Picto painting potency should be readjusted

[Shurrikhan]

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 didn't say they weren't. I said only that simply throwing other shifting imbalances atop the existing one will not cause people requiring jobs over a <5% difference to suddenly be acceptant of it (and if most were already tolerant of the issue said imbalance, it was all a non-issue to begin with).

I've repeatedly said that jobs should be allowed their distinctions. I've only warned that distinctions alone (especially by just making certain fights want certain jobs) won't somehow magically "bypass" intolerance unless each and every fight leverages each and every job's distinctions in ways that give each similarly equal value (requiring vastly more fight design time), but merely slightly delay community consensus on meta comps/strats, since unless each jobs' gameplay actually becomes deeper -- not just different in basic capacity while operating in very similar ways, players will just be expected to level all in their gear-class and stop fight by fight if the expected gap exceeds their PL's tolerance or all this would be a non-issue in the first place if not.

Again, my initial response was to the idea that you a singular outlying imbalance shouldn't be solved by... addressing that imbalance directly. Direct solutions are good, and a decently large part of the problems of this game is from things like buffing every other job just because one was OP (leading to incidental power creep), all because nerfing the singular problem is somehow distasteful to people etc. It just should have been pointed at the one fight in which the job was a problem if it was a big enough issue there to seem like it was forbidding other casters from seeing use, rather than quite so devaluing that aspect of the job across all fights.

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.

Since all jobs within a gear class share all but one piece of gear already, that's essentially what a "distinctions are good, no matter how large the gap between jobs" gives us, within the tolerance of role-based stat buffs (likely then buffed to enforce role variety even while jobs are put on rotation).

With one job providing some 10% more damage overall, or phase-clutching burst over another of the same overall, etc., you wouldn't get to simply play BLM, or RDM, or PIC. You'd play Caster. Which would then shuffle its kit fight by fight unless there were a hell of a lot more effort put into each fight's design to leverage the distinctions you've wedged between jobs equally for each job.

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.

In any way that would actually work, that would be more homogenous than what we have now.

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.

Yeah, that's... not remotely feasible. You can't AI ARAM-style retune jobs skill by skill mid-fight.

And that would absolutely be difficult to implement. Or, more likely, impossible.

Again, if you have a singular fight with far, far more downtime than any other, and a singular job with far, far more use for downtime than any other job... you just nerf that interaction within that particular fight. You don't need any of that crap.

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.

If it were possible. It's not. You cannot have the value of each skill be predictively retuned based on players' typical and theoretical performance across other jobs for a simulated identical context in order to force equity across all jobs. That is utterly implausible short of the game blocking any parsing while the client merely pretends that anything you do matters while the server really just grants DPS per item level per average %activity until the things falls down dead.

If you have truly unique gameplay, it will inevitably result in different errors possible and, accordingly, different kinds, frequencies, and severity of losses that you cannot spontaneously-predictively auto-retune your way out of to force equity.

Again...

• Singular, narrow problems are best resolved by singular, targeted fixes.
• If other jobs were within community tolerance of PIC in FRU, all of this was bleating over nothing.
• If not, then the simplest, most direct fix was to reduce the value of PIC's downtime interactions specifically with FRU.
• If that were somehow not possible, then the best bet would be to siphon from PIC's downtime-advantaged capacities to their non-advantaged only until PIC's performance in that fight were within tolerance of other jobs in role, within a limit of the downtime-advantaged tools still remaining almost always at least a slight gain, as before (then nerfing the job as a whole for the remainder, if necessary).

_____________

Now, should we have more distinct ways and places for jobs to shine? Certainly, especially if they're competed against by other ways and places among their direct competition. Preferring direct solutions over the kinds that have caused us so much bloated power creep and the like isn't averse to that.

I would love to, for instance, see more Cover and ranged cheese from Paladin, so long as there are opportunities opposite those for, say, GNB/DRK to fortify a BLM (HoC, TBN, Oblation, Manaward) to take a distant tank tower so they don't need said range, for WAR to sustainably drag an add pack out of raid and healing range and Holmgang through a friendly-firing meteor drop, etc., etc., in the same fight.

And I'd ideally retweak jobs to be more centered around those unique features. I'm just being realistic as long as jobs are largely interchangeable in all ways other than their ability to generate overall DPS (which is all PIC's featural distinction amounted to, even if situational), then making certain fights want certain jobs isn't going to make those jobs more unique; it'll just leave the advantaged jobs playing the same while more and more players are asked to play those jobs instead, more likely reducing the total breadth of a fight's experience.

