Pictomancer is insanely overtuned and needs to be fixed before savage drops.

[MrJPtheAssassin]

People who think that casters are easier to play than melee how do you explain casters higher IQR’s in most fights

The damage casters have the highest IQR of the roles (and RDM also has a wider IQR than most jobs and healers have far wider IQR’s than tanks)

FFlogs shows us that people struggle in modern fight design with casters more than they struggle with melee, why should PCT get taxed more heavily when the players show they consistently cannot play casters as well

The nebulous “feeling” that melee are in more danger does not translate to the rough competence of the playerbase

Agree, I really don't understand where ppl get this idea that melee is harder and in more danger than casters in the game. Im guessing that just believing whatever the devs are saying or taking what they have said at face value but melee has never really been that hard or been dangerous role.

[CKNovel]

People who think that casters are easier to play than melee how do you explain casters higher IQR’s in most fights

The nebulous “feeling” that melee are in more danger does not translate to the rough competence of the playerbase

My experience with the XIV community seems to show that everyone thinks their job is the hardest unless it's comparing it to BLM or comparing SMN to anything else.
I believe that's because we are familiar with our job small optimisation and the risk it involves. You need to greed a cast to build ressources, you need to greed a positional, you need to pay extra attention to your tight rotation...

Difficulty is subjective and wildfly differs on the context.
There's a significant difference between a RDM in P7S and a RDM in M2S.
The same way there's a difference for a MNK between E8S and P7S. (Before the dash)

Jobs have their strengths and weakness but somehow the balance is done in a way that suggest only melee have a weakness

[Lyth]

IQR

I'm also interested in the use of descriptive statistics to understand how player skill is distributed, but I think it's important to reflect on the limitations of this approach. I've tried using your approach previously, but I don't think it works quite the way that you'd expect.

First, there is no direct measure of player skill. What you can measure is DPS. Different jobs award DPS differently. While you can compare the performances of two players on the same job, it becomes much harder to correlate two performances on two different jobs. How does a 90th percentile PCT correlate to a 90th percentile GNB, for example? You're essentially comparing apples and oranges.

The next issue that arises is that the IQR is really only interested in the 25th and 75th percentiles. You have no idea what happens outside of those percentile ranges. What it tells you is how average performances vary with internal job changes, rather than letting you compare high skill play on two completely different jobs. For example, let's say that you increased the benefit of a job's damage up buff. That's probably going to benefit a player who knows their optimal opener and burst moreso than a player playing freestyle. So you'd increase the IQR without changing the difficulty of the job. What you've changed is the reward structure. You'd also increase the degree of positive skew and positive kurtosis, both of which are worth considering in your analysis as well.

But the conclusions in here precede the statistical analysis anyways.

Either way, I think the point here is not actually about comparing personal biases about relative job difficulty, but rather the fact that PCT has a lot of utility. I don't really mind if you want a high mobility, freeform job as your flagship caster instead of BLM. But you should pay a price for that utility and versatility, or lose it.

[MrJPtheAssassin]

Either way, I think the point here is not actually about comparing personal biases about relative job difficulty, but rather the fact that PCT has a lot of utility. I don't really mind if you want a high mobility, freeform job as your flagship caster instead of BLM. But you should pay a price for that utility and versatility, or lose it.

You say PCT has a lot of utility but it really doesn't. In fact, it has the same amount of utility as most of the other jobs in the game. It has a team shield, well a lot of jobs have that as well or something similar to it and it has a 5% buff which again almost every nonselfish job has as well. Im not including Star Prism's heal as a utility bc is a tool no one can plan around and chances are its heal will not get any value unless the fight is designed to dish out a large amount of dam doing 2-minute burst windows. Star Prism is as useful as phoebix's heal, its a heal you have no real control over and no choice in using it since it's tied to an attack or phase in your rotation. In fact I have no clue why they even added that to star prism to begin with. Based on the amount of actually useful utility and the fact it doesn't have a rise, it is along the same lines as any of the other melees. Once again you putting too much behind the idea that Melee has the hardest time in a fight when that is just simply not true. No boss I have seen has ever forced melee out of melee range for more than a GCD or two and once again groups will always find ways to make melee uptime easier.

With all that said I don't see why PCT shouldn't do numbers close to a drg/mnk/rpr/nin since a)it has the same amount of utility as any other job, b) it has no combat riz, and c) melee uptime isn't as hard as you and small amout number players say it is. As I said a few times if PCT did number closer to the other casters then it would never be picked over an rdm or smn bc it has no rez. In fact, over half of the community will always pick rdm/smn over any other caster for the caster spot in a party bc they have to have the beloved combat rez. This only leaves PCT with one spot on a team and that is the same spot that BLM and the other melee fight over for which is the flex spot.

