My take on pictomancer no one asked for

[mallleable]

I don't find the standardization of raid buffs/burst as offensive as some, but I do think potencies, and substats could be rebalanced as well as adding more points of interest like every 30 or 40 seconds to job rotations. I think such changes could make standardization a bit more tolerable. It's Fine™.

Anyway, Pictomancer looks super fun! I don't get the hate for it.

[MagiusNecros]

I take bigger issue with Warrior being a Tank/Healer/DPS. And Monk's Dragon Kick still being as busted as it is. It's so funny to me.

[Coulvre]

Honestly Pictomancer should be really exciting for me, it checks or at least claims to check all the boxes I want in a job. Uses all the elements to attack and is supposed to have a strong party support focus but I just cannot deal with the manic pixie aesthetic they chose for the spell effects and animations. I don't think it's going to be a terrible job that no one will play, just personally disappointing and since we are unlikely to get another caster for 6 or more years it's going to be a long wait for another.

Agreed. I love the idea of it and I think in terms of gameplay it sounds great, but the visual and audio effects are so jarringly cartoony, they don't fit the aesthetic of the other jobs or indeed most of the game itself... It feels more like a novelty/joke thing than anything. I think that may be appealing to some people because it's different and they like the silliness of it but personally for me it's very off-putting.

[Sylvain]

Time Mage enjoyers also a bit miffed. We're tired of the "Astrologian is Time Mage because it has/had Time Magic" gatekeep to no end.

I wished for Time Mage (or whatever form of "Arcane neutral non-elemental magic" mage), but I was convinced it wouldn't happen (the time mage part).
However I'm really glad it isn't geo or green mage.

[Taranok]

Honestly 2 minute meta is bad, but it feels like the only real reason why it's being discussed over poor healer or tank designs is because it effects DPS players which is the majority (for good reason).

Ehh, I feel there's a separate issue here. DPS and tank design has been awful since ARR. The problem is a fundamental design principle of the game. The meta to which encounters handle damage, I.E. busters. When you design every fight about spiking damage all at once and then giving a rest period before spiking again, then there's only 3 tools that can effectively deal with this. Mitigation, barriers, and raw burst throughput. It's why I've long held the opinion that all healers are the same and all tanks are the same, because they effectively do their job the same way, sometimes with literally identical skills.

To fix healer/tank design, they'd need to massively overhaul every single fight in the game, severely drop the power and throughput of every healer, and create room to bring back more styles of healing and tanking, such as sustained healing tanking, HoT healing, deferred damage tanking, smart healing, and so on. And as if that wasn't enough of a cliff to scale, it has to be done in such a way that console players can handle the spot healing indicative of better meta designs without the controls getting in the way. Which is definitely doable, but the devs have no interest in it.

[Dyvid]

That is assuming they took the entire feedback we gave them for how much the 2min raid buff fight design and job design sucks for fun and individuality and do f***-all with it.

I'll be holding my breath until media tour/7.0 how things go. The forced 2min job design needs to die.

Nah, they chose to give us pretty graphics instead.....

[Palladiamors]

I think people are just salty it wasn't Green Mage or Geo.

Yes and no for me. I'm just salty it's not a job I could get excited for. Pictomancer could still do that, mind you, but what they chose to showcase just did nothing for me.

[Mayhemmer]

I like the direction they took aesthetically, and I don't want the goal of painted spell effects to change, but there's such a disconnect between what we see in the CG trailer and what we see in the game footage. You wouldn't really second guess the effects in the trailer, as they look pretty much like what you'd think in-game effects would when translated into CG. They just look normal. Most of the flashier skill/spell effects in-game use 2D visuals in a way as to make them appear 3D, and lots of particle effects that exist entirely in 3D, and nearly every effect gives off the illusion of luminance. They all look bright, like you'd expect magic to look, and the way you see Krile's effects look in the trailer. It all looks as it should, and looks good.

But Picto's effects in-game don't appear to have any of that. The effects are entirely 2D, and there's no simulated luminance or particle effects. While I don't see this as entirely a bad direction to try to take, it's incredibly jarring when you put it next to everything else we've ever had in the game. We're painting with magic or aether, but it doesn't really look like it at all to me. I fear it's going to stick out for the wrong reasons.

[Mercury_Grey]

Honeslty the design of pictomancer is great, to me it jsut lacks something diverse. And no "it using paints o its diverse" argument doesn't work very well. I have tried pictomancer after I grabbed it and I think i won't level it until the very end or just only use it with friends.

[Carighan]

Honeslty the design of pictomancer is great, to me it jsut lacks something diverse. And no "it using paints o its diverse" argument doesn't work very well. I have tried pictomancer after I grabbed it and I think i won't level it until the very end or just only use it with friends.

It would become cool once future expansions go about the way that the only thing they change is giving us more Motifs for each canvas, sharing the Muses. That'd be fantastic. Similar idea to how Summoner should have multiple options for each Minor summon, classified into three types, and getting a random setup after each Major so that you have to make due with what you got. Pictos could have multiple Motifs, and they have different timers, but a shared Muse and canvas. Good luck, also that's a ton of really neat complexity if anything ever drifts.