I Thought BLU Was Made For Solo Players

I’ll admit, i’m late to the party on this, but it just now hit me. I started getting into BLU and I really enjoy it. It’s been something fun I can work on outside of the usual grind for gear and progression through raiding. However, it was a huge letdown when I realized that most of the titles and even a mount are all locked behind completing some of the hardest content the game has to offer. I never got into savage raiding because I just never had the time to commit to being in a static. But to get all the good BLU achievements, you pretty much need one. It feels contradicting to what the whole “solo content” that BLU was pitched as. Sadly I don’t think ill ever be able to do it.

It stopped being about solo content the moment you hit Lv50 and wanted to obtain the first 49 spells due to the EX trial requirement back in 4.5.

The content for solo players was the Masked Carnivale. The reason why BLU is limited is because they saw the need to make "game-breaking" skills which don't work in 95% of content, yet standard BLU damage rotation is pretty much just another Caster with some slight nuances - basically the devs forced a self-fulfilling prophecy.

For what it is, 8-BLU raids are some crafty stuff, but tbh at this point I wish they would've given us a second job stone, call it "Memoires of the Blue Mage" that just acts as a standard Blue Mage kit with skills tied to levels and design more BLU sticks to work as normal weapons (with VIT).

Instead, now we have the dread of another job receiving "Limited" status on the horizon. I really wish they'd stop.

The Masked Carnivale can be done solo, spells can be learned solo, you can solo dungeons with Basic Instinct and the level 30 totems. It can 1-shot many things, such as FATEs, using spells such as Tail Screw or Ram's Voice + Ultravibration.

But it does have party-related endgame content, yes. They went in the direction of creating lore that entire adventurer squadrons could enter dungeons as blue mages and fulfill the typical roles of tank, healer and dps using blue mage spells.

You can PUG some of the raids involved for the Morbol but realistically this is more likely to be the easiest ones, T5 and A4S. The others can take multiple days, weeks or months of progression.

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Originally Posted by chaotix69

However, it was a huge letdown when I realized that most of the titles and even a mount are all locked behind completing some of the hardest content the game has to offer.

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Are these titles and mount necessary for BLU progression?

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

Are these titles and mount necessary for BLU progression?

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Depends what you see as progression.

Levelling and learning skills? No. End-game progression for BLU? Yes, they are quite a mark to clear various fights for achievement titles & Morbol mount.

You're not the only one let down, let me tell you. Like Reinhardt said, they forced a self-fulfilling prophecy. There was no merit to the idea that "Blue Mage would not work in XIV as it did in XI," for the very reason that the claim exists at all. To acknowledge that XI's iteration of BLU could not work in XIV is true, but we already know that. They're fundamentally different games. Anybody willing to both see and accept this fact would have accepted a less free-formed implementation of BLU as a full job, and those that wanted XI's version, well, I guess they haven't gotten the memo.

The devs COULD have made it a full job, given it a set of starting-tier skills you learned through the job's initial story quests, and had later skills learned as you level with inspiration taken from characters met and enemies faced during MSQ encounters. The entire "how" of BLU could have been that the knowledge of abilities we've seen in our journey were always in our minds, and that the Soul of the Blue Mage and use of blue magic allowed us to recall these and wield them ourselves. The system of going out and learning from encounters in real-time wasn't necessary at all.

For whatever reason, they refused to adapt the concept to the game they wanted to implement it into and left a hell of a lot of people very whelmed.

It adapted fine to the game. It's just something different.

Unlike this thread.

Whats really funny is they managed to force roles on it.

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Originally Posted by Mayhemmer

You're not the only one let down, let me tell you. Like Reinhardt said, they forced a self-fulfilling prophecy. There was no merit to the idea that "Blue Mage would not work in XIV as it did in XI," for the very reason that the claim exists at all. To acknowledge that XI's iteration of BLU could not work in XIV is true, but we already know that. They're fundamentally different games. Anybody willing to both see and accept this fact would have accepted a less free-formed implementation of BLU as a full job, and those that wanted XI's version, well, I guess they haven't gotten the memo.

The devs COULD have made it a full job, given it a set of starting-tier skills you learned through the job's initial story quests, and had later skills learned as you level with inspiration taken from characters met and enemies faced during MSQ encounters. The entire "how" of BLU could have been that the knowledge of abilities we've seen in our journey were always in our minds, and that the Soul of the Blue Mage and use of blue magic allowed us to recall these and wield them ourselves. The system of going out and learning from encounters in real-time wasn't necessary at all.

For whatever reason, they refused to adapt the concept to the game they wanted to implement it into and left a hell of a lot of people very whelmed.

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Highlighted the key points and I love everything about this post.

The claim that they couldn't make it like XI confused the absolute kupo out of me because almost every single instance of Blue Magic existing in the FF franchise had a different method of spell learning. Kimahri had Lancet for Ronso Overdrive, Quistis and Quinna used Devour, some Blue Mages simply had to be active in a fight and not suffering from Blind, Berserk, Confuse or Charmed, another had to get hit by that skill (hello FFX-2 Gun Mage, worst nightmare). They could have done a FFXIV lore friendly version to design it into a normal caster job with its own quips and quirks.

Which you perfectly described in that second thing I highlighted, literally what I said many years ago but I got treated like a Pariah back then.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

The Masked Carnivale can be done solo, spells can be learned solo, you can solo dungeons with Basic Instinct and the level 30 totems. It can 1-shot many things, such as FATEs, using spells such as Tail Screw or Ram's Voice + Ultravibration.

But it does have party-related endgame content, yes. They went in the direction of creating lore that entire adventurer squadrons could enter dungeons as blue mages and fulfill the typical roles of tank, healer and dps using blue mage spells.

You can PUG some of the raids involved for the Morbol but realistically this is more likely to be the easiest ones, T5 and A4S. The others can take multiple days, weeks or months of progression.

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Some spells can be learned solo. Even with Basic Instinct, Mighty Guard and Mimicry there are actually a handful of duties you need other people for due to mechanics I'm pretty sure.

Even without that though, group BLU content outweighs solo BLU content. All solo BLUs get is the Masked Carnivale and being able to abuse Vibe Check. Meanwhile, even for levelling doing so in a group is encouraged. You level faster with other players, your dungeon grinds will be faster with other players, you can't solo BLU logs and pugging the BLU achievements is a nightmare. Even for learning spells, going into PF is advised because of how much faster it is. In dungeons you can vibe check each group of mobs instead of having to die, reset CDs and then vibe check the second w2w pack. In trials... it's just straight up faster. Castrum Fluminis is a 30 minute ordeal if you try to solo and one mistake sends you all the way back to start.

It's strange though. I see a lot of people complaining about FFXIV needing to feel like a MMO and needing to have multiplayer activities, but then you see people wanting BLU to be mostly solo.