Quote Originally Posted by saevel View Post
As someone who did BLU/WAR tanking and BLU/WHM healing I can say that job is ridiculously powerful. Seriha is right, at release BLU didn't have much in the way of healing spells outside H.breeze and M.fruit at "higher" levels. This pretty much made BLU's into "just another" melee DD. Once SE added W.Carrot it made BLU as a main healer possible as BLU's lacked a cheap heal at lower levels. M.Fruit scaling as a Cure V but only 72mp is ridiculous, outside of curaga it's the most efficient heal in the game. H.Breeze was amazing, 55MP for the healing power of a 120MP spell. It was so good that I would go RDM/BLU at 75 to merit on birds (this was before SCH was made). Now they have aoe erase, Curaga IV, Cure 4.5, Cure 4.8, Auto-Refresh, Self-Haste, Self-Refresh, Lullaby, Sleepga, Sleepga II, and whatever they get from their sub.

BLU is now the 2nd best healer in the game, and people still want tell a RDM it's their job to "shut up and heal".
It was actually worse than other melee, since no amount of haste or attack could affect the physical spells. I guess this is still true, but Blue Mage has more options now and it's less common to be buffed to infinity and beyond.

Blue Mage can definitely keep people alive like a champ. Alive and possibly without haste. Alive and without a worthwhile level of Shell. Alive and possibly engaged to a monster with no amount of Dia applied to it. And so forth. Typical healing in FFXI is mixed with support and far more than watching big cure numbers scroll by in a chat log.

I do agree that Blue Mage is the second best at restoring HP in FFXI right now. I also think it's too drastically different than Red Mage and White Mage for a direct comparison. It seems closer to Summoner, since both receive unique tools totally outside of White Magic. Heck, with Earthen Armor, Summoner could probably be considered the second-best healer for VoidWatch. The amount of HP loss that prevents can be amazing.

I also agree that Red Mage in a total healing role would be boring as sin to play, but expanding the job's enfeebling abilities and the like at the same time is a far better solution than letting the job's HP restoration/damage prevention abilities stagnate because casting spells on other players makes a minority of people feel sad.

Then again, letting Red Mage stagnate seems to be a favorite hobby of the development team, so I can't say it wouldn't match the theme of the job. It's really a testament to how strong the fundamentals of Red Mage are that the job remains useful.