Here's a thought. Blue Mage doesn't need fixing. Revolutionary, I know.
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Here's a thought. Blue Mage doesn't need fixing. Revolutionary, I know.
So you disagree with the implementation. That still doesn't mean Blue Mage is broken and needs to be fixed.
You can use it in regular content up to the earned job level as long as you're not doing it through random matchmaking in Duty Finder or PvP. I certainly won't have a problem finding people to pre-form groups with to play Blue Mage. I wonder why you think you will.
If SE did what you wanted with the job, they would have to nerf potencies so hard that people would be complaining that the job isn't OP like it should be and would stop playing it because it was more annoyance to level than anything else. This way, the job gets to be OP and people get to have that fun without it impacting balance in the rest of the game.
I don't think BLU can function as a proper tank even with Mighty Guard when they still suffer from having the caster HP pool and significantly lower defense and also get a much heavier damage penalty then tanks do. It seems more like something you toggle on a pinch to not get melted if the MT died or if you want to mitigate something like a boss' phase transition (Diamondback is more powerful, but can't be manually disabled which makes it impractical in some situations).
Their healing is similarly more meant for pinch situations with White Wind having a huge MP cost to match its power and Infusion, well...killing you.
At the heart, it's still a DPS class.
I wonder what sort of nonsense you could get up to with a rdm and blu together, with the blu just suiciding to feed the rdm mana who raises the blu. Probably literally nothing actually interesting, but the concept amuses me. I wonder how much dps a blu with a dedicated rdm raiser would do just spamming self destruct/final sting and infusion.
What I see is people on the forums sick of Blue Mage posts. Sorry, but until the job is changed to work in normal content, there will always be posts like this. They will likely persist for as long as it takes for these issues to be addressed.
Based on datamining;
Mighty Guard provides twice the damage reduction of normal tank stances, and depending on how much damage they do normally the penalty may end up setting them even. If not, Off Guard and Peculiar Light help offset that.
Diamondback, which you bring up, can shut down basically any tankbuster. Pair with Veil of the Whorl or Ice Spikes to keep some damage going.
Bad Breath provides a 15 second Reprisal, -10% damage done, seems to lack any CD
Toad Oil grants 20% evasion for 3 minutes, seems to lack any CD
White Wind, used at 50% HP, fully heals yourself.
Survival is not likely the concern, damage output while tanking might be though.
I would wait at least until BLU can reach current max level to even try to figure out how to balance it for running Duties normally.
Which will probably be sometime after the release of Shadowbringers.
"Can queue for any role"
So in addition to having its own unique levelling system and content, you want it to encompass three different roles that will each require balancing?
This would take the resources of four different jobs, and result in only one.
It's basically Arcanist all over again, but with three instead of two job promotions.
Will never happen.
This. Personally I do think BLU can be made to work with normal content, after all most BLU mages in the mainline games had spells that simply didn't work on bosses if they were too OP, but for now I'm actually happy to have extra content that runs contrary to how things normally work. Will it succeed? Will it fail? Who knows. Let's give it a shot first and /then/ put out threads about fixing it once the majority of the community has had time to play with it.