Picto motifs just don't flow..

I've been really enjoying pictomancer since the expansion, it was the first magic DPS I leveled and as a big FF6 fan, I'm super glad it was added.

However, I've been trying to wrap my head around the general rotation flow of the job. It all seems right when comparing it to the others but motifs are so unique to the skill pool, it's hard to compare that to others.

Motifs force you out of combat for at least 5 seconds and locks you in place for almost 4 while it's casting. It's kinda wild and throws off the whole flow of battle for me.

It took me a bit more playing to think of what exactly is bothering me about it, there are charges to expend the muses which is what is supposed to limit the usage of an attack but on top, we have to use another ability to ready something with a charge?

I think that letting us spend 2 or 3 white paints to quick cast a motif would smooth things out nicely.

I'm always maxing out white paints since I can't find a good place to spend them, especially at 100 where you have many other attacks to run through. Having something better to spend them on instead of a weaker aoe attack sounds like more fun to me!

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Originally Posted by beefrobo

Motifs force you out of combat for at least 5 seconds and locks you in place for almost 4 while it's casting. It's kinda wild and throws off the whole flow of battle for me.

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This is kind of the point.

You have to think strategically about when the best time to use them is. Points in the fight where there is no movement required, in-between bursts, ideally when the boss is untargetable or jumping out of range anyway.

It's really great design. We were just spoiled by FFXIV design turning the bosses into striking dummies with puzzles and completely static unchanging job rotations.

Personally I wouldn’t really like to see them take the most unique aspect of Pictomancer and completely delete it.

Plus, it would need massive potency nerfs across the board to compensate for never having to cast; the only reason Pictomancer has such high potencies is to compensate for it having to stop attacking (similar to the giant potency attack at the end of Dancer’s Standard Step).

I feel like being able to make one instant-use every 40-seconds is already enough. If they gave us a second way to make them instant on top of Swiftcast they’d just lose their functionality since they’d never need to be cast and become pointless

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Originally Posted by beefrobo

I've been really enjoying pictomancer since the expansion, it was the first magic DPS I leveled and as a big FF6 fan, I'm super glad it was added.

However, I've been trying to wrap my head around the general rotation flow of the job. It all seems right when comparing it to the others but motifs are so unique to the skill pool, it's hard to compare that to others.

Motifs force you out of combat for at least 5 seconds and locks you in place for almost 4 while it's casting. It's kinda wild and throws off the whole flow of battle for me.

It took me a bit more playing to think of what exactly is bothering me about it, there are charges to expend the muses which is what is supposed to limit the usage of an attack but on top, we have to use another ability to ready something with a charge?

I think that letting us spend 2 or 3 white paints to quick cast a motif would smooth things out nicely.

I'm always maxing out white paints since I can't find a good place to spend them, especially at 100 where you have many other attacks to run through. Having something better to spend them on instead of a weaker aoe attack sounds like more fun to me!

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if you have noticed, Picto's damage is designed to take into account this downtime.
The big things you should try to do is wait to use one of your motifs until you have a damaging OGCD, or just an ogcd in general.
I do agree that it feels weird though. I wish instead that they did damage and potencies were adjusted for this but once you get the hang of knowing when to properly cast them it isn't so bad
Also in 99% of content you don't need to hyper optimize this. You can just draw motifs whenever you feel like it and only do like 1% less damage than someone purely optimizing)

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Originally Posted by beefrobo

I've been really enjoying pictomancer since the expansion, it was the first magic DPS I leveled and as a big FF6 fan, I'm super glad it was added.

However, I've been trying to wrap my head around the general rotation flow of the job. It all seems right when comparing it to the others but motifs are so unique to the skill pool, it's hard to compare that to others.

Motifs force you out of combat for at least 5 seconds and locks you in place for almost 4 while it's casting. It's kinda wild and throws off the whole flow of battle for me.

It took me a bit more playing to think of what exactly is bothering me about it, there are charges to expend the muses which is what is supposed to limit the usage of an attack but on top, we have to use another ability to ready something with a charge?

I think that letting us spend 2 or 3 white paints to quick cast a motif would smooth things out nicely.

I'm always maxing out white paints since I can't find a good place to spend them, especially at 100 where you have many other attacks to run through. Having something better to spend them on instead of a weaker aoe attack sounds like more fun to me!

