Picto painting potency should be readjusted

[Supersnow845]

@"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.

Why would they be the only options? Jobs are allowed to have niches and that should be encouraged

If “doesn’t sit around watching paint dry when the boss is untargetable” is such an unwieldy niche they nerf it over fixing it we really are screwed

[Carighan]

Exactly. It's perfectly fine for Pictos to be stronger in fights with breaks, so long as they're weaker in others.

With so many classes, adding more and yet keeping them all equally valid for all content is just utopian anyways, see... any time in the game's history, ever. It's better to embrace it and mine the imbalances for class identity and pros and cons, instead of pretend balance is possible in the first place and eshew all differences and class identity.

[Shurrikhan]

Why would they be the only options? Jobs are allowed to have niches and that should be encouraged

If “doesn’t sit around watching paint dry when the boss is untargetable” is such an unwieldy niche they nerf it over fixing it we really are screwed

Because the only counter to specifically X is the devaluation/reduction/removal of X.

Premise: {Job} has a {downtime} advantage.

Context: The meaningful application of {downtime} advantage unique to {Fight}, thereby unable to be balanced out via other means without making the thereby-buffed jobs overpowered in other contents.

Solution A: Give everyone equal downtime value, removing the advantage. You've homogenized jobs.

Solution B: Remove downtime from fights, thereby removing the advantage. You've homogenized fights. (And yes, preventing certain uses of downtime via a brief debuff, as above, is a hell of a lot more feasible than completely redesigning the fight's transitions.)

"Solution" C: Give more to worry about than just the final overall damage? -> How?

• Via add-spawns via the jumps? Then you've removed downtime, as above, partly homogenizing fights.
• By making the content easier? Then you've partly homogenized fights by making the hardest less hard.
• By adding a bunch of other commensurate advantages to all the other jobs for all the other fights? Now each fight needs a quota of levers for those advantages to be used on, homogenizing fights, or (more likely) you will have expanded the issue from one must-pick to a cast of must-picks per fight, worsening the situation still further.

I agree with you that Picto's painting should be a damage gain, even if only barely one when ill-leveraged, and that a job should not be changed to the detriment of its kit use or its iconic elements to suit a singular fight, but specific problems do have specific solutions. Anything else just invites more problems atop the usually thereby-left-unsolved ones.

In FRU's case, that may well have been to just inflict the party with a bout of blindness and "aphantasia" over certain transitions just to nerf PIC in those specific cases, but you cannot "solve" what is specifically an advantage in manner X without removing/reducing it or its use case.

Exactly. It's perfectly fine for Pictos to be stronger in fights with breaks, so long as they're weaker in others.

It's not, though. Because that just means they become a must-pick in some and others must-picks in others, which means we then just have a rotating half of a job roster instead of truly having n choices.

It's fine instead for a job to have an advantage in a phase of a fight, others in another phase, etc., with overall roughly equal value across the whole.

But PIC's issue wasn't just that it had a downtime advantage; it was that the advantage led to overall greater performance in a way that couldn't be specifically dealt with without neutering PIC across the board or through changes to FRU itself. Sadly, they appear to have opted to change PIC's place in n-1 places of content instead of just the 1, all to avoid a gimmicky solution for the one fight.


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None of this is to say you can't have more diverse encounters (we definitely should), just that as long as the diversity does not relatively devalue the advantage, you'd still have the same 'problem'. And when you devalue advantage A only by giving job B an advantage B, job C an advantage C, job D an advantage D, and so forth, fights then have to build themselves around leveraging each advantage equally to not simply expand the issue of one must-pick into an issue of several, even if on fight-by-fight rotation (at which point it'd feel more like a play-as-NPC scenario where one person takes "The Monk", another "The Black Mage", another "the Paladin", another "The White Mage", and so forth).

In the end, if people aren't willing to play jobs that are some 4% behind overall but with which a fight is nonetheless clearable, we're bound to have either (A) homogeneity in fights or jobs or (B) greatly slowed development time in hiding homogeneity in job-leverage across fights.

[Supersnow845]

Your last sentence encapsulates my point (no offence but I’m really not in the mood to respond to an essay, I burned myself out years ago doing that to renrathas)

Nothing in your post is particularly wrong but it’s all built on the assumption that niche based balancing only works in tight balancing by having a rotation of niches filling a “niche spot”. I see why you arrived at this point but my problem is the entirety of the balance design design removing the ability of niches to exist

Some jobs should be bad in fights, design should encourage particular jobs over other ones

Any job can clear all content is why all the jobs play exactly the same

[Shurrikhan]

And again, the issue stems primarily from community intolerance for "sandbagging". Without that changing or massively more effort put into each fight's design, making jobs much more unique probably won't allow for more total 'uniqueness' experienced across each fight, but at best simply more distinction among fewer actually permissible choices (trading quantity of choices for quality of choice). You'd have 8 to 10 choices per raid, with more entertainment briefly once deep enough into farm weeks to shake up who plays which of the fight's permissible jobs, but in getting that you'd sacrifice others' ability to simply play the job they want without being lambasted (now for far better reason than ever before).

