Picto makes the game less fun

[Aco505]

PCT’s balance problems more centre on it just being better than BLM in every category, but it isn’t out of line with the melees

Leaving BLM and the other casters aside for a second, PCT is higher or topping rDPS, aDPS, nDPS and cDPS-wise than the majority of melees.

If it has high rDPS, it shouldn't be easily beating a melee like RPR, who is more selfish, in aDPS or being equal in nDPS yet it does at different percentiles and fights.

If it has high aDPS/nDPS, it shouldn't be above NIN/DRG, melees with lower personal damage but higher rDPS. PCT is usually the first job after the buffless ones in the aDPS charts and is somehow even above VPR and BLM in some high percentiles in M1S.

As for BLM, it still beats PCT in aDPS and nDPS, as it should. The main issue is perhaps the fact that BLM cannot abuse buffs as well as SAM or VPR so its aDPS is lower than it should.

We can argue that the difference is some hundreds of DPS and not that relevant but PCT is leading or very high in every single metric at several percentiles.

Things are more balanced now after the buffs but the job remains very strong regardless, and we haven't even seen its full potential due to the lack of downtime in this tier besides M4S.

It doesn't matter if PCT leads one or two metrics but leading several is a symptom that it is a bit out of line. Would we not think the same if VPR was topping all metrics as it was happening some weeks ago? PCT has been consistent in its strength throughout the expansion and now the latest Savage tier, with or without BiS.

However, I do agree that forcing motifs to have a target to be cast is not a solution. It'd break the job. Imagine having to hard cast motifs after a period of 30s downtime for 30~ seconds of uptime. The PCT would hardly be able to start doing anything before the next downtime phase began. Just moving damage from burst into filler so full uptime damage remains the same but downtime gains are toned down would be the best solution.

[Eraden]

Mao just chiming in here as BLMs. Mao nots concerned so much abouts state of PCTs. Mao more concerned abouts Devs wrecking EW BLMs. Mao wantings BLMs to be fixed, not PCTs to be dragged down to BLMs. Is make no sense to Mao to destroy two jobs rather than fix one whats been wrecked.

[Supersnow845]

There is definitely something that needs to change about PCT but I’m still not entirely sure what it is

Right now PCT has 3 particular strengths

-highest rDPS and a better potential to scale its rDPS than most of the jobs that are within its aDPS range given its relatively large 5% buff over smaller buffs like arcane circle or searing light
-strongest utility of the 8 “high damage dealers” with its closest competitors being MNK and RPR (however I still maintain my original point in this thread that PCT is not world endingly overpowered in utility given its utility is weaker than all 5 support DPS by a pretty wide margin, its closest competitor would probably be BRD
-really strong downtime potential to shoot it even higher

PCT needs to give somewhere or if they truly do think they can fix PCT by buffing literally every other job then they need to actually buff the jobs equally because the existing 7.05 buffs excessively benefitted the melee and BLM over the support DPS (though to be fair BLM desperately needed it) which just widened the gap between the two for no obvious reason given this was supposed to be a flat set of buffs as to rebalance PCT without nerfing it

However I strongly do not believe actually changing any of PCT’s mechanical design is the answer here. Motifs should continue to be castable whenever and be instant outside of combat. From this there is 3 main ways you can fix PCT

1) flat nerf its potencies. If you do it this way it literally doesn’t matter what you really nerf because the feel of the job isn’t changing, however it would likely be best to avoid nerfing hammer or reversed aetherhue as ignoring normal aetherhue of the 4 remaining components (creature, hammer, starry and reversed) reversed and hammer have the lowest PPS
2) move potency from the motifs to the aetherhue combo. This reduces the effect the motifs have as they no longer contain so much potency. This doesn’t really hurt it in full uptime fights except for a slight loss in how strongly it’ll scale with buffs over the course of the expansion but it will nerf how much downtime benefits it
3) reduce the potential scaling of its strongest attacks within in its burst window by forcing them to crit reducing how much PCT benefits from lucky crit fishing in its starry muse window

Whichever way you think is the best way to fix it doing something like actually changing the way motifs function such as requiring a target to cast really shouldn’t be in consideration as that changes the entire design and interaction of PCT and we know how well that went for VPR

[Mecia]

Stacking potency to single moves has been a mistake in general. This started in SB i believe? But has been getting exponentially worse since timers started aligning in ShB.

Redistributing motif damage couldve avoided nerf tantrums and other balance issues they caused by just buffing.

[Zakuyia]

Picto recieves nerf ends up being trash community wonders why it recieved nerfs lol

[Raikai]

"IN ADDITION to providing buffs to the party."

I must be missing something with this being brought up so much. Is not like a raid buff is an "extra"... it's still part of a job's rDPS budget. In fact - in theory - it's a disadvantage if you compare to BLM, because if the party as a whole is doing poorly, that outsourced dps will suffer.

[mallleable]

Just knock Starry Muse buff down to 3% from 5% if it still needs nerfs. The mechanics that PCT gains from the buff should be more important than raid buff itself.

