2 melee 2 ranged standard

[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.