Eating Paint for Fun and Profit (FFXIV 7.2)
It's been a whole year since Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail released, bringing with it two new jobs: Pictomancer, and some other kind of guy whose name I forget. It also brought with it some major changes to existing jobs, like the one I'd mained for four and a half years. Long story short, they completely ruined Monk (subjective) and I had to find a new job to base my entire personality around and also raid on. Now, after a year of exclusively playing Pictomancer in high-level content, I have a lot of thoughts about the job and how its design incentivises certain kinds of play.
To begin, a little about me and my raid experience: I have been doing Savage raids since Eden's Verse (patch 5.2, mid-2020), and raiding seriously since the end of that year with a static that mainly focuses on blind prog - that means no consulting videos or guides, just collectively using our brains to figure out raid mechanics. We've cleared every tier since then blind, and shifted to a hybrid model for the current Cruiserweight raid tier (7.2) in the interest of clearing a little faster. So far in this expansion that means we've blind progged pretty much everything except the second phase of M8S, which we finally cleared last night.
So: I've been playing Pictomancer for both of Dawntrail's raid tiers, and after maining one of the base game's melee jobs for four and a half years, it's been a deeply interesting experience both playing a brand-new job and learning to optimise fights as a caster. This has been compounded by balance changes in 7.2 fundamentally changing Pictomancer's damage optimisation incentives, which I'll cover further down. First, though, I'll quickly cover the basics of casters and Pictomancer's design for those unfamiliar with the job. Feel free to skip to the next section if you know about this already! Alternatively, check out the official job guide, which has pictures.
On a basic level, movement in battle for the caster and healer job archetypes means contending with most of their spells requiring a cast time, and only being able to move in the small window of a second or so between those cast times. To mitigate this, all casters and healers are able to generate resources which give them brief periods of uninterrupted movement. They also have access to a Swiftcast every 40 seconds, which allows for a "free" cast of any spell, enabling up to several seconds of free movement.
Pictomancer's basic spells are Red/Green/Blue spells, which work towards generating a couple of kinds of resources when you cast them. One of these resources, when consumed, allows you to execute Subtractive Palette and briefly convert those basic spells into more powerful versions - Cyan/Magenta/Yellow - which do more damage but also take roughly 50% longer to cast. Every third cast of a basic spell generates a stack of Holy in White, a damage-neutral spell with no cast time that allows for some movement; five of these can be held for use.
Pictomancer also casts motifs, which are a kind of resource that can be consumed later to unlock various different effects that replenish over time. The three motifs are: Creature Motif (used for damage; their timing is important), Weapon Motif (used to summon three hammers in Striking Muse, which can be used for unrestricted movement; one set of hammers becomes available every 60 seconds, and you can bank up two charges), and Landscape Motif (used for a party-wide damage buff every two minutes).
To take a holistic view of the job, Pictomancer focuses on managing the resources available to the player to summon creatures and weapons, and to support the party during buff windows, all while working around raid mechanics which require intelligent movement and timing of the job's various skills, and dealing with spell cast times.
A Brush with Greatness - Optimising in 7.0
In its original form, Pictomancer optimisation was fairly straightforward. As with now, resources would build up in the background, and motifs would unlock them. The damage numbers on the skills used by consuming these resources, superior to that of the normal R/G/B or C/M/Y spells, meant that it was a no-brainer to use as many of them as often as possible: one set of hammers would be used during the two-minute buff window, and the other would be used at some point between buff windows, ideally to help with movement during a raid mechanic.
All this means that correctly optimising your damage during 7.0 meant using resources as they became available, whether that was your Subtractive Palette gauge, your creature motifs, or your hammers. The knock-on effect of this was that the basic R/G/B spells were the lowest-priority part of your spell rotation, since their damage was the lowest out of any of your options. In moments during fights where a ton of movement was necessary to resolve mechanics, Swiftcasting a Hammer Motif and then using all three hammers would provide roughly 10.5 seconds of free movement, which is a significant amount.
However, in its base form, it turned out that Pictomancer was just a bit overpowered compared to other jobs, which is to say that it was both stronger than Black Mage (historically the highest damage job) and easier to play. This was considered a problem.
Stop Hammer Time - Optimising in 7.2
The specific numbers of the 7.2 changes aren't important. In a nutshell, the basic spells (R/G/B, C/M/Y) were buffed, and the damage on hammers was nerfed. The change means that basic spells are a noticeably better proposition damage-wise than hammers, to the point where it is actually a damage loss to use them outside of buff windows.
Fascinatingly, this has a number of cascading effects.
First, the priority of hammers is reversed. Overcapping your Hammer Motifs by not using them outside of buff windows is now a DPS gain, which runs counter to the instincts the game instils in you through the design of every other job. (This might be bad.)
Second, if one is playing optimally, this means less movement resources are available overall. Fights become harder to optimise, and mastery of techniques such as slidecasting becomes even more important.
This might sound negative, and for some people it absolutely is. But what it also does, arguably (and arguably perversely), is increase the skill expression of the job. At the Savage raid level, it is now essential to build a mental map of each basic spell cast, to know when you can greed a slidecast and when you can't. Most recently, I found it a great and pleasurable mental challenge to map out the entirety of M8S's first phase without using any unnecessary hammers. It now takes genuine effort to extract as much damage as possible out of Pictomancer, particularly given that the latest set of Savage raids requires even more movement than the previous tier. I'm not bored of Pictomancer, and because these changes actually force me to think about the fight, I think actually like them.
On the other hand, a larger issue looms. It straight-up sucks, on a conceptual level, that the most optimised way to play Pictomancer is to play it as boringly as possible, focusing on only casting basic spells and leaving one of the three motifs gathering dust on your hotbar. Being disincentivised to use the tools available to you flies in the face of the fantasy of playing Pictomancer in the first place, and indeed stands in stark constrast to every other job in the game. Job resources are meant to be used - that's one of the pleasures of doing a good ability rotation. Friction in game design is healthy and good, and so is forcing players to make genuinely interesting choices in gameplay, but this isn't quite that.
With that in mind, it is likely that the scale of these changes was unintentional, but it has also exposed a more complex and interesting version of the job, and it's hard to put that back in the box. Players are good at recognising friction, and there has been a large amount of discourse on the changes, with many wishing for a return to the job's original design. I think that would be a step back. My interest lies in how the job's designers can smooth over its current friction without reducing complexity.
Exploring the Design Space for 7.4 and Beyond
With Pictomancer's hammers being the pain point for both players and designers, it is clear that changes need to be made here. Something I was musing on during our first clear run of M8S last night is the idea of being able to intentionally compromise a use of Striking Muse by not using all of its hammer charges and "save" extra damage for its next use under party buffs, similar conceptually to how Sage's Haima and Panhaima abilities will reimburse any unused charges by providing equivalent healing. This would retain the added difficulty of restricting movement options and still allow for skill expression and damage optimisation.
In terms of intentionally empty design space, however, it seems that the designers have intentionally left space for another kind of Weapon Motif, perhaps one that becomes available in between uses of Striking Muse. That seems like the most likely option, and it's one I'd welcome. But changes like that rarely come in late-expansion balance patches - they're usually saved for either an expansion launch or a major job design rework. If I had to choose between the two existing designs, I'd be fine with keeping Pictomancer the way it is, even if that meant a million furious Reddit posts from people who would rather be playing Summoner.
Anyway, I just think FFXIV is neat.