The identity of Pictomancer is being destroyed

[Carighan]

That’s my issue, the players whine, they’re extremely entitled. They want the class to be played their way, SE want it played another way, much like the hammer changes, it sucks your job got gutted but it is what it is now. Whining about it in every thread possible isn’t going to do anything.

Eh, it's fair of players to express disappointment. My issue is the lack of nuance.

Like look at this thread, "The identity of Pictomancer is being destroyed". This, in a vacuum, sounds as if Pictomancers just lost all color from their animations, and no longer equip a brush to fight. What it actually is about is that if you don't skip odd-minute hammer, you suffer a 1% loss to damage assuming there's absolutely no situation where you can utilize the flexibility of hammer and it's a pure-uptime fight with essentially no fight mechanics.

Given such "OMG THE SKY IS FAAAAAALLIIIING"-feedback being just about the only one you'll ever see (see the BLM threads, and that's a much bigger change and even then it's utterly unwarranted to contextualize the changes as such) it's really no wonder devs stopped listening to player feedback in MMORPGs - at least about class design - somewhere in mid-DAoC-development. Sony EQ still tried with EQ1. Mythic pretty quickly understood that it's pointless, you just get binary "This class is GOAT!" or "Entirely useless, delete the class" and nothing in-between.

Which has the extra side-effect that if anything ever is problematic in a bad way, that's no longer possible to convey, due to the Boy Who Cried Wolf effect. :<

Still, it's entirely normal to express dislike for stuff you don't like. Not blaming anyone for that, just for the (lack of) expression in giving feedback.