[Kishin12345]

Unfortunately Picto has fallen quite far since its release. Picto or Smn are now the worst casters. Red Mage does as much damage as Picto now and provides Verraise on top.
The real problem with pictomancer is that in full uptime fights it just sucks and in fights with a lot of downtime it is too strong. It is as if picto was made to annihilate ultimates.

I would definitely like to see potency buffs to the motifs and that the devs actually keep their promise and let picto rival blm instead of rivaling rdm.
Maybe just (i know that is the easy way out) make motifs always dh crit. That also stabilizes dmg output and we have a less varying damage profile because picto is the definition of "please crit". Potencies are way too high and it is too bursty. Dh crits and instead potency nerfs could balance that out a bit more.
It is just insane that you can have a 2mil damage opener or just a 900k opener, like, what is that?

[Yuella]

in full uptime fights it just sucks and in fights with a lot of downtime it is too strong

What's wrong with this?

[Kishin12345]

What's wrong with this?

It should be as viable in full uptime fights as in downtime fights. We dont want jobs that have advantages over others. Makes it a balancing mess, too.
The next ultimate that comes heavily favors picto again and in for example savage it is not really favorable to play. I would like it to be playable in all content to the same extent and not always feel like "ahh i should have gone blm or rdm."
Picto before the nerfs was fine. They nerfed picto and buffed everything else and now picto is a mediocre job. Also full uptime fights are the norm and that is what jobs should be balanced around. If they just left picto where it was on launch and buffed every other job then picto would sit in a good spot now.
Also we were promised it would rival blm and that is not true anymore.
It is pretty simple to fix, just a bit of potency shifting. It should mix in between melees and we should not always have blm on top then the whole melee block and then the rest of the casters.

[Shurrikhan]

I don't think there's any universal "we" surrounding that preference.

Some don't want fights to prefer certain jobs. Others do.

Some are okay with it to a point (for me, under 5% overall variation in resultant average clear time [where "average" is important due to ease/reliability provided by cheeses] between a 'meta' comp and something only partly so), while others accept far larger or smaller thresholds. /shrug

[Carighan]

We dont want jobs that have advantages over others.

Drop the "we", at least. Speak for yourself.

[Supersnow845]

I 100% want jobs with unique advantages and disadvantages

Having 20 versions of the same job + SCH warping healing balance with spreadlo for 10 years gets boring

Give me more diversity amongst jobs, I’m fine to have my job be bad in A to be good in B, that’s why we have the armoury system, if I wanted to play the same job for everything I’d play a game that doesn’t have the armoury system

[Shurrikhan]

Give me more diversity amongst jobs, I’m fine to have my job be bad in A to be good in B, that’s why we have the armoury system, if I wanted to play the same job for everything I’d play a game that doesn’t have the armoury system

Meanwhile, I want different jobs to give different takes on fights (simply advantaging different strats/phases so that there's more creativity available for how to go about a fight, instead of just tighter compositional checks), instead of just to be a clear meta or inferior pick for it.

Honestly can't tell if that's more agreeing or disagreeing with your take, though, without knowing the thresholds you'd place on that.

[Supersnow845]

Meanwhile, I want different jobs to give different takes on fights (simply advantaging different strats/phases so that there's more creativity available for how to go about a fight, instead of just tighter compositional checks), instead of just to be a clear meta or inferior pick for it.

Honestly can't tell if that's more agreeing or disagreeing with your take, though, without knowing the thresholds you'd place on that.

I think we are more leaning to disagreeing because of a difference in the idea that if one job or a small collection of jobs do something extraordinary in a fight then that constitutes a form of homogenisation because players will then build around the assumption someone will always be on the team that can do that extraordinary thing, so instead of 8 players you have 7 players + 1 “key” and who the key is shuffles around per fight

I don’t even necessarily disagree this would be a consideration but I’m not imagining your “in 9 SCH is a god and SGE is griefing, in 10 SGE is a god and SCH is griefing”, I’m more imagining something approaching T8. Where your party composition dictated how you solved a mechanic but players had the tools to do extraordinary things if needed, like the wrong person got allagan field? The SCH has the power to power shield them to save it exploding, the bard got it, well they can move more effectively to dodge non forced damage to survive

Everyone should have the ability within particular context’s to be the one to achieve the wow moment but within that window it shouldn’t be unexpected that some classes will simply outshine others depending on the context

[TakumiHarada]

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

Unpopular opinion: Ultimates are the cancer in this game.
RNG job mechanics, gone
Non-standard rotations, gone
DoTs, gone
Non-2-minute bursts, gone
Strong downtime management, gone

Why are all jobs neutered for the sake of a content that the majority of players aren't interested?
Now that the game has gone stale it's time for a change.