[Aco505]

Hello! I've decided to log in and comment specifically on false info

I believe that you have not understood what I was trying to write or that I didn't perhaps explain myself well enough. Either way, I'll try to reply to your points as best as possible.

First, nDPS and cDPS do not matter when comparing jobs against other jobs.

nDPS is your DPS not including ANY buffs outside of your own. It's ONLY useful for comparing performance to other players on the same job. Please note, that the current highest nDPS is... VIPER! Followed by... BLACK MAGE! Picto is 5th for nDPS at 95th percentile! So you're blatantly wrong here.

While you're right in the sense that nDPS is usually mostly relevant when comparing performance to other players without taking buffs into account, it can still be a useful metric to understand specific differences between jobs. For example, if we posit that RPR is a job in theory meant to have higher personal damage than other buffing jobs due to having a weaker 3% buff, then ideally its personal damage (nDPS in this case) should be higher than that of a job with a 5% buff such as PCT.

However, since PCT tends to have higher aDPS than RPR, we can then use the nDPS/aDPS comparison to realize that despite having lower personal damage when not taking buffs into account (nDPS), PCT is able to put more potency into buffs, as several fights of the tier at different percentiles attest.

For the sake of completeness, nDPS also equals rDPS for non-buffing jobs such as SAM, VPR or BLM, just like cDPS equals aDPS. The relevance of the differences of each of the four metrics is clearer for jobs that provide buffs than those that don't.

Therefore, it is logical that it's the buffless or "selfish" jobs leading the nDPS charts, as they should. Do note that the sentence of mine that you are quoting explicitly says that PCT is higher than the majority of melees at the different metrics, meaning that it's higher rDPS-wise than all of them but it obviously won't be higher aDPS-wise than SAM, VPR or BLM. In that sense, I do further clarify later on that PCT is right after these jobs in the aDPS charts, meaning that it's above MNK, RPR, DRG and NIN.

cDPS is your rDPS without single target padding. Also useless compared to rDPS and aDPS. It's basically aDPS without single target buffs applied. Because f*** you, Dancer. It does not allow us to draw conclusions for balance or game health.

As explained in their webpage,

"cDPS stands for "Combined DPS" and is measuring how much damage you've done with single target padding removed and adding how much your damage you've given to others with your buffs. [...] cDPS allows you compare how well you and your raid played into burst windows and AOE buffs. It's a good way to look at job balance between each other, and seeing which jobs have strong buffs while also providing good damage during other job's AOE buff windows."

cDPS is basically a "combination" of rDPS and aDPS and does have the ability to help us understand balance between jobs. The main caveat is that all metrics (except nDPS) are affected by party composition and, while cDPS is the one affected the most, so is aDPS.

Like rDPS, cDPS does include the single target buffs from AST and DNC but only in the "rDPS portion" for those two jobs. It is actually aDPS that does not include them for the jobs receiving the buffs.

In essence, cDPS can be useful to analyze overall job balance, particularly if party compositions are similar.

No metric is perfect. Some jobs will favor rDPS while others will favor aDPS. This is why I think that taking them all into account is the best approach when discussing job balance. As imperfect as it can be, this is the data we have to work with because we have no access to SE's internal numbers.

Picto leads in 1 metric that matters, by under a 3 digit rDPS difference, and a less than 3% difference between it and the worst Melee. Far from a balance issue and far from egregious.

I don't believe that using a single fight in a Savage tier comprised of four can paint an overall picture of job balance because different fights may favor one job or another due to different reasons such as difficulty to keep uptime or hold resources for burst.

Regardless, my argument is not that PCT should be nerfed or that it's entirely unbalanced. In fact, in a previous post I conclude that the balance of this tier is mostly fine (besides MCH). My point is that PCT is still quite strong at several areas despite the buffs most other jobs got.

As I already said, we could argue that the differences are small enough not to matter, and that would be just fine, but I still believe that if PCT is to have higher aDPS than jobs with less personal damage such as NIN, then its rDPS should be a bit lower than theirs. I don't think it's healthy for game balance to repeat situations such as SAM in ShB or BLM in the later parts of EW. On the other hand, it could be argued that as long as any job can clear the content, these difference don't matter too much.

BLM can ABSOLUTELY abuse buffs

As for BLM, it still beats PCT in aDPS and nDPS, as it should. The main issue is perhaps the fact that BLM cannot abuse buffs as well as SAM or VPR so its aDPS is lower than it should.

Where does it say that BLM cannot? What I'm saying is that its capacity to abuse buffs is lower than that of SAM and VPR, which may not help the job in the landscape of putting the maximum amount of damage in the 2-minute burst windows, particularly if BLM has to use those resources for movement.

Sure, it gains a lot, but so does anything else that lets their CDs refresh. Because literally every job got a "you can now do this high potency follow up!" for most of their CDs, we'll need to wait to see how FRU shakes out.

