blue mage

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Originally Posted by Yorumi

Consider how many bad players are in the game that can barely put a rotation together. You're going to have blus queuing with half or more of their skills missing. Now you put them in a tank slot and you have tanks queuing with most of their skills unlearned. Yeah that won't go over well. You'd basically have to make a special system for blus that ties level or ilvl to the skills they've learned so they don't make queue requirements until they learn skills..

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Have to agree with this, they could barebones the concept esp for a tank job by giving them a skill to temporarily stock a recently used ability on them and then reflect it back on the enemy, but thats about the extent of it. Why pets dont get anymore actions, cause too many actions and an unfair advantage or something. The fun and thrill of the jobs classic design would be lost entirely to balance, and as you said before would be a nightmare if it was usable in anything but unsynced or solo runs due to the high liability of the player base

I understand the concern but look at it this way.

BLU could have a basic skill set that uses its weapon, this would include a 1-2-3 enmity combo and damage combo and a DoT skill and some quirky skills like a mitigation CD, damage increase CD and invulnerability skill. It would have role skills (since as of 4.0 that's going to be a thing) giving it Rampart (confirmed), Convalescence? Awareness? Foresight? Flash?

It will probably start at level 50 or higher, so it could have a tank stance already available when unlocked like DRK did. (ff explorers gave blue mage predetermination as a basic skill which was basically a tank stance).

This alone gives BLU the necessary tools to perform its job competently, we've all seen the tanks who sit in tank stance and just spam their flash/enmity combo and never pop a CD and can still clear content.

BLU spells would then be an addition on top of this basic skill set, BLU spells would be their clemency, their fell cleave, their abyssal drain, their sole survivor, their sheltron, their vengeance. The spells would be the thing that takes them from a competent BLU to a good BLU. You won't need them, but you'll perform way better if you have them.

Job skills could then be saved for actually interesting things like chain affinity, doubles the potency of your next spell, azure lore, allows blue magic to be cast with no cost for the duration, unbridled knowledge, grants access to more powerful spells. Using these would take you from a good BLU to a great BLU.

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Originally Posted by Cabalabob

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Yeah but again look at it with existing skills. I had a drg queue one time for a 60 dungeon and he had NONE of his 50+ skills. His dps was about one third of what I was doing in tank stance. He was essentially a non-existent party member. Or look at it a different way, I was gone for awhile and when I came back had to do catch up. I was tanking gubal hard and expert in 240-250 gear with a 240 weapon. It was really difficult to hold hate even with tank stance. That was with just a bit of an ilvl difference and using everything at my disposal. Now drop a blu in that scenario tanking with half their skills missing. Not going to happen. A pld does slightly less damage than the other tanks and they're shunned for it.

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Originally Posted by Yorumi

Yeah but again look at it with existing skills. I had a drg queue one time for a 60 dungeon and he had NONE of his 50+ skills. His dps was about one third of what I was doing in tank stance. He was essentially a non-existent party member. Or look at it a different way, I was gone for awhile and when I came back had to do catch up. I was tanking gubal hard and expert in 240-250 gear with a 240 weapon. It was really difficult to hold hate even with tank stance. That was with just a bit of an ilvl difference and using everything at my disposal. Now drop a blu in that scenario tanking with half their skills missing. Not going to happen. A pld does slightly less damage than the other tanks and they're shunned for it.

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You can't really work off this slippery slope logic though, as you said this is ALREADY a thing, bads will be bad, you can't stop that and you shouldn't design the game around it.

I just don't think they are going to make a tank out of a clothie job. SE is not experimental enough to make a tank out of a job that doesn't at least traditionally wear heavy armor even if it had traditionally been a DPS (i.e. if they wanted, they could have made DRG a tank. It wears heavy armor). So these threads can pop up all the time, which they do, but its just not going to be a tank.

Just being realistic.

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Originally Posted by Cabalabob

You can't really work off this slippery slope logic though, as you said this is ALREADY a thing, bads will be bad, you can't stop that and you shouldn't design the game around it.

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The point I'm making is more about the dev's mentality. They make a game that holds your hand as much as possible and then some more. They took elements out of the game for fear it was too complicated and boiled every job down to one stat. They're not going to design a job that could potentially be so poor. Of course after that you'd have all the forum whining about dps that spent 45 minutes in a queue only to get a blu incapable of doing his job, having to drop only to do another 45 minute queue to have the same thing happen. Believe me I want a blu like you're describing, I just know it's not going to happen.