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1st piece of advice: there's no rotation. Make sure no cd/gauge overcaps and make sure you have everything ready for your burst. What you do in the filler and in what order doesn't matter as long as you keep your gcd rolling.
2nd piece of advice: don't use Holy in White unless you need to for movement (or optimizing burst). Overcapping white blobs is not a dps loss (it's actually a minor gain to not use them), so don't bother trying to spend them all.
3rd piece of advice: you said it yourself- a motif is 5s doing nothing. So, if you Swiftcast a motif, you can run around for 5s losing 0 dps. There are so many uses for this... Holy in White + Swiftcast Motif? Enjoy running around while Honey B. Lovely is vomiting hearts everywhere with 0 loss! Ex2 is gonna knock you up for that wind tornado/enumeration nonsense? Swiftcast a motif and you get 0 downtime! The possibilities are endless.
Once it clicks in your brain that a Swiftcast'd Motif is a 5s window of movement with 0 dps loss outside of burst, you'll see how versatile Pictomancer truly is. Now go and have fun painting :)


(As a note, the burst thing you can do is use some Holy in White to make sure you open your Starry Muse burst window on the Y part of your CYM combo woth 50 gauge stored- this way, you can do Y > M > Comet in Black, then pop another subtractive, use another Comet in Black and Starry Prism, gaining you 80 potency compared to just using a full CYM combo in burst. It's not much, but it's cool you can do that!)

My biggest issue with the motifs is I feel bad standing there casting for 3-4 seconds without doing any damage.

Please no, I would hate this change. The motifs feel very unique and lend itself well to the job fantasy of painting your attacks. They are also very flexible with an inherent trade-off for their high power, which makes planning their use in combat much more interesting and rewarding.

Picto is perfect the way it is gameplay wise. They can nerf potencies if they want, but don't change gameplay mechanics.

That's the point.

You paint when you know you can and unleash the rest for mobility/damage/burst.

The gameplay is perfect.

It’s a caster. It’s supposed to have cast times. There are two other DPS roles that don’t have cast times and summoner barely has any.

Their basic rotation has super short casts and they can build up a ton of mobility with their white paint.

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Originally Posted by OliverQ

My biggest issue with the motifs is I feel bad standing there casting for 3-4 seconds without doing any damage.

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If you don't enjoy that iconic part of pictomancer's gameplay, maybe try a different class you like more? There's plenty of options. You don't have to play picto if its playstyle isn't to your liking.

I love violently drawing pictures at the boss for the first minute of the match, I hope it stays that way. :P

Motifs also have their upsides and learning to optimize them is fun.

I mean thats the only part of the job thats meant to be difficult, finding places to cast your motifs and deciding when to hold it and making sure theyre all up for burst. Its filler is really easy its literally auto combo.
Its like how RDM has a melee combo to activate its big damage, it doesn't really flow well as a traditional caster but for RDM it adds flavour to a very simple filler of magic having you think about your positioning to get close enough to do your melee combo.

It's a funny job that way, the thing that basically does nothing is actually the main task and the color combos are the filler.
Having your paintings ready to use when needed is the name of the game for picto

The things they unlock are well worth the cast times at least

The White Paints do less DPS for solo opponents so you only want to use them when you are forced to move since they can be used while moving. If you are stationary, they are .6% less DPS so don't both with them. For Multiple opponents, then they do give you more DPS then the standard rotation if attacking 2 or more opponents, but I still wouldn't bother with them since most multiple opponents are not that strong anyways and at the most might make you do 1 extra attack to kill them.

But the 12 seconds of NO DPS while you are casting all 3 of your 4 second recast timed MOTIFs ... I don't understand this. Literally 12 seconds of no DPS ... I am still running numbers but I feel like the burst isn't worth the wait at that point. Only if you are about to be in a scene where the enemy is not targetable does it feel worth doing in a fight.

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Originally Posted by ScarletL1995

The White Paints do less DPS for solo opponents so you only want to use them when you are forced to move since they can be used while moving. If you are stationary, they are .6% less DPS so don't both with them. For Multiple opponents, then they do give you more DPS then the standard rotation if attacking 2 or more opponents, but I still wouldn't bother with them since most multiple opponents are not that strong anyways and at the most might make you do 1 extra attack to kill them.

But the 12 seconds of NO DPS while you are casting all 3 of your 4 second recast timed MOTIFs ... I don't understand this. Literally 12 seconds of no DPS ... I am still running numbers but I feel like the burst isn't worth the wait at that point. Only if you are about to be in a scene where the enemy is not targetable does it feel worth doing in a fight.

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All 3 motifs are an enormous gain to cast

Creature- 444pps
Hammer- 332pps
Starry- about 500 or so pps

For reference RGB is 192pps, CYM is 254pps, the combined loop of 2*RGB+1*CYM+COB= 214pps

So all muses are an enormous gain over aetherhue

For me it was just a matter of getting used to the motifs.

But I think they're good because you can single weave after each motif to use the muse right there if you want, so you can see the immediate huge damage number caused by that long cast.

I also think the fun part is to decided, based on what is going on with the fight, when it's the best point to cast the motifs, especially the Starry Sky one, which doesn't do anything until later.

Nothing wrong with Motif flow. You are quite literally just stockpiling a huge amount of potency for later use. This is a really strong mechanic in a game like ffxiv that is very burst-centric and want to press a lot of buttons under raid buffs.

not gonna lie I often hard cast one and swiftcast the hammer so when the cooldown happen I can still use the monster motif often being on wing motif meaning I also get the mix attack before using the hammer or the field motif