I’m personally very much looking forward to splashing a bunch of paint around on Pictomancer, one of the two new jobs coming in Final Fantasy 14’s Dawntrail expansion—mostly because I like a good ranged caster, but also because my Warrior of Light is a mean-looking Hyur and I want to see him getting all Bob Ross about it.
Fellow catboy enjoyer, FF14 player, and PC Gamer writer Mollie Taylor got to speak with game director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) at the Dawntrail Media tour recently during a roundtable. In the discussions that followed, Yoshi-P was asked what niche Pictomancer would be filling in groups—since it doesn’t have a dedicated resurrection (or “raise”) spell, but lacks the DPS of the hard-to-use Black Mage.
Yoshi-P says that while you might bring Red Mage along for its powerful resurrection ability, raise spells become less useful the more comfortable you are with content—which is why the job is balanced in such a fashion. As for black mage, “Black Mage has a high DPS … because it’s more difficult to use, so when you’re using Black Mage and make a mistake, you could end up dying … you need to be very skillful in playing the job.”
Pictomancer’s strengths, however, rely on its relative ease-of-use. “If you want to have a cleaner experience when going through a rotation, you can use the Pictomancer,” he says, since if you’re needing to resurrect people all the time or playing a high skill job, “you probably won’t be able to clear the content so quickly.”
It should be noted that Yoshi-P is speaking through a live translator here, so there’s likely some meaning lost-in-translation—I do, however, get what he’s stabbing at. Pictomancer doesn’t need a raise (or high DPS) because, from what I’ve seen via other media tour previews, it’s more of a middle-ground between very simple magical ranged DPS like Summoners and the hyper-complex Black Mage. In other words: It’ll let you hit things hard without thinking too hard.
Although, err, come to think of it, Summoner is very simple to use and it still has a Raise ability. Still, job balance in FF14 is generally pretty good when compared to other MMORPGs, and your own personal affinity and comfort tends to make way more of a difference when tackling high-level content. Simply put, if Pictomancer feels good to you, then that’s the best job for you to play during Savage raids, Extreme trials, and Ultimate masochism sessions. Yoshi-P certainly seems to like it—the Pictomancer, not masochism. I assume.
“I like playing Pictomancer so much I’m considering playing Pictomancer together with Black Mage as my main job[s],” Yoshi-P then adds, with a threatening aura: “Of course I do understand that some players would want a raise ability for Pictomancer, but if there are [too many requests] like that, it’d probably be best to remove raise from all of those jobs.”
You heard him, whippersnappers—stop asking for raises or he’s going to turn this whole car around, and then you won’t even get your chicken nuggets—I mean, err, raise mechanics. Best not to tempt him, anyway, since a large portion of the team’s been inspired by Elden Ring as of late.