Quote Originally Posted by Supersnow845 View Post
I think the point more centres on the fact that nerfing PCT while leading to PCT not being overpowered anymore doesn’t actually fix the wider balance issues at all nor do a lot of the offered suggestions around things like motifs needing targets consider the fact that core job design shouldn’t change when nerfing something

A lot of BLM’s have come in here and said “I feel bad that PCT does more damage than me while being easy”. That isn’t PCT’s fault, that’s the fault of BLM being a terrible burster in a burst heavy innate design. If we nerfed PCT down to NIN level tomorrow it would be back above BLM next tier anyway because it feeds into buffs so well, we have evidence of this with how well the healers scale over the course of the expansion.
Burst and continuous DPS can definitely coexist under the current game design. If you want to understand this, just look at what happened with M1S over the weeks. We've seen VPR/MNK trade off against DRG/NIN/SAM on a weekly basis. VPR is currently one of the weakest melee on that fight, with a 2.0% representation in the top 50 fastest clears in contrast to DRG's 31% and SAM's 25% (PCT has 100% representation - no other casters were used at all). That's purely a function of fight length. As ilvl goes up, fight duration shortens to the point where you clear on your 6 minute potion burst. That's like the zenith of burst-orientated jobs, which is what we see now.

Now if you look at M2S in comparison, it's a completely different story. VPR is the strongest melee in that fight, and has about 27.6% representation in the top 50 fastest clears (PCT has 94.2%). That's not surprising either, because kill times are between 7-8 minutes (i.e. between burst windows). So dealing continuous DPS gives you the chance to catch up and overtake jobs with heavier burst (PCT aside). In fact, you can predict VPR and MNK's usage in the top 50 fastest clears based entirely on fight length. I think when a system is closely balanced, you'll see natural trade-offs between these job damage types without one job being always on top for all fights.

It's not really the magnitude of PCT's burst that worries me. There are some intrinsic problems with this, the obvious one being a lot of damage variance, which may point to a need for more Crit/DH caps on burst actions. But I think the real issue is going to happen when you have fight designs with forced downtime and no target. That's where PCT will be truly uncontested, because it will have a full burst where even other burst jobs won't be able to build resources. That's why motifs are a big part of the underlying problem. I don't think flat potency changes can fix this.

In short, I don't think that you can balance PCT by just titrating average DPS, because the size of the discrepancy will be very much fight dependent. This is why we have resource-gated burst systems, to ensure that your ability to burst is still at least partially a byproduct of uptime. Motif casts should be uptime dependent and should require a target.