BLU Balance

[Shiyo]

I'm well aware of what a BLU can do. It takes substantially less damage than any other melee DD from mob AOE attacks. That's being tanky while doing the most damage in the game, having aoe erase, having aoe cures and self hasting for 45%.

A moderately intelligent human being can wiki spell tooltips and descriptions. I'm not sure what you're arguing?

BLU literally takes much less damage than any DD, while doing the most DPS in the game for a melee DD(As stated by afania).

The job does too much and has no weakness. That is imbalanced.

[Afania]

BLU literally takes much less damage than any DD, while doing the most DPS in the game for a melee DD(As stated by afania).

Just to clarify myself before massive wave of anti nerf people start another page of drama about this statement. There are some content that BLU isn't the ideal DPS and other DPS are preferred. People have been suspecting woc may have crit-hit dmg taken- trait or enemy crit-hit rate- trait with bracelet up, and many parse result shows BLU doesn't parse high on woc. Also on things like teles CDC spam isn't ideal, making BLU a bit behind as well.

Also in super short zerg THF may come out ahead on parse with SA TA etc, or WAR winning with MS etc.

But without any of these special scenario BLU is still pretty strong, definitely stronger than 75 lv era and 2012 legion era. Should be stronger than 2013/2014 delve 1/2 era too.

I wouldn't say the MOST dps in every single situation, but definitely in some situations and certainly not as behind as people claimed.

That being said I'm not asking for a DPS nerf though, only MG mechanics so pt organizers aren't being punished for inviting 1 BLU 1 DD instead of 2 BLU.

[detlef]

I don't consider that to be an unreasonable position.

[Stamos]

Afania has been reasonable and fairly consistent on what he is pushing for.

While, others just see something and run with it. Example being, people keep posting like BLU does all these things at once. In general if you're DDing you're not casting all these defensive spells, cures etc. If you are and have them set you will not be anywhere near the top DD. You don't magically have 500 points to set. The best part of BLU is the utility, you set your spells/traits for that event; The WHM you're with kind of sucks? Set Winds of promy, magic fruit, and White Wind etc.

[Jakuk]

Because BST didn't require the best gear to solo as it did but it was still OP and got nerfed...

All jobs require skill and work to play it at its proper level, BLU is not and never has been unique in that, and let's not kid ourselves, you wont be an amazing BLU, but BLU doesn't require that much gear/skill to be acceptable in most content whereas MANY other jobs do.

Set DD spells and one or two defensive spells
Get JP
Get basic gear
Cast Flutter + MG
Spam CDC

Done.

This works in most content bar the 130+ content, and even then it works in some.

[Fae]

Most MMO's or games period take Area of Effect damage into balance considerations. There are currently only 3 jobs good at AoE damage in FFXI, and then there's others that are comparatively terrible at it due to long timers or having to use weaponskills. Many games, a job good at AoE is a job defining trait, because it is a very powerful tool for a variety of content. Take Vagary for instance. Without AoE damage you can't even do Vagary well. Merit farming, cleaving reisenjima for Job Points, handling adds on dangerous mobs such as Reisenjima T1 Tonberry or Wynav on WoC or even the ability that BLU has to breakga with elemental Seal for resleeping adds on a melee setup of albumen (in which btw BLU is both tanking and doing primary dps, I don't think some of the BLU saying you can't do that here even have experience with it, let alone researched what others are already doing), and there are many many more examples of where AoE damage is needed. So why is an already overtuned and overloaded job like BLU would you drop area of effect damage from the conversation? This and many other points made in my original posts are ignored and so far every person ignoring it happens to play BLU. Hmmm.

Cleaving is very important in FFXI, and adding status effects on top just seems overkill. BLU spells used to be somewhat gated by MP costs and tizona was the answer to that, but in the era of magic hammer and refresh for free out the whazoo, it's not even a barrier and BLU wanting to cleave will use Clubs and spam spells anyway. As stated in my original posts BLU is a problem at all levels of play. Also nerfing diffusion for mighty guard doesn't really help break the BLU only mentality and culture, as they'll just be even less inclined to include other DD that aren't BLU. I'm also astounded that of all the melee DD, a hybrid job that can cleave, enfeeble, cap haste, and have so many buffs also gets the most melee accuracy while also being top of parses (if not the top on the very upper end).