PCT is balanced around doing no damage for a specific amount of seconds while casting motifs. Any amount of downtime that reduces this no-damage period during uptime phases will hugely benefit the job. Yes, other jobs can recharge their CDs such as NIN's mudras but those are not balanced around doing zero damage for specific periods like PCT is.

Considering how common downtime tends to be in high end duties, this specific quirk of PCT is quite beneficial to the job because it further increases its damage potential. I do agree that we will know for sure when FRU is released.


In conclusion, I don't think PCT should be nerfed. I do believe it could be adjusted by moving some damage from burst into filler to avoid the potential balance problems in Ultimates or other relevant content when downtime is involved while keeping the overall full uptime damage the same. Additionally, I don't think the job should lose its utility or defensive capabilities either. If anything, what other jobs have should be reevaluated without falling into the homogenization pitfall.

PCT should be balanced within the "more damage group" just like BLM. I don't think we disagree in this particular point. But I still think the job excels in several areas compared to others, as I have already explained.

I will say though that I am here to provide feedback and discuss the state of the game. I have done so in a polite way and I don't think I have been hyperbolic in my posts. If you don't like or disagree with something that I write, I'd appreciate if you returned the gesture and engaged in fruitful discussion instead of coming guns blazing accusing others of being ignorant. If anything, it is your own post that contains misconceptions and hyperbole at times.

Just so that it's clear and we don't waste each other's time, I will refrain from replying again to a post with a similar tone as your first one.

[Lyth]

One of the downsides of trying to condense someone's performance down into a single number is that you lose information in the process. Let me give you an example as illustration:



If you look at the damage profiles for PCT, it's extremely burst orientated. I'm sure you know this intuitively, even when you look at the max damage on individual attacks like Star Prism or Mog/Madeen. You can land upwards of 200k on a single hit. Xenoglossy pales in comparison to that. The end result is that PCT ends up concentrating nearly all of its outgoing damage into its two minute bursts, while BLM has to catch up between bursts by simply being extremely consistent.

As was said earlier, the problem with these two extremes is that you just can't balance them against each other. The extent of PCT's advantage is going to vary based on fight duration, presence of downtime, and whether you end on a two minute window. Crit/DH can produce a large degree of variability in performance as well. I think trying to rebalance these jobs without looking at the damage profiles is meaningless, simply because they are designed so differently. Flat nerfs or buffs in isolation are not a solution, simply because you're going to end up with PCT either being overpowered or underpowered.

I don't think that it's at all acceptable to 'just wait and see what happens in FRU.' The problem that I have with balance decisions in this game is that they're always completely reactionary. Just look at the data that's out there for the more recent legacy Ultimates and it becomes fairly obvious where we're headed with this. You don't need PCT to completely dominate FRU to nerf it into oblivion for 7.2. For once, I'd like to see some proactive design choices where we avoid reactionary balance swings into extremes.

The solution is to directly address PCT's burst profile such that it becomes more compatible with the game design. That may mean utilising more Crit/DH effects to avoid massive damage variance on PCT's biggest attacks. That may mean shifting some of that burst potency off on to the job's base rotation. That may mean putting constraints on motifs such that they always require a target to use, and such that you can't load them up out of combat.

Alternatively, you'd have to revise every other job to have even more of an extreme burst focus within two minute buffs (if you could imagine that to be possible), and let everyone else also charge up their gauge during downtime/out of combat. Probably makes more sense just to rein back PCT's burst a bit, yeah?

On the subject of utility, I think you can pretend that any form of utility is 'optional'. They're all situational in their use, after all. RDM and SMN may never use raise once in a run, but their DPS is still docked significantly simply for having access to it. I think it's only fair for PCT's damage output to reflect its access to a number of very valuable utility effects.

Mao just chiming in here as BLMs.

I think it comes down to ensuring that every job provides some unique value, at the end of the day. The problem is when you design a job to be just better in all areas, at which point it becomes a direct upgrade. That's fine if you're willing to swap to the most powerful job in a given role, but less so if you're passionate about a particular job aesthetic.

Eventually, you start losing players because there's a community perception 'If you want to play tank, then you play WAR,' or 'If you want to play caster, then you play PCT' and so on. It defeats the point of having lots of jobs. Sometimes the only thing keeping someone from playing a certain role is the fact that the right aesthetic just hasn't been released yet.

To get an idea of the current situation, in the top 50 fastest clears, PCT is represented in 86.5-94.1% of groups, and BLM is represented in only 2.0-7.7% of groups. The next highest represented job after PCT is BRD, with 60-72% representation.

Rebalancing PCT is unavoidable, given the current state of affairs. But I expect to see a 'seesaw' balance between BLM and PCT for the foreseeable future as long as SE only balances with reactionary flat buffs (which is the only thing that they seem to ever do). To avoid that, I would much rather that they look at the underlying reasons behind the balance problems in their relative burst profiles and address those issues directly. If you know that you have to upset part of the player base, just do it once and fix the issue once and for all. FoTM balance just alienates players in the long run.