I think
basil's thread summarizes a lot of what makes pencil strong at high level, and you'd have to shut that down somehow for it to stop being overcentralizing
the main issue is we can't realistically dream of anything crazy cuz this is the splatoon 3 patch team we're talking about, it's a miracle if a special changes by more than 10p in a patch
the most obvious issue is that pencil completely flips the long-range paint dynamic on its head -- usually, weapons with less range are supposed to paint better, but pencil gets ridiculous paint output for a weapon that can play as safely as pencil can -- even ballpoint only has good paint on the short range mode, so you can't just sit on the other side of the map and paint really well
I don't think a range nerf is that good of an idea—decrease its range too much and it just becomes weaker bamboo, and if you just reduce it to like, unscoped range, that doesn't actually change very much of what it can do
similarly, just nerfing special doesn't do much when half of its threat is that it has basically limitless access to paint that will let it charge its special
for nerfing paint output, I feel like there's a couple options
1) hit it in the ink tank — but it already doesn't charge that many times so that kind of sucks to play at that point
2) increase charge time — honestly probably pretty effective, but probably also incredibly un-fun
3) thin out its painting lines — a solid idea that i think could be combo'd with something else
4) personally, my favorite idea would simply be to reduce its shots per charge to 4, or maybe even 3. it can still flash paint stuff suddenly, but you don't get to spam as much at people and you can't paint as well. the weapon is still able to do everything it could before, just not nearly as quickly