[Ramiee]

If pct lost its raid buff that just means it filler would have more damage and it would become even stronger to balance out the fact picto's damage is 90% from their burst phase.

[rewd]

If 'utility' is all you guys care about I hope you put the same energy into asking for MNK nerfs but I have yet to see it.

[Supersnow845]

If 'utility' is all you guys care about I hope you put the same energy into asking for MNK nerfs but I have yet to see it.

MNK is probably the best comparison of PCT’s utility. Earths reply and star prism are functionally identical, they both have a 5% raid buff that also provides internal rotational benefit (starry muse gives you star prism, hyperphantasia and rainbow bright, brotherhood gives you access to other players generating chakra for you) then manta while not a shield itself can buff the healers or the tanks shields like Tempra grassa. Tempra is put as stronger of the two but MNK also has more HP, riddle of earth and bloodbath

So their utility is almost identical but MNK has regularly been the highest damaging job since its rework in 5.4 to delete greased lightning stacks and nobody seems to bat an eye about it

[Lyth]

Mantra doesn't work as a standalone action. Tempera Grassa is a 90 second recast defensive barrier that works on all types of damage. I'm sure that DRK and GNB would be willing to swap you for Dark Missionary/HoL. I think if they wanted to preserve PCT's identity as a 'BLM-type' caster, then the job should only have been released with Tempera Coat. I think adding another layer of defensives to the role (Magicked Barrier, Tempera Grassa) was a bad idea if you want the role to be damage focused, as you're essentially heading towards Physical Ranged territory with this. Addle is plenty strong on its own, given that magical raid damage tends to be more common.

Smudge is too powerful in its current design. 5 seconds of sprint uptime is a lot, especially when paired with a 20 second recast targetless gap closer. That gives you 25 seconds of sprint every minute. If you wanted to keep the Sprint effect, the recast should probably be a minute. Otherwise, the Sprint effect needs to be 1-2 seconds at most on each use.

PCT probably has closer ties to RPR, in that you have an rDPS orientated job with a lot of burst potential. A critical difference is in the resource acquisition, though. Most jobs, even burst orientated ones, still need uptime to build up their burst. This also leads to an asymmetrical burst, where your opener is usually slightly weaker than subsequent burst windows. Motifs are supposed to be your long cast actions that challenge your movement. Yet you can stockpile them out of combat and start with a full burst. It's a bit like letting RPR charge up an extra double enshroud out of combat or during downtime. Motifs should be usable in combat only, require a target, and generate enmity/a small amount of damage on use.

Another point worth mentioning is that it's much easier to swap out with a Raise Caster on PCT than you can on melee. If you want to treat PCT as being in its own separate category from the Raise Casters, then they probably should introduce gearset splits in Caster like they do for melee. Let PCT and BLM be on a separate gearset from the other two casters. If you want equivalence, you need to lose the advantages that you currently have as well.

[Reimmi]

I'm glad they didn't nerf PCT. I think it's overall a better feel to just leave a job as is and then buff the ones that need it, which they did.

This is only a good thing if they tune the savage fights around it
if they buffed all these jobs but didn't tune the HP, then the tier becomes a joke where enrages don't matter.

[CKNovel]

Mantra doesn't work as a standalone action. Tempera Grassa is a 90 second recast defensive barrier that works on all types of damage. I'm sure that DRK and GNB would be willing to swap you for Dark Missionary/HoL. I think if they wanted to preserve PCT's identity as a 'BLM-type' caster, then the job should only have been released with Tempera Coat. I think adding another layer of defensives to the role (Magicked Barrier, Tempera Grassa) was a bad idea if you want the role to be damage focused, as you're essentially heading towards Physical Ranged territory with this. Addle is plenty strong on its own, given that magical raid damage tends to be more common.

Smudge is too powerful in its current design. 5 seconds of sprint uptime is a lot, especially when paired with a 20 second recast targetless gap closer. That gives you 25 seconds of sprint every minute. If you wanted to keep the Sprint effect, the recast should probably be a minute. Otherwise, the Sprint effect needs to be 1-2 seconds at most on each use.

No, I wouldn't trade Heart of light. Yeah it's a bummer I can't protect raidwide but on the positive it also makes me think about where I can use DM/HoL instead of just putting circle in circle hole, cubes in cube hole.
We also had too much mitigation, so going back to physical/magical raidwide to make shine different type of mitigation is good in my opinion.

Mantra doesn't work as a standalone and is very difficult to quantify, but due to its multiplicative nature, we know it is very strong.

We don't need more caster gear, we need less melee gear or better gearing options. It also makes no sense to balance jobs based on their capacity to swap to another job.
We should... Nerf Pictomancer because it can swap to SMN? I struggle to follow you, I don't see a world where it makes sense. Imagine a world where there's only 1 type of melee gear, you would nerf Viper because Reaper or Monk exists.