Picto painting potency should be readjusted

[jd2408]

7.2 picto nerf made picto paintings, particularly the hammer, a potency loss over just casting filler rgb. That has been fixed in 7.3 for the hammer. What has not been fixed, however, is your creature muses are still DPS Loss if you do not get a moogle or madeen. This feels awful because there will be cases where you just let your single charge of pom or claw muse sit there cause you know you won't get the wing or fang muse in time before the fight ends, and would just rather cast holy in white. I do not think this is intuitive at all. A job should never be casting filler over one of its major CD.

There are a few ways to address this. The most obvious is to buff muse from 800 to 1000. This will put them just barely over the potency per second of a full filler RGB Cym combo, but this will buff picto by ~1.5% overall dps, which is fine in full-uptime since the job is lagging behind most melee dps and blm and it's being tailed closely by rdm, but it might be too strong in ultimate.
The alternative is to take out a couple of hundred potencies from the moogle/madeen and shift it to the initial muse. Something like Pom Wing Claw Fang at 1000 and Moogle at 800, and Madeen at 900, should have the same effect without buffing picto too much.

[Valence]

I'm not sure I agree with the premise being a problem to begin with... If people have to use their heads on what to use and when, isn't that a good thing?

[Sunako]

Main problem with PCT is that it does too much damage, if the fight have downtime while not doing enough if the fight is 100% uptime.

My solution to that problem would be, add small initial potency to paint skills like 100 - 200 potency aoe which not require target and nerf little bit other spells. That way PCT gameplay would not drastically change and it would be more balanced in different encounters.

[Reginald_Cain]

I think for how long the cast times are on pictomancers pallets that they should hurt a bit. Abilities with long cast and no damage are the worst. Ruby right on Summoners ifrit stance for example.

[Supersnow845]

If PCT can’t play to its identity of being a painter because “what about downtime” it just shows how restrictive combat design is

Launch PCT potency of skills relative to each other was perfect (it was too high as a net but the proportion was right that painting was ALWAYS a gain) and it was destroyed for FRU

If a well designed job like PCT has to be neutered simply to deal with restrictive combat design then it’s time for combat design to change

[jd2408]

A major damaging cooldown of a job being ignored over its filler combo is not a good thing for any job. Granted, this is a relatively smaller issue compared to the hammer in 7.2, but they share the same problem. Painting creature is a dps loss in certain situations. That is not a good thing, considering that they are a core part of your kit. To put in a bit more perspective, holy in white is a button you would like to avoid on picto since it slows down your subtractive gauge generation and is considered in most general use case a dps loss, but it is STILL a better button to press over painting and using a single creature muse. I don't think there is another dps job in the game that would rather press filler over spending its major cooldown.

[Reginald_Cain]

If PCT can’t play to its identity of being a painter because “what about downtime” it just shows how restrictive combat design is

Launch PCT potency of skills relative to each other was perfect (it was too high as a net but the proportion was right that painting was ALWAYS a gain) and it was destroyed for FRU

If a well designed job like PCT has to be neutered simply to deal with restrictive combat design then it’s time for combat design to change

100 % agree. It's time to look at how jobs can be unique and viable by creating more diverse encounters

[Valence]

If a well designed job like PCT has to be neutered simply to deal with restrictive combat design then it’s time for combat design to change

Sorry, pvp leeched all the good job designers off pve, and the few that remain are too busy serving as doormats for encounter designers - on their knees under the tune of "Sinister".

[Xapapetsu]

I'm currently maining picto and I can see where it's a hard job to balance, downtime fights it's still king, but normal fights it seems better to bring a red mage or black mage instead, black mage for the damage, red mage for the utility. Picto does have some one offs like m10s where it can hit crazy numbers by saving hammer, Motifs, Rainbow drip, moogle beam, and madeen for cleaves, but generally I don't see a major reason to bring it over a red mage when it only does about 500 dps more than red mage at the 90th percentile.

[Shurrikhan]

@"If a well designed job like PCT has to be neutered simply to deal with restrictive combat design then it’s time for combat design to change" (on mobile, so can't quote normally)

The only way for fight design to "change" to make a large downtime advantage less significant is to homogenize the fights to have no downtime, or to stun or pacify and silence players in the meantime, which would then screw over other operations like healing, Form Shift (previously Anatman), preparatory Dances and Mudras, etc.