turning my aura's tail into a big gator tail always fills me with An Emotion. she's incomplete without it.

Bigger than before

So I just got Pictomancer to 100 a couple days ago and wow did I have fun.

While I recall it being billed as a support caster in the leadup to Dawntrail, the Pictomancer we actually got is a hard-hitting DPS whose main contribution is personal damage, with a lot of flexibility and abilities that divide into a couple of distinct systems. Most of your time is spent in a system I’ll call the color spells, which form a fairly standard builder-spender system: you use short-cast-time Red-Green-Blue spells to build gauge plus a charge of Holy in White (instant cast GCD), then you spend gauge to switch to longer-cast-time Cyan-Yellow-Magenta spells for higher damage and a charge of Comet in Black (also instant cast GCD). You can bank up to five White/Black charges, with no more than one Black, which sadly means you should use the higher damage Comet in Black before you might generate another one. Because White/Black are instant cast, they’re great for movement, and this is a really nice feature of the job: you can interrupt your combo at any time to cast one of them, and get a GCD of free movement without damage loss — or multiple GCDs if you have the charges. This makes Pictomancer’s movement less frequent but more easily available at will than Black Mage or Red Mage: most of your GCDs have cast times, but as long as you have a White/Black charge banked, you can get a GCD of movement whenever you want rather than having to be in the right phase of your rotation or spend an Acceleration, Swiftcast, or Triplecast. In an emergency you can get up to five GCDs of free movement without damage loss, if you have the White/Black charges banked, and that’s not counting an extra four seconds if you Swiftcast a motif or another three GCDs if Striking Muse is ready from your hammer motif (see below).

Pictomancer’s other ability system is its motifs, and those are what really distinguish it from other jobs. Each motif is a GCD spell with a long cast time that doesn’t do anything by itself but primes a corresponding OGCD for later use. These OGCDs do quite different things — one is a simple attack that sometimes has another OGCD follow-up, one primes a hard-hitting instant cast GCD combo chain (Striking Muse/Hammer Stamp), and one is your two-minute buff and Ley Lines equivalent. But what they all have in common is that they’re a way to bank resources during downtime or during the slower parts of a fight, in order to spend them later. This makes Pictomancers very interested in downtime and almost uniquely able to take advantage of it, as well as able to unleash devastating attacks after it because in essence they’ve stockpiled damage while other jobs had to sit idle. And because their rotation is so freeform, they can take advantage of it at pretty much any point in a fight. Another nice feature specifically of the Striking Muse/Hammer Stamp abilities is that they provide a sort of secondary burst phase with a big damage spike; while normally you’ll want to align this with party buffs, it’s handy to have on demand for overworld quest fights and FATEs.

All that said, the job does have a couple of downsides. One is its heavier reliance than most on foreknowledge of a fight. If you enter downtime with full motifs already, it’s just lost DPS the same as for other jobs, and if you don’t know when you can stay put your long motif and Cyan-Yellow-Magenta spell casts are as dangerous and liable to be interrupted as they are for any caster. The other downside is that some of the freeform nature of the rotation and most of the freedom of movement come from Holy in White, which you don’t get until level 80 — getting level-synced into content before the Shadowbringers endgame is a drag. These don’t kill my enjoyment of the job, but they do temper it a bit — getting stuffed into a Stormblood raid, for example, makes me extra sad because I’m not as familiar with those fights and I don’t have important parts of my toolkit.

In summation, then, Pictomancer is a flexible, hard-hitting caster DPS that takes some fight-specific knowledge to play at its best but is a lot of fun regardless. Inexperienced players might struggle with it until they learn how to mold its freeform rotation to the ins and outs of each individual battle, but I recommend it for anyone interested in a quirky DPS full of personality that can also smash enemies harder than a raging rroneek.