The Limitation Dilemma: Why Final Fantasy 14's Limited Job was a Mistake

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Originally Posted by Zebraoracle

Isn't blue mage a normal job in 11 though?

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The problem with 14’s design is they decided every job should be equally viable in all content. In 11 it is entirely possible to get into situations certain jobs are just not designed for, and there is a lot more personal responsibility in getting gear/spells/etc.

In 11, a blue acquiring certain spells is not much different than a samurai grinding a monster to get a specific katana, or a white mage trekking out in no man’s land to get a teleport spell.

Unfortunately, in 14 a level 90 Paladin needs to be functionally identical to every other 90 tank.

Lack of job individualism, lack of horizontal progression and lack of the devs being able to allow certain jobs to be better than others in certain circumstances are IMO this game’s biggest faults.

In other words: what is the point of allowing one character to play all jobs if mastering those jobs doesn’t bring any tangible benefits or otherwise make certain situations easier to do? If you have 90 Paladin, there is no point to having 90 dark knight.

On topic of Blue, they really should go with the intention of allowing blue to run amok in older expedition content like Bozja and Eureka. Why they decided to lock spells behind dungeons was an incredibly dumb decision.

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Originally Posted by kaynide

Why they decided to lock spells behind dungeons was an incredibly dumb decision.

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Putting spells in dungeons is kinda trivial at this point with Basic Instinct. Think the only level 70 dungeon spell I opted to group for was Cold Fog, and that just for the boss being too tedious and troublesome, but not impossible to solo.

Agreed on expedition content, tho. Not being allowed in Eureka was the biggest disappointment. I don't even need the whole "elemental" thing to be relevant. Just wanted to have some extra fun.

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

Putting spells in dungeons is kinda trivial at this point with Basic Instinct. Think the only level 70 dungeon spell I opted to group for was Cold Fog, and that just for the boss being too tedious and troublesome, but not impossible to solo.

Agreed on expedition content, tho. Not being allowed in Eureka was the biggest disappointment. I don't even need the whole "elemental" thing to be relevant. Just wanted to have some extra fun.

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It’s less about a spell being in a dungeon, and more like, you have to do the entire dungeon + final boss and maybe they’ll give you the spell, or not. Or you can organize a group to do it “at level”, on what should have been a solo job.

Specifically that stupid lighthouse.

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Originally Posted by Atelier-Bagur

So many terrible takes with people hating on Blue. I hope they eventually realize this backwater thinking of theirs where the game shouldnt be encouraged to do unique things is exactly why jobs have become so boring.

Go ahead and cry all you want about them dedicating some resources on a piece of content that people like. At least the job itself is a lot more diverse and fun than the "regular" jobs we currently have. This design should be celebrated, not scorned.

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OK, then why can't they use their design philosophy for BLU for regular jobs? Literally no one disagrees with what you're saying. The contention is why such a fun class is locked behind "limited".

The usual spiel is "balance, balance, balance".

Then hire more balancing staff.

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Originally Posted by MikkoAkure

If they did both things together and BLU was a regular job that had to learn its jobs from monsters, you'd have people being kicked for missing certain spells or not having meta builds just as you described is happening right now in PF.

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I mean, I'm kicking the WHM who doesn't have Assize because he couldn't be bothered to do his quests. If it's a normal dungeon, who gives a crap every dungeon can be solo'd by a warrior these days. But for high-end content? Yeah bring food, have materia in your gear, and have your spells and abilities from your quests. The only difference is BLU has to spend a bit more time getting the spells -- and hey, they could always just bar BLU from content if they haven't gotten the "core" skills. Barring BLU from content is already the design philosophy of the game anyway.

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Having BLU players spend more time than everyone else to experience the same content as everyone else or be kicked from parties is against the model of the game, for better or worse.

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The nice thing is, you can switch jobs. If hunting down monsters to learn their skills is so unappealing that a player won't do it, well, maybe BLU isn't the job for them. It'd be like someone playing BRD but hating that whole "song" thing so they just ignore them.

The job already takes more time to get into a playable state than any other job, the only difference is you get to do less content.

As for some other concerns about how the job wouldn't feel right without its OP stuff, like White Wind healing based off the user's HP or death spells or bad breath not working on bosses.

