The real issue is that Pictomancer is the equivalent of letting the genie out of the bottle. It’s not really feasible to put the lid back on anymore because they introduced a true Hypercarry class into this game that is designed to maximize the buffs of the party member and is tuned to sacrifice uptime to make sure that gain is substantial.

In addition to this, the community now has to wrestle with the fact that now that Pic exists. Having 4 classes compete for what is traditionally 1 slot in a raid afforded to caster is simply not feasible. We already see in previous expansions that either 1 of the 3 options ranged and magical ranged had was either objectively bad (machinist) or pretty much the best option in every area except specifically progression (black mage) to have a 4th class means someone has to be the best and someone has to be the worst. The arguments drafted up by the community to make Black mage better are insufficient. It’s lack of utility doesn’t mean it has to be better then pictomancer, after all most of the utility picto has is either A, just another way to do damage less directly, or B, conditional. The shield is really the only useful utility it has and heal on star prism might as well not be there due to how rigid the use of that skill actually is. It’s probably overheal more than anything else.

If we took away the heal and the shield, would people be satisfied? No, because those are arguments made in poor faith to necessitate a nerf, not becuase those skills themselves contribute to why black mage should be better. Nobody is crying that viper is so low in ultimate despite the fact it has basically no utility to offer anyone. Some people complain about smudge and want that nerfed. Okay, let’s nerf that. But pictomancer would still be better then black mage.

Most of the nerfs here are in service of justifying why black mage should be better, but what they actually do is just make picto much less fun for the people who don’t come to the forums. Remembers, we’re the vocal minority and the devs know this.

Imo, the solution to pictomancer is something that can’t be solved this expansion. FFXIV has to change as a game fundamentally or pretty much abandon any semblance of unique job diversity because Ninja had this exact same issue of being too useful in HWs and Stormblood due to its kit have a ton of fun interactions with the games mechanics, from setting up burst, to controlling aggro when that was a mechanic, to managing debuffs for slashing jobs in the game. All of those things have been stripped from ninja leading to the jobs to become static.
The community is essentially asking for pictomancer to end up in the same scenario.