What id like to see is a Geomancer as a tank (using things like walls of earth and vines for Aoe crowd control).... Storyteller for healer (like orator in ff tactics can buff party and debuff enemies as well as healing)... as for Dps Puppeteer ( works like BLU or BST unlocking various skills from collected minions)

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Originally Posted by Cabalabob

... I really don't understand why people want BLU to only learn their spells in job quests, that would be incredibly boring. BLU could easily have a basic skill set using their weapon and learn blue magic on top of that from monsters in the world.

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I always thought an interesting idea for a Blue Mage tank would be to have a set of 'Absorb' abilities that acted both as mitigation and a way to (temporarily at least) learn extra abilities beyond their standard set and keep the diversity that Blue Mages is known for...

The idea would be that Blue Mages have an 'Offensive Absorb', 'Defensive Absorb' and a 'Support Absorb', which at a base level would simply provide damage mitigation (like Rampart), however getting hit by a special attack while an 'Absorb' is up would then turn that 'Absorb' ability into a special ability, the effects of which would depend on the type of the 'Absorb' and the category of the attack...

For example:
Offensive Absorb + Single Target Hit = High Damage Single Target Attack
Defensive Absorb + AoE Magical Hit = Short Duration AoE +Magic Defence.
Support Absorb + AoE debuff (e.g. Bad Breath) = AoE 'Esuna'.

This would of course require balancing, as it could be quite powerful in certain situations, however it is one way that Blue Mages could still be able to learn abilities 'in the wild', and have a diverse ability set, without having to break the established pattern of job quests.

(As a side idea, and as the 'Absorb' abilities would work best if the Blue Mage was the main tank, they could also have a 'Observer Stance' which lets them simply observe enemy abilities (rather than get hit by them) in order to gain access to their special abilities while off-tanking, etc.).

I could see Blue Mage working as a tank. It would need a substantial re-imagining though.
Initially I tried to think of ways to have the Blue Mage being hit work, but I don't think the devs will ever make a tank that is encouraged to take more damage.
I do however think a magic stealing theme could work, taking power offensively from enemies in order to power up your own mob themed attacks. The lore would focus on learning from your enemies (and allies in some cases) and taking their power to use against them.

So, after you've gained enough power you could use 'blue magic' to charge up a roster of moves.
Say the BLU AoE aggro generator is an overpower copy called 'Bad Breath'. As standard your character would breath out a wispy green cloud that does damage and builds threat, but powered up by stealing power from enemies the same move would also have a spectral Morbol behind you doing the full attack putting blind, heavy and poison on the mobs.
You could do the same for combos, like having a DPS combo based on the Ziz group of enemies (those bird things and their poison breath attacks) that when powered up turns into a conal DoT attack.
As a gimmick I admit it's a bit of a rip-off of WAR stacks and DRK dark arts. Would need a bit more to flesh it out properly, but a vague list of moves I think could work would be.

Lancet: Attacks done while under the effect of this buff generate stacks to spend on blue magic and charging up your basic attacks.

Scan: When placed on a target Lancet is more effective at generating stacks.

Learn: Saves the last received buff for re-use, stoneskin placed on you, use learn and have another stoneskin saved to use for the tankbuster.

Diffusion: Spreads your buffs to nearby party members at 50% potency. Healers shielded you and put a regen on? Share the love with the melee DPS.

Copy: Placed on another party member, duplicates buffs and debuffs they receive on yourself. BLM using raging? Copy him for a damage boost.

I'd have the stack count be quite generous and various moves use different amounts of stacks. 'Blue arts' as it were would be fairly cheap, straight up cast Blue Magic like Learn and Copy would be quite expensive in comparison.

Edit: Oh, and I'm thinking one-handed spear and an off-hand whip.

If their going to do BLU, it's probably going to be a DPS with support, akin to summoner. They could easily give it ability that allows it to have some damage mitigation (like Titan or monks earth stance.). I can't really see BLU wearing heavy armor. But maybe SE will finally start giving each tank their own gear set, like they do with the DPS jobs.