1) White Wind healing the party based off a percentage of HP actually sounds kinda decent and not OP. In different FF games it worked a little differently, sometimes it just healed for your current HP, sometimes it healed a portion of it, sometimes it's based off your max HP, in one case it healed how much HP you were missing. And given that Medica II or Cure III can pretty much top off the entire party anyway I just don't see this as that big of an issue, especially since HP constantly trickles up since stamina is tied to item level, just like spell power.
2) None of that stuff works on bosses anyway, even in most older FF games. Very few bosses are vulnerable to the Death spell (aside from like, "Hey this guard captain and his 2 cronies are a 'boss' because the music is playing but really they're just a random encounter with one guy being green instead of brown."). Heck quite a few bosses -- noteworthy, sometimes difficult, real bosses with real mechanics and sometimes real story relevance, can be one-shot with Life or Raise or a Phoenix Down or whatever. And nobody's saying "ugh, white mage sucks, it's not a real white mage, I can't use Raise to insta-kill this clearly undead boss." (Well, some people do, but everyone else just kind of accepts that one-shotting a boss in an MMO might be a little much.)

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Originally Posted by Powercow

I mean, I'm kicking the WHM who doesn't have Assize because he couldn't be bothered to do his quests. If it's a normal dungeon, who gives a crap every dungeon can be solo'd by a warrior these days.

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I'm going to slightly veer off track the main topic with a personal experience because it's really not emphasized enough that the content people would be afraid to queue into with a BLU without a full kit is so utterly devoid of teeth that going into a End Game EW dungeon, getting a cure spam healer who's allergic to Holy and couldn't cast Esuna to save their own life 3 times because they got hit by Doom Status all while a RPR seems to not notice the big circle on the floor and we still got through it just fine.

Annoyingly longer than it needed to be sure, but we didn't wipe and not a threat of a kick by anyone. I think folks are really exaggerating how many people will go all kick happy just because a BLU might not have BiS spells for queueable content because, for the worse IMO, the devs are afraid of not throwing a Soft ball in queueable content
Anything bigger that's going to need static or a premade team on PF like EX or Savage, then yeah, doing some research isn't asking for a lot, especially since it's rather the norm for this genre.

Blue Mage is a class that's levelled in such an interesting way, so it sucks that there's not much use for it outside of FATEs and unsynced content. I'd love for it to be reworked in a way so that it could be played in regular content, but hopefully not at the cost of the levelling being streamlined like every other class.

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Originally Posted by Alexandre_Noireau

The only way BLU will unbecome a mistaken decision is with another Limited Job.
With as much content, it's own set of trials and tribulations diferent from BLU.

A Beast Master with a tactical RPG elements and deep pet (unit) managment. A Corsair with ship-based combat and customization with focus on exploration.

But as long as the BLU stands alone, it will always feel incomplete.

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???

So you want SE to double down on their mistake? I mean that is likely but that's not what we should be aiming for.

In a way it's one of my favorite things in the game but the execution is overly complicated. You don't have enough spell slots. It takes too long to build and update multiple different sets and hotbars for different situations and then you have to remember how all of those work in case a group makes you switch role.

The worst thing is the extreme FOMO; you do certain content at patch release or you never do it. I will never find a 24 BLU group for the alliance raids that I missed logging. That has to be the earliest priority since the people who care about the log are never going to repeat it after their run. Not letting us undersize the blu log is some BS.

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Originally Posted by TheDecay

OK, then why can't they use their design philosophy for BLU for regular jobs? Literally no one disagrees with what you're saying. The contention is why such a fun class is locked behind "limited".

The usual spiel is "balance, balance, balance".

Then hire more balancing staff.

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You should know that Im in the same mindset that the regular jobs should be just as fun as Blue. It's not that they need to hire more people to balance but it's the dev team sticking to a broken philosophy of the meta, rather than designing a job for its uniqueness and fun factor.

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Originally Posted by Rufalus

In a way it's one of my favorite things in the game but the execution is overly complicated. You don't have enough spell slots. It takes too long to build and update multiple different sets and hotbars for different situations and then you have to remember how all of those work in case a group makes you switch role.

The worst thing is the extreme FOMO; you do certain content at patch release or you never do it. I will never find a 24 BLU group for the alliance raids that I missed logging. That has to be the earliest priority since the people who care about the log are never going to repeat it after their run. Not letting us undersize the blu log is some BS.