This is largely *because* of XIV's relative ease of swapping jobs or even roles with every tier start due to crafted gear. When it's actually far enough out of one's way or the jobs each deep enough (regardless of ostensible "uniqueness") that one maining the job would do better than a skilled player merely dabbling in something more meta for the given fight, this becomes less of an issue. But that's not merely forcing niches. Niches without competitive levers just reduce choice for most players across a community like XIV's.

Now, is agree that jobs should be more unique; I'm merely cautioning against the idea that fights should have clear best or fitting or "niched" choices, or that such would be balanced out by said jobs being the worst elsewhere, let alone that it'd forgive any size of imbalance. Unless that gap is small enough, it doesn't become something that a main of a given job simply rides the highs and lows of, but simply a matter of fights greatly reducing their permissible rosters, however shuffled their winners may be.

Tl;dr: "Certain fights should require certain jobs" isn't necessarily any better for available total breadth-times-depth of play than "any job can clear all content", no matter how dismissively one intones the latter.

[Carighan]

In the end, if people aren't willing to play jobs that are some 4% behind overall but with which a fight is nonetheless clearable, we're bound to have either (A) homogeneity in fights or jobs or (B) greatly slowed development time in hiding homogeneity in job-leverage across fights.

But they are.

I mean yes, if reading the forums or reddit you get the idea that a 1% difference in damage output means flat-out not a single group will ever allow this job on a spot, they just hard-lock it in PF and all that.

But ingame? Nobody cares. People are happy the spots fill, that's the only thing that matters, damage is way too closely balanced and not enough fights provide an actual DPS check for it to matter. There might be situations where yes sure, you can offset that damage down your black mage got on Orbital Omen if you had a Samurai instead of a Reaper or so. Yes. But that's a bit silly of a comparison, because a much simpler fix instead of going out and replacing a job with another job is for the BLM to just not stand in Omen and not get a damage down (that is to say, damage checks in this game are too lenient for sub-10%-damage-balance to ever matter at all).

The community loves to make a big stink about it, all the while loudly complaining how SQEX "takes all the unique parts of my job away", never realizing that it is this constant complaints about damage or reach or timing differences that cause them to do this of course. The community - seemingly - wants more homogenization, so they provide.

So I kinda agree and disagree. If you ask the forum community, of course Pictos being intentionally designed to be better on some fights and worse on others is not okay. We've seen it, people went absolutely mental here. But if you look at actual numbers, the real issue was Picto was also overall too strong, their built-in advantage on fights with times to paint just needed to be offset on fights without, and they'd have ended up with ~4% advantage on some and 4% disadvantage on others roughly (depends on the fight). Which is... well within the current damage spread anyways so it's not even an issue anybody would want to discuss. I don't get the players of this game.

This is largely *because* of XIV's relative ease of swapping jobs or even roles with every tier start due to crafted gear.

This makes me wonder whether as far as fight design they'd be better off removing the balance-part of a "job" anyways, and go back to classes.

Say I pick "Caster DPS", and then "Pictomancer". For my gameplay, only the latter is relevant. It gives me the buttons, the mechanics, the UI elements, etc. But for balance and numbers, the server wants to know the former and couldn't care any less what actual job I have.

Meaning that whether I pick Picto or BLM or Summoner, the damage profile and output is exactly identical so long as we all keep casting and using our skills roughly on CD. The differences would be sub-1% as the server frankly doesn't actually care what we're doing, so long as we're busy.

Now of course, this sounds absurd. But then, jobs are already so oversimplified (despite using so very many buttons on the hotbar) and so staticky in their gameplay, would it really be such a big loss? And this is far from the first time CRPGs, in particular MMORPGs, have fudged numbers to enforce tighter balance while giving the illusion of greater gameplay randomization or customization. In the end button-presses would still matter, the server however employs a sliding window of some kind (say, 60s) to figure out what damage multiplier to apply to each next skill we press to "level" our damage outputs. So if I Picto gets a big boost from being able to re-paint in a downtime moment, effectively this'd make their next 5-8 spells deal slightly less damage after the muses, to compensate. Again, actually much more tricky due to buffs and all that, but it's not truly difficult to implement, either.

