The hate for limited jobs is unjustified

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Originally Posted by Sindele

Strago's just about the only mid one.

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Incorrect.

While there are more powerful options for characters in FFVI, they don't come without a lot of leveling caveats, whereas Strago's Lore (Azure Lore if you will) comes in stronger than all other characters skill options relative to game progression with just his 3 starting spells.

His most powerful spell is tied to a World of Ruin sidequest that at most is locked behind just completing Owzer's House in WoR OR Veldt Cave (so one dungeon after Falcon acquisition, either way) if you let Shadow perish. This spell is basically a more MP efficient Ultima for all intents and purposes. It has slightly lower MP cost and spell power than Ultima, but easily reaches maximum damage before you can even acquire Ultima. This is maximum damage with his innate skills long before other characters can do maximum damage with their own innate skills.

Alternatively, his other most powerful spell is Step Mine (Traveler in later editions) which is a spell analogous to Quina's Frog Drop. Except it's tied to how many steps you've taken, and it's accessible within the World of Balance from early game enemies. You can get it right after getting him, and then spend like an hour or so in a town with Sprint Shoes on ramping it up until it is at max damage. Which is still faster than other means of acquiring maximum damage dealing attacks. And also used in minimum level runs since it doesn't rely on stats for its damage calc.


By comparison to other Blue Mages, Strago is a stand out in the category. Blue Mage in its inception appearance doesn't get to its game breaking spells until like, Karnak Castle escape, which is like half a dozen dungeons away from the Wind Crystal shard acquisition.

Gau is another great and comparable/arguably better Blue Mage than Strago, even having access to spells that cast with the Lore animation but Strago cannot learn. But he gets bogged down by how long it can take you to run into enemies on The Veldt, and that's if you didn't miss their encounters.

Enemy Skill materia is great, but it's not a character.

If it weren't for that one artist that drew the funny comic with Quistis, I'd forget she was a Blue Mage 90% of the time.

Quina comes in swinging hard, because you can get most all of her incredible spells right after recruiting her, particularly if you get her early. But I mean, this is mostly Limit Glove, which has that pesky needs to be at 1 HP stipulation. She shines harder in people's minds from being from a more recent game, but also from the fact that Strago is in a game where every character has to compete with Esper granted magic, so it's not uncommon for you to already have a few characters with magical prowess comparable or better than Strago's starting spells.

So going back to VI, with Esper Magic and making sure to get that Magic Power+ on level up from specific Espers (Maduin, Cait Sith, Zoneseek, and Tritoch) any character can get insane in the membrane magical damage, making Strago seem less special, but he can do that too and it also boosts the powers of his unique Lore spells. In addition he has gear access others don't and can get close to the same amount of Magic Power+ from gear that Terra/Celes/Relm get. Then there's always that funky layer that all Blue Magic has where he gets spells that do things that standard magic doesn't. Like he gets the Aero spell which is basically like a tier 3 on all enemies wind spell.

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Originally Posted by sindriiisgaming

So, if seeing how right now blu mage is
*versatile
*has no 2 minute meta slave
*can learn there own skills and engage with the overworld
*has actual skill required to optimize

Why would you want to change this in any way?

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Because it's taken years to get to that point and wasn't that way on it's inception.

And I have zero faith in CBU3's job development team to put out a good job on it's initial run.

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Originally Posted by Saraide

This would be relevant if I was the one who started questioning other people's credentials in order to shut them down here. Still waiting on the explanation on why having a 2 in 1 job would be an insult to blu identity.

