ofc, if there was a job that did 20% more cdps when played to its maximum (both individually and in the team), that'd be a huge issue. But PCT isn't close to that. I'd say, perhaps a bit coldly, that I'm happier ignoring the bottom (if you don't press buttons, nothing really matters). I want to add the addendum that I'm not advocating for simplifying jobs to appease the lowest common denominator (something XIV has been doing as of late), but I actually think PCT's reward for high mastery and overall team performance is adequate. I wish more jobs were like that.
(Strictly speaking, BLM is... but in the worst way possible with miserable payoff)

(Sorry for being harsh-spoken at times, I appreciate the civility. I hope I'm getting my point across. Fwiw, while I have strong conviction in what I'm saying, but I can be convinced... it's just that I've played the game a long time, and I remember when 5.2 SMN was overpowered, and PCT isn't at that level at all)

EDIT: another thought that crossed my mind, I think the extreme numbers might be a bit better because, atm, 99% of NMs are random df groups, while extremes are a bit more planned for/filtered, and probably reflect the Savage/static experience more closely.

[W00by]

snip.

No worries! Similarly, you've made some great points that I appreciate. As someone who played RPR for all of last expansion, once I had reached the height of my personal play, parsing just became "Did I crit Communio/PH under pot this time? No? Back to the mines I go!" so I can strongly relate with what you're saying. And raid buff jobs obviously have it worse, too. My best friend parsed Dancer in PF in Anabaseios, and it was pretty much "is my Dance Partner good this party?" or the log didn't matter. So I definitely agree the maximum shouldn't be considered very strongly at all.

And fighting games aren't a perfect analogy, because you don't have teammates, true. League is a better comparison, and we've seen how characters like Ryze and Azir are absolutely unplayable because they balance around competitive, so your words have a lot of truth in them.

I also don't think PCT is poorly designed at all! I love Picto and would like to see more jobs designed like it, not less. But moving away from numbers for a second, I think part of the reason it seems like I'm disagreeing here is because I'm talking about "design" balance, not "numerical" balance. Frankly, as long as a job won't be hitting hard enrage unless it's played by a giga parser, I don't care if jobs are numerically over- or under-powered. But I think "design strength" should also be factored into the discussion, and it's harder to judge by numbers on FFlogs.

For instance, I'm playing RDM this tier, but I think anyone would agree RDM is numerically weak. It always has been and always will be. But RDM is not a "weak" job. In the content where RDM is strong (prog and PF with inconsistent players), I think there's a strong argument that it is THE strongest job in the game, because the chain resurrection is just too darn good. And I've been an RDM soft-kinda-sorta-main since Stormblood, so it's been frustrating that my job is weak and strong at the same time -- it's the strongest job in content I don't do and among the weakest jobs in content I enjoy, so I often stop playing it.

When I talk about Picto not being balanced around the lowest end, I more mean its design, not its numbers. There are a lot of people here arguing that PCT is immobile, but if the devs were to balance around this concern by adding more mobility (influencing its design, NOT its numbers), then for the high end, it becomes so ridiculously mobile that it's even stronger mobility wise than it is now. Its "design strength" at the moment is huge, with a raid buff, flexible mobility tools, and high personal damage, and I think it's important to consider this when talking about future changes to PCT.

And for what it's worth, I think the "future changes to PCT" should be, like, nothing. I love that job, it's freaking awesome, and I'd rather see abysmal jobs like BLM patched up than see PCT hurt. But when the casual community makes claims about jobs that aren't true (PCT is immobile when it really isn't), it can influence their design in ways I think are harmful. PCT is cool because of how interesting its tools are, but what if the CYM combo lost its hardcasts or they made Holy potency optimal to make the job more mobile? It'd lose things that make it interesting.

So that's what I mean when I say, when judging the tools, the upper end must be considered. Because I don't want jobs changed to be more boring when it's not necessary because people aren't engaging with them. Otherwise, from a numbers standpoint, I agree with you a lot!

Edit: It's also worth explaining that I've been maining Viper this expansion, so part of my fear of this kind of thing is reactionary. My job existed for 6 days before a rework got announced for a community that isn't playing the job at a level where things like positionals or timers matter, and I live in constant fear of that rework every day. I'd hate to see PCT suffer the same thing when it's so well designed.

[Galvuu]

snip.

As an aside to what you posted, RDM (and SMN, to a lesser extent... and even healers) have this strange property that they scale with encounter design. That is, fights centered around body checks make the rez irrelevant. Fights not centered around body checks and with lax dps checks make the rez extremely powerful. I've posted on another thread that my personal thoughts on the matter is that while caster balance before DT isn't ideal, it's not terrible either, and I think the rez should stay since it gives some semblance of a distinction between casters.

