Final Fantasy 14's director confirms that no, Pictomancers weren't meant to manually remove their own buffs for a 1% DPS increase—outlines other job changes for patch 7.01 of Dawntrail

Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail has been out for less than a week. I'm barely starting to near the story's final act myself, however that hasn't stopped the admirably ravenous theorycrafting communities of the world from tearing into its new job balance adjustments.

There's been a fair share of «the sky is falling» types, who say their jobs are ruined forevermore—I've heard Black Mage is in trouble, but I like being able to move, so I barely play the dang thing. On the whole, though, this sort of early-days adjustment period is very familiar.

As a ninja main, I remember back in Endwalker where, for a brief time, Square Enix suggested that we should have to use a gap closer attack four times during our burst window (that's the bit where you do lots of damage very fast every two minutes or so, for those unfamiliar with MMO terminology).

This sucked. Every time you use a gap closer, your character gets locked in place for a second—which is both terrible class fantasy for a ninja, a job about being an agile and nimble warrior, while also being a massive pain in the rear. Square changed that right quick, and now you get a choice between a gap closer (or) a normal zap.

All of this to say, game director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) has already released a news statement outlining player feedback and the team's plans to change things in the near future.

The funniest change is at the bottom of the list, but I'm going to go over it first here—Pictomancer, the Bob Ross of Final Fantasy 14 jobs, had an absolutely cursed rotation (as shared on the ffxivdiscussion subreddit) where players can manually cancel a buff by right-clicking it in order to gain a whopping 1% DPS increase. «This has been mathed out to being under 1% overall DPS to do,» explains painterly scholar tordana, «at the cost of making your rotation extremely more painful and strict.» A truly misbegotten alternative.

«This will be addressed with Patch 7.01,» Yoshi-P promises, «but we ask that you please refrain from manually