The identity of Pictomancer is being destroyed

[Supersnow845]

If an action is a guaranteed critical or direct hit then anything that would have increased the chances will instead increase its damage. This includes Battle Litany, Battle Voice, or your stats in Critical Hit and Direct Hit. Math in the Balance Discord isn't final yet but they say it's still a gain to paint the hammer in uptime.


Came from this patch note - https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...fa9db46a466e6/

The maths on it is mostly settled now

There is a particular optimisation system for PCT called “magenta skipping”, since aetherhues 2 (buff) has a 30 second duration if you cast stone in yellow then wait 30 seconds by doing other things (hammer, comets, creature muses etc) that buff will drop off returning you to blizzard in cyan. If you do this you generate gauge faster because magenta doesn’t generate any gauge

If you use hammer to facilitate a magenta skip the you can make hammer a gain in uptime (simulations of a vacuum max DPS rotation involve using hammer to magenta skip, if you exclude magenta skip then hammer is just a straight loss) otherwise hammer is only a gain using a very specific combination of buffs and only 2 and 3 will go into the starry muse window

So for everyone below the pink parsers hammer is now basically a dead button because if you just need to move and don’t care about trying to magenta skip (which itself is a nightmare to facilitate because it can throw off your aetherhue alignment) then holy in white is actually less of a DPS loss than hammer

So now hammer is next to useless, creature muses are only a gain because of mog/madeen. Each part itself is a pretty significant DPS loss and star prism no longer is worth using a hyperphantasia stack on

They’ve buffed filler so far at the expense of painting it’s barely a DPS loss to just never paint at all

If you have to scrutinize potencies and get your team of accountants to run the numbers to check if there's a dps loss in certain circumstances, I think your idea of job identity might be a little too strict

That’s exactly the problem, with the potency changes it is now incredibly opaque as to what is and isn’t a gain when it used to be obvious……painting=gain