These are the reasons for it's popularity, and it's even pushing out RDM in shout groups for the Ambuscade frog, because their subduction gravity is stronger than most RDM gravity II. RDM niche is enfeebling that is what they have the highest skill in and highest tier spells no one else has. And yet, BLU is even outperforming them when it's important in their niche role. Haste II at one time was also a RDM exclusive thing, and BLU does that better too. BLU obviously melees far better as well. Oh and Tanks better.

BLU in it's current state is basically what every RDM always wanted to be, the best at nearly everything and it's too strong and is really hurting game balance. Look at shouts for content of any kind, look back to skirmish II shouts even. What was most shouted for? BST and BLU. And why was that? Both could be self sufficient, do great single target or aoe damage, and damage type didn't matter. BLU literally is getting the best of all worlds right now, and it is very bad for job balance.

[Diavolo]

BLU in it's current state is basically what every RDM always wanted to be, the best at nearly everything and it's too strong and is really hurting game balance.

Lack of content and steering away from open world design is what's hurting this perception of game balance.

I was practically playing 24/7/365 back in the 75 era and you could bounce around between different events all day long without ever repeating the same event twice. HNMs -> Sky NMs -> Sea NMs -> Limbus -> Dynamis -> Einherjar -> Assaults/Salvage -> BCNMs/KSNMs/Avatars. Even with SAM dominating as melee of choice there was still plenty of room to use other jobs. Now all we have is Escha/Reis, HTBFs, Ambuscade and Master Trials which only a very small portion of the population even attempts.

Worst of all, much of today's content is designed for parties of 6 whereas most of it used to be open to alliances of 18 all the way up to 64 in Dyna's case. 15 people already fighting Sea NMs when you get home from work? No prob, bring any of your jobs and lend a hand. Your LS already fighting Tiamat when you get back from the bar? Bring your WHM/SMN/RDM/whatever and help handle adds or help heal from outside the alliance. You can't do any of that anymore because of the way the game is designed - separating the player/group away from the rest of the world - and that's in large part thanks to the massive amount of complaining from casual players who felt like they couldn't compete against the HNMLS that were using third party tools, which is ironic given the fact that third party tools became much more prevalent after HNMs were eliminated. Funny how that worked out.

Careful what you wish for, you might just get it... and it won't have the desired effect.

[Fae]

Some of the best players I met only use equipsets, what you're talking about is mostly fear mongering and correlating things as if they cause one another. I am all for more varied content to hop around to, more things to do. SAM has been top dog more than once, but varied content wasn't the solution to any job dominating the scene ever, a strong job is strong in pretty much all content that's how it works, especially a job so versatile as BLU. Players complaining to make things easier is a constant theme in any games history or even democracy, I just don't want FFXI dumbed down because without challenge there's no reward. The have nots will want from the haves. Sometimes there is systematic reasons why a group is disenfranchised, job balance is actually part of that equation, sometimes it is justified. Other times, people just want things handed to them and made easier or to get stuff others already have for much less effort which happens anyway when content is phased out. In this instance, BLU is hurting job diversity and balance because it has too much power in one place. For a given DD class, the most I'd expect a balanced game to have is 2x the number of one job than another. As shown by the census earlier, it is over a 22x difference clearly there is a lack of incentive to play other DD and as shown it stems from power.

[Shiyo]

What census shows over x22? I'm really curious.

I literally only see bluemages every time I run by someone or see someone else in game. Every. Single. Time.

[Fae]

Sorry to be more clear, the difference between the least and most used DD job, earlier in the thread I searched jobs on my server and how many were playing them at level 99. The last one showed BLU was 23.25x more played than DRG and was over 20% of the job population in total. While that shouldn't be taken as law and may vary from time to time and by server to a degree I wouldn't be surprised if that was close to the average since both times I did the report the numbers were very similar and whenever I look BLU is always at least 10-20% of the population when if all jobs were evenly distributed which probably shouldn't ever happen, it'd be 4.5%.