We'd be able to have more unique gameplay and all damage output amongst a role would be effectively always equal. While also curbing outliers but top and bottom, which means damage checks in fights can be more tightly tuned. And finally ending the argument "unique gameplay" vs "numerical balance": Server enforces the latter, client is free to do the former.

[Voidmage]

In the end, if people aren't willing to play jobs that are some 4% behind overall but with which a fight is nonetheless clearable, we're bound to have either (A) homogeneity in fights or jobs or (B) greatly slowed development time in hiding homogeneity in job-leverage across fights.

I have to disagree here.
People simply play what they find fun and even in the worst times of job balance you had players use jobs that had been simply worse. I sooner have a "bad" job in my party that the player is good with than a "good" job they can't even really play or are not motivated to optimise.
It's really only the raiding scene that truly cares but even there it doesn't really matter outside week 1 with how the catch up gearing in this game works and that's how I jump to my main point.

The root cause of all this is that Savage upwards has far too much say on job design and potencies than it should have.
I know that people will come with "normal modes don't matter" and all that but the truth is that the balancing for the raids also impacts other content.
It's fine for a job to be better in downtime heavy fights, same as it's fine for jobs to not be burst but consistent damaged oriented. Just make different fights that let different jobs shine.
Would jobs be excluded by the idiots in PF? Yes but there will also be groups that do not care about that and I sooner take my job being worse in certain fights than having it boring (no one asked for BLM's opinions on Endsinger or P7S).

Savage upwards should not dictate the core strength’s and weaknesses of jobs. Whoever thinks otherwise is frankly far too deep in their raiding bubble. This whole mentality holds back new gameplay ideas and is what brought us into this mess right

Tldr:
The problem isn't PCT potency or how it works in certain fights, it's that the priorities in this game regarding content are completely backwards and impact the overall design and enjoyment of jobs.

[Aco505]

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

It's not only downtime, however. Look at M10S, PCT is ahead of every other job, even those that have always had the niche of "good at 2-targets" like DRG. VPR's burst AoE was nerfed recently, too, due to its power but it shows that the new DT jobs took over in several ways (e.g. AoE damage) compared to the older DPS jobs.

The developers released PCT in an overtuned state and have been missing the mark when it came to balancing it since then. If it's too good, then you have a FRU situation when the other casters are played way less.

While a job avoiding using one of its mechanics in some situations is not ideal, it also introduces some extra decision-making that is not necessarily bad. Other jobs do this, too, by for instance not refreshing a DoT like Higanbana if a target will die before it can deal enough damage.

So while the developers should keep trying to actually balance the job without hurting its core mechanical features, it is far from neutered considering its strengths in several areas that are not exclusively full uptime single target fights.

[Supersnow845]

It's not only downtime, however. Look at M10S, PCT is ahead of every other job, even those that have always had the niche of "good at 2-targets" like DRG. VPR's burst AoE was nerfed recently, too, due to its power but it shows that the new DT jobs took over in several ways (e.g. AoE damage) compared to the older DPS jobs.

The developers released PCT in an overtuned state and have been missing the mark when it came to balancing it since then. If it's too good, then you have a FRU situation when the other casters are played way less.

While a job avoiding using one of its mechanics in some situations is not ideal, it also introduces some extra decision-making that is not necessarily bad. Other jobs do this, too, by for instance not refreshing a DoT like Higanbana if a target will die before it can deal enough damage.

So while the developers should keep trying to actually balance the job without hurting its core mechanical features, it is far from neutered considering its strengths in several areas that are not exclusively full uptime single target fights.

And I mean that’s countered by the fact that in all other fights this tier besides 10 RDM is either close enough behind to be statistically insignificant in distance or outright doing more damage than PCT (as in 9) while having chain rezz

If anything PCT overperforming 10 and underperforming 9 11 and 12 is exactly the sort of microcosm of balance that should exist, when a fight plays to PCT’s strengths (it can move around when it uses 2 target cleave) it overperforms. When it can’t or there is no niche available it underperforms

Still neither option involves making it so in particular situations you should be designing jobs to want to avoid their core mechanic. There is a pretty big difference between that and the baseline expectation of DOT’s not being used in the last 30 seconds of a fight

If you want to get into the reeds of caster balance the biggest problem right now is arguably PCT being taxed to RDM levels for tempra grassa and being overpowered in 7.0

[Carighan]

Exactly, and either way the difference is small enough that a Picto is perfectly fine in the entire tier, while a Red Mage is perfectly fine in M10S. Identity, but without imbalance, everyone just plays what they want.

We just need more of that. There's so much room for more diversification as right now everything is balanced for numbers only and is super-tightly-balanced.