Picto painting potency should be readjusted

[Kishin12345]

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

No i wont. Multiples = we
I share OP's opinion. And i have friends that are not on the forums and say that picto needs buffs. So in a way i speak for them, too.
And Picto just needs a tiny buff to perform well again. Maybe the devs just overlooked it.
I know they are probably careful with the picto topic, because a tiny full uptime fight buff can result in massive disbalance for lets say ultimates.
But it is picto's design and it is the developer's own fault for designing themselves into a corner with this job.
The hammer changes already took too long and i dont want creature motif potency to be overlooked.

I know that with the tiny micro downtimes in a lot of fights at the moment they might be trying to give picto a little niche, so that you can swiftcast a painting while the boss becomes jntargetable for 2sec or so, but that is not enough. A job should be strong in a standardly designed fight and not just in 10% of cases.

[Kishin12345]

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.

Pretty much this!
I dont want any job, not just picto to be a "bad" or "good" pick. I dont want a meta to be formed where a certain job becomes just simply better than others. That is the wrong direction.
We chose hyper balance and that should be the way. The developers themselves chose hyper balance, so keep it balanced.
And it is very clear that picto is underperfoming in 80% of this tier, when rdm does the same amount of damage and on top provides more valuable utility.
Granted it is not underperforming by so much that it warrants an emergency buff, like smn got for example, but maybe when the savage tier gets unlocked and the final numbers are clear, we get some potency buffs

[Aco505]

RNG job mechanics, gone
Non-standard rotations, gone
DoTs, gone
Non-2-minute bursts, gone
Strong downtime management, gone

Non-standard rotations and burst windows as well as downtime management are core features of Ultimates to this day. DoTs (Higanbana in particular) did get less effective at specific points of DSR and TOP due to the abundance of trio mechanics but I doubt the developers removed them because of this.

Ultimates are hardly the deciding factor behind big job changes.

[Shurrikhan]

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

Then we're in agreement. Thanks for giving a more concrete example.

[TakumiHarada]

Non-standard rotations and burst windows as well as downtime management are core features of Ultimates to this day. DoTs (Higanbana in particular) did get less effective at specific points of DSR and TOP due to the abundance of trio mechanics but I doubt the developers removed them because of this.

Ultimates are hardly the deciding factor behind big job changes.

Most DoTs were removed from the game because of "debuff limits" or "being too strong in 2-enemy phases".
Picking a few jobs that still have some DoTs doesn't help with your argument.
Most non-standard rotations esp. BLM are gone. And I specified "strong downtime management" like PCT.

They couldn't balance 21 jobs with hundreds of combinations in Ultimates, where they require jobs to squeeze out every last bit of damage, so they have to converge, standardise and homogenise jobs for debugging and testing purposes.
Job simplification started in ShB, after the first Ultimate back in late SB.

[Shurrikhan]

Most DoTs were removed from the game because of "debuff limits" or "being too strong in 2-enemy phases".
Picking a few jobs that still have some DoTs doesn't help with your argument.
Most non-standard rotations esp. BLM are gone. And I specified "strong downtime management" like PCT.

They couldn't balance 21 jobs with hundreds of combinations in Ultimates, where they require jobs to squeeze out every last bit of damage, so they have to converge, standardise and homogenise jobs for debugging and testing purposes.
Job simplification started in ShB, after the first Ultimate back in late SB.

If we were building for Ultimate, we'd still have non-standard rotations specifically to ease balancing in Ultimate, because they reduce the maximum unavoidable loss a job suffers in abnormal circumstances, such as those that Ultimate alone tends to have in any meaningful amount.

I don't give a damn about Ultimate and don't intend to play it, but you're in most cases barking up the wrong tree there.

[Carighan]

If they were seriously building for ultimate, they'd just flat-out restrict which classes you can bring in there, anyways. It'd be "Fight this ultimate with xyz", a specific 8-people setup that is the only setup that can go in.

Can tightly tune the fight exactly for that setup, and any player on the level where they do ultimately would trivially have jobs for that setup available and be able to gear them. The fact that they don't do something like this is already an indication that ultimates aren't a true focus point for balance unless a specific incident causes too much player unrest to ignroe.

[Reginald_Cain]

We should be able to paint an adamantoise and get a big shield and aether cannons like BIG MAN BLASTOISE BIG MAN BLASTOISE BIG MAN BLASTOISE!

[Kishin12345]

If we were building for Ultimate, we'd still have non-standard rotations specifically to ease balancing in Ultimate, because they reduce the maximum unavoidable loss a job suffers in abnormal circumstances, such as those that Ultimate alone tends to have in any meaningful amount.

I don't give a damn about Ultimate and don't intend to play it, but you're in most cases barking up the wrong tree there.

It is probably a mix of savage and ultimate that dictates balancing. Most potency and balancing changes happen with a savage or ultimate patch.
In 7.3 melees got buffed because the devs were planning a lot of downtime in the coming savage tier. At least that was given as the reasoning back then.
Smn got an emergency buff because it was underperforming in this tier. Picto got nerfed AFTER the numbers from FRU were clear.

We also already know that they design the fight in the hardest version and then water it down for the normal version.
So obviously it makes sense to balance jobs for the hardest difficulty or change them so that they dont struggle in ways that gives them too much of a disadvantage.
Gnashing combo getting stacks was a change specifically for this tier so that it wouldnt drift away during a fight like m10s where you are just forced to take downtime sometimes.
M7s is very likely the reason rdm got ranged melee (after all the complaints about not being able to use 1 burst window). Also this tier has several occasions where rdm has to be disconnected from the boss during burst windows, which could turn the burst window into just spamming dualcast and that would feel quite stupid if any other job could do their proper bursts there.

Edit: forgot to mention the aoe nerfs/buffs to multiple jobs after m6s turned out that some jobs are very bad at aoeing

[Carighan]

Edit: forgot to mention the aoe nerfs/buffs to multiple jobs after m6s turned out that some jobs are very bad at aoeing

Those are a good example of why Savages apparently don't truly matter for balancing though. The changes arrived as the tier just became outdated. If M6S had meaningful impact on class balance, they'd have hotfixed them in 2-3 days after deploying the tier.