For the remainder of my discussion, I'm excluding SMN, because SMN isn't really a caster right now. Further, I have not leveled and played RDM yet, so I cannot say anything conclusively. But, from what you're saying, it feels to me all three casters have the idiosyncrasy of being able to sacrifice burst potential for uptime. BLM has it the worst out of the three (needing to consume its nuke and most powerful dps steroid, Triple), PCT has it the best out of the three. I don't want to go into PCT optimizations much, but beyond the obvious cost of delaying your next CYM combo, Holy in White also interferes with optimal PCT burst (in which you start mid CYM combo on Y). These are small losses, but you do consider them if you try to push the job to 100%. This seems similar to the argument that RDM's mobility has some cost in burst (although I did play RDM in EW, I progged Dragonsong with it and did some Abyssos with it too, so if it's anything like that, you have some liberty on where you put your "filler" melee combo between burst phases). This is so ubiquitous to the caster role it almost feels like their version of "positionals"- a unique aspect of their optimization (the ability to trade some amount of burst for uptime).

I think currently PCT has adequate mobility for the fight design they're trying to push. I think it's very much comparable to EW BLM (although EW BLM was harder to setup and execute in practice, it's a similar feeling in terms of shifting the pieces of your rotation around to place the mobility parts where you need them while minimizing any losses of uptime or losses of damage in your burst window). I don't know how RDM compares, but if it suffers in comparison, I think studying what makes PCT work and apply it to RDM might be warranted (just like I think Smudge should be the blueprint for all caster dashes). Similarly, I feel that, ideally, we'd revert BLM back to its EW state (which plays somewhat comparably to PCT).

My entire tirade loops back to the original point- I think the last dps should be potentially a melee, caster or physical ranged with sub 5% rdps difference between each comp. PCT is the only caster and ranged job that can match the melees on some metrics in some percentiles. The only way to "break" melee supremacy is by allowing other roles to come within a small margin of their damage potential. If PCT is overtuned, it's by less than 1%, which is a different picture than what some people paint when they say it's "massively overtuned"- and the logs seem to back this assessment up, as far as I can see. I concede your point that fights should be designed assuming a melee might be in that 4th dps slot, much like they should also assume a caster might fill it. If the design is such that the 4th dps slot incurs a small loss as a melee and/or caster, I might live with it. I'm slightly bothered by the fact double melee has been the optimal choice for 5 years after playing a meta where we had 3 best comps depending on fight.

[W00by]

I don't know how RDM compares, but if it suffers in comparison, I think studying what makes PCT work and apply it to RDM might be warranted (just like I think Smudge should be the blueprint for all caster dashes). Similarly, I feel that, ideally, we'd revert BLM back to its EW state (which plays somewhat comparably to PCT).

It really depends. There are some mechanics where RDM is doing great and some mechanics where it really struggles, and of course you have the ability to manipulate it. We talk about "swapping the dualcast window" so that odd GCDs are casted and evens aren't, or vice versa, and some mechanics accommodate that well and others don't. For instance, Mountain Fire in EX1 is really punishing to a poorly placed Dualcast window, but is very easy if you set up properly. It's also worth noting that Dualcast windows are harder to swap now that Acceleration gives 2 instant casts, but slightly easier too now that Swiftcast is a short CD, so it's six on one had, half dozen on the other.) When talking about melee combos, there are fights where it's free and fights like Honey B. Lovely where getting both melee combos off during 2 minutes without griefing your melees by dropping puddles under the 3 of you is prohibitively difficult. It just depends, like any job. And you do get one filler burst combo per 2 minute, but even this filler burst combo technically should be saved for burst phases so you can triple Scorch under pot, so it's weird. I think PCT suffers a little less moving certain things out of burst windows than RDM does -- moving comet out of Burst is a lot less punishing than moving an entire melee combo out, and Hammer and the CYM combo are not as far apart in potency as Red Mage's burst and Red Mage's general filler rotation -- but the paradigm does exist for all of them.

I'd like to see double caster get played more, because I think every comp should be warranted. I just also don't think it's as suboptimal to go double caster as people think right now, since we tend to fixate on damage above all else.

[rewd]

The job is good, but people talk like it's 5.2 SMN. I played 5.2 SMN- PCT is nowhere near that level of dominance. It's over-represented

ShB SMN will be forever missed. Aside from damage, how to forget Egi Assaults/Ruin IV/Phoenix mobility, unlimited Ruin II for the rest, Titan shields, Everlasting Flight, Raise, fast raise in Dreadwyrm and Firebird Trance and Devotion tech. <3