Yoshi-P will turn Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail around if players keep asking for a raise spell on Pictomancer, jokes: 'it'd be best to remove raise from all of those jobs' if they don't behave

I'm personally very much looking forward to splashing a bunch of paint around on Pictomancer, one of the two new jobs coming in Final Fantasy 14's Dawntrail expansion—mostly because I like a good ranged caster, but also because my Warrior of Light is a mean-looking Hyur and I want to see him getting all Bob Ross about it.

Fellow catboy enjoyer, FF14 player, and PC Gamer writer Mollie Taylor got to speak with game director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) at the Dawntrail Media tour recently during a roundtable. In the discussions that followed, Yoshi-P was asked what niche Pictomancer would be filling in groups—since it doesn't have a dedicated resurrection (or «raise») spell, but lacks the DPS of the hard-to-use Black Mage.

Yoshi-P says that while you might bring Red Mage along for its powerful resurrection ability, raise spells become less useful the more comfortable you are with content—which is why the job is balanced in such a fashion. As for black mage, «Black Mage has a high DPS … because it's more difficult to use, so when you're using Black Mage and make a mistake, you could end up dying … you need to be very skillful in playing the job.»

Pictomancer's strengths, however, rely on its relative ease-of-use. «If you want to have a cleaner experience when going through a rotation, you can use the Pictomancer,» he says, since if you're needing to resurrect people all the time or playing a high skill job, «you probably won't be able to clear the content so quickly.»

It should be noted that Yoshi-P is speaking through a live translator here, so there's likely some meaning lost-in-translation—I do, however, get what he's stabbing at. Pictomancer doesn't need a raise (or high DPS) because, from what I've seen via other media tour previews, it's more of a middle-ground between very simple magical ranged DPS like Summoners and the hyper-complex Black Mage. In other words: It'll let you hit things hard without thinking too hard.

Although, err, come to think of it, Summoner is v