The identity of Pictomancer is being destroyed

[MrJPtheAssassin]

Don’t worry, melees are fine. Encounters are designed with the idea that melees have to move out of range and will lose damage. -Someone on the balance team.

Yeah, I never believed that line in the patch notes. I don't think the balance team has ever made a super melee unfriendly fight. We are talking about the same dev team that decided to make every boss hitbox half the size of the area last expac just to help melee keep uptime.

[Carighan]

It is a bit odd the tier made casting harder then they buffed melee because of melee uptime concerns

And just judging from M5S they made melee harder (one genuine no-melee moment but more importantly his 'out' is a pixel-perfect max-melee out, so it's no longer just standing somewhere as a melee DPS), but not remotely as much as they made casting harder in that fight, ouff. Black Mages are still the problem pick of the group in that, even with all their new flexibility. >.>

[Owyn_Addens]

And just judging from M5S they made melee harder (one genuine no-melee moment but more importantly his 'out' is a pixel-perfect max-melee out, so it's no longer just standing somewhere as a melee DPS), but not remotely as much as they made casting harder in that fight, ouff. Black Mages are still the problem pick of the group in that, even with all their new flexibility. >.>

Even in 7.1 BLM was already more mobile than RDM and had better access to that mobility on-demand. Combined with the fact that RDM constantly gets denied its melee combos in 6/7 if it's the sole caster, and we'll probably see a spike in BLM playrate that has little to do with the job and more to do with the encounters.

[fulminating]

VPR is now 12% ahead of every other job in M6. Obviously it’s time to nerf it apparently

Tbf I would endorse a significant nerf to viper particularly if it made reawakening a dps loss purely because that would be very funny. I would much rather they just made motifs not suck again - it’s not as if they weren’t borderline neutral in full uptime before anyway. Maybe the pictomancer nerf would have been better if they had moved potency to the motifs from rbg/cym. Or not touched it. It’s a job designed specifically to burst, let it.

[Carighan]

Viper must needs be deleted!

[Rithy255]

Instead of buffing directly pictomancer's potencies they reduce the cast times of paintings, who wants to cast a long spells anyway?

Please look forward to it!

[Kishin12345]

If you look at the damage Picto deals now then you can clearly see that they overdid the nerf. It is balanced for FRU sure, but full uptime it is at best mediocre. Rotation got ruined because we skip the 60s hammer now, so we even lost mobility. The devs dont know how to nerf and tbh how would they know how? All they do is only buff so there is no experience with nerfing jobs. Picto is supposed to rival blm and now it rivals rdm xD i want the rotation to be fixed so that hammer is useful again and i want damage output to be buffed so that it actually rivals blm damage output. That would mean that they need to buff paintings again and nnerf filler slightly. So we would be back at the old pictomancer pre nerf. Picto is pretty much unnerfable at this point...

[Supersnow845]

They pretty much did exactly what everyone who didn’t want a nerf to PCT was scared of

1) the nerf overly focusing on the balance of FRU at the expense of everything else
2) the rotation getting messed up by the nerf (seriously pick your least favourite part; hammer being a loss, creature parts hitting like wet farts or starry muse being an opaque mess as to what you put in it. They literally messed up every single muse with the change)
3) the nerf being large enough that it now falls in the awkward range between the melee and the physical ranged where it barely does enough damage to justify its lack of rezz

I guess I should be happy that motifs are still target less and instant outside of combat but at that point that really only preserves its old gameplay in dungeons

[Valence]

1) the nerf overly focusing on the balance of FRU at the expense of everything else

It is funny that they waited for 4 months and a whole patch where FRU was the only thing of note going on, and where PCT literally destroyed the competition, without doing anything, to suddenly bring the nerf bat out for 7.2, where FRU isn't really on the radar anymore. The balance team has such a funny way to miss their own train.

[MrJPtheAssassin]

It is funny that they waited for 4 months and a whole patch where FRU was the only thing of note going on, and where PCT literally destroyed the competition, without doing anything, to suddenly bring the nerf bat out for 7.2, where FRU isn't really on the radar anymore. The balance team has such a funny way to miss their own train.

The thing is, tho, even if they nerf the job for FRU when FRU came out, we would still be in the spot where the job isn't great in savage as we are now...you can't just nerf Picto every time a new ult comes out and then then turn around and buff it when savage comes out. The only major reason Picto did so well in FRU is bc other jobs just have problems in fights with a bunch of downtime, while Picto is kinda the first job that loves downtime. It was its niche, and what it was good at. Tier 1 savage Picto was never op, it was doing fine, ppl only complain about it bc of FRU. What the devs should've done was actually fix the other jobs and add some kinda mech to each to help them in downtime fights like Ultimates...


Now I just want to make a genetic comment about pct state now

The damage is done now, the ppl who wanted Picto nerf got their way, and now picto is now IMO one of the worst casters in the game. Like why bring a Picto now over an RDM or even an SMN? As I said in every "plz nerf picto" thread that was made months ago, if you nerf picto and it ends up near rdm or in the middle of rdm and the other melee, it would lose its spot on teams. For the caster spot, ppl will always prefer a rez caster and the flex spot will always go to the dps's that has the most value, mostly a 2nd melee or a BLM. Picto is now doomed to be the middle child of the casters, it doesn't do the dps to compete with BLM or other melees to give it the flex spot, and it doesn't have the battle rez to compete with rdm and smn for the caster spot...