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nobody said it being slipt in 2 would be an insult, having set skills chosen for you by the devs would be the insult. if you think blu would keep any of its skills if they actually had the rescources to make it a proper job (spoilers they dont) youre mad

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This would be relevant if I was the one who started questioning other people's credentials in order to shut them down here

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i even achknowledge in my original post that you can clear savage on blu mage and still have 0 understanding of how it works. sure you get how oit works as a dps.. but have u tanked on it.. healed on it? can you appreciate gate, cold frost, diamond back, strotram, boom cheese and other broken role based spells

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Originally Posted by sindriiisgaming

i even achknowledge in my original post that you can clear savage on blu mage and still have 0 understanding of how it works. sure you get how oit works as a dps.. but have u tanked on it.. healed on it? can you appreciate gate, cold frost, diamond back, strotram, boom cheese and other broken role based spells

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Stotram as a healer is an awful spell. It heals for way too little and main healer is usually the tank. Everything else is a mit check and/or is easily coverable by White Wind from heal mimic BLU.
Do enlighten me what broken role based spells you are talking about?

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Originally Posted by sindriiisgaming

i even achknowledge in my original post that you can clear savage on blu mage and still have 0 understanding of how it works. sure you get how oit works as a dps.. but have u tanked on it.. healed on it? can you appreciate gate, cold frost, diamond back, strotram, boom cheese and other broken role based spells

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Tanking on a BLU sucks mostly because of the cast times on every spell, aka every mitigation. Not to mention the lack of HP due to you having caster gear instead of tanking gear that the tank mimicry doesn't make up for.

The fact that Mighty Guard still lowers DPS output even after CBU3 removed every other tank stance DPS penalty is pretty disappointing as well. They could easily just allow tank mimicry to remove that dps penalty so other roles don't use it.

Finally, they have MP issues because everything is a spell with only Lucid Dreaming to really get mana back, and unlike every other job in the game their "Ability" skills require MP to use (And BLU has a LOT of ability skills, that's their entire burst phase)

Okay so there is no problem with a 2 in 1 job approach with the unhinged current version and a standardized normal version. Glad we cleared that up. And if you only like the current version nothing would change for you. This approach is also extremely doable since all the animation work is already done. Weirder things have been asked and received in this game.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

Tanking on a BLU sucks mostly because of the cast times on every spell, aka every mitigation. Not to mention the lack of HP due to you having caster gear instead of tanking gear that the tank mimicry doesn't make up for.

The fact that Mighty Guard still lowers DPS output even after CBU3 removed every other tank stance DPS penalty is pretty disappointed to. They could easily just allow tank mimicry to remove that dps penalty so other roles don't use it.

Finally, they have MP issues because everything is a spell with only Lucid Dreaming to really get mana back, and unlike every other job in the game their "Ability" skills require MP to use (And BLU has a LOT of ability skills, that's their entire burst phase)

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Reading how blu tanks used to just spam blood drain over and over again because the damage penality was even higher on mighty guard so you may aswell not bother doing damage at all was comical.

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Originally Posted by sindriiisgaming

i even achknowledge in my original post that you can clear savage on blu mage and still have 0 understanding of how it works. sure you get how oit works as a dps.. but have u tanked on it.. healed on it? can you appreciate gate, cold frost, diamond back, strotram, boom cheese and other broken role based spells

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I mean, sure you can clear it without learning BLU tanking or BLU healing, but there are still things to use correctly to clear things as a DPS. Example, in A8S I had to correctly take aggro if I had a certain Gavel buff or squeeze out a lot of damage when getting other Gavel buffs. Even if you do a Gavel skip strat, I remember that being ridiculously tight to the point it was being macro'd.

In some fights I had to help with white winds or diamondback. Occasionally some water cannon players without rez joined us and needless to say, they weren't clearing these raids.

All the fights took a lot of prog tbh and crit/dh RNG luck on final stings, it would be hard to imagine new players just casually clearing T9, T13, A8S and A12S, but I haven't seen if the new abilities make it easier.

Yeah, doing Coils and Alexander Savage definitely required knowledge and readjusting rotations and such. For example, doing the Moonflute opener on Alexander Prime was not ideal as it meant you would be unable to do anything during Prey + Stack (and you can get both!)

I also learned that the BLU tank should NOT use Meat Shield on the person with a Tempest tether (while they also have one) on Bahamut Prime. The game does NOT like that (just launches you into the wall).