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You do realize you can save hotbar builds with your blue mage right? Really what they need is giving more set slots for those builds.

Also while I get your 2nd point. What's stopping you from forming the specific party on PF yourself? I do that all the time and usually I can get a like minded group going most of the time.

The moment they make all jobs like BLU is the moment folks here will complain again about jobs not being balanced like they did years ago. Well veer right back to the days where certain classes are shunned in the raid scene because other classes are more desirable. We've been through this before..the sheer amount of balance talk and complaining is why classes are the way they are now I don't think folks get this.

I understand the gripe, but I don't see how Blue Mage could exist otherwise. The game simply doesn't support a job that can tank, heal and DPS. And it is the only job where there is content that actually requires you to utilize specific elemental weaknesses. Anyone else think it made no sense the first time you fought Ifrit and your BLM was spamming Fire on it? How was that ok? At least BLU puts us in a position where we have to think about what we are going to cast on a specific enemy.

If people want BLU to be able to do current content, then they'd have to accept the cookie cutter nature of jobs. BLU would have been be declared a tank, healer or DPS. And then they'd either give them the same toolset every tank has, or a series of GCD and oGCD heals if they are a healer or a gimmick gauge for a DPS. Frankly, that sounds a lot more boring than what BLU currently is.

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Originally Posted by IkaraGreydancer

The moment they make all jobs like BLU is the moment folks here will complain again about jobs not being balanced like they did years ago. Well veer right back to the days where certain classes are shunned in the raid scene because other classes are more desirable. We've been through this before..the sheer amount of balance talk and complaining is why classes are the way they are now I don't think folks get this.

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It's not either/or if they actually invest in expanding the balancing team beyond 3 people, all of whom are also on other teams.

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Originally Posted by TheDecay

It's not either/or if they actually invest in expanding the balancing team beyond 3 people, all of whom are also on other teams.

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Is it actually just three people or are you just messing with us because this sounds like an assumption

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Originally Posted by IkaraGreydancer

The moment they make all jobs like BLU is the moment folks here will complain again about jobs not being balanced like they did years ago. Well veer right back to the days where certain classes are shunned in the raid scene because other classes are more desirable. We've been through this before..the sheer amount of balance talk and complaining is why classes are the way they are now I don't think folks get this.

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Then we can point them to this expansion's incredibly boring and homogenized job design and tell them to shove it. Bonus Points, even in this expansion, people still complained about Job Balance

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Originally Posted by Kaurhz

IMO, the biggest issue I have with BLU is just the simple fact they insisted and even sold it on the premise that BLU would be a solo job. So far, some of the biggest pieces of content with solo content, e.g., Palace of the Dead and Eureka don't even allow Blue Mage to interact with it, which frankly is abysmal.

A class who's one of the biggest selling points upon release and for a long time was the given fact they saw it as a solo job. - The only solo element of this class is Carnival, and frankly nobody cares for those rewards because absolutely everything you get from the Carnival in terms of currency is something you can get far more efficiently doing other pieces of content.

Blue Mage has got to be the most underwhelming content they've ever released due to half-baked decision making. Probably the worst decision they have ever made.

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I actually have to agree with this. They weren't completely honest about what BLU is.

It's not a solo job by far. Even leveling it up isn't solo most of the time, because it's 100% meta for people to find partners to kill overworld mobs for them with other higher leveled jobs while they tag everything with BLU rather than grinding.

The masked carnival itself is actually a bit useless. It's fun, you need it for the BLU quests and the weekly goals are nice for quick and easy rewards. That's about it though.

BLUs main uses have almost always been tomestone farms or just farming things in general.

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Originally Posted by Atelier-Bagur

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You're misconstruing what I'm saying and I don't know if it's purposeful or accidental, but I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt.

The meta thing is very relevant. You can't just say "there's no point to bringing it up" when the complaint that SE will just homogenize it is one of the biggest arguments your side of the debate uses, when in reality the playerbase (not all, but by far the majority) is literally already doing it themselves, just in a different way. Again, any moogle tomestone run on PF, you're expected to be able to do the ultravibrarion combo and the final sting combo.

Which FF are you pulling your BLU info from? Spells often work differently between games, and White Wind is no exception. It doesn't always equal current hp = healing, and in some games it even has an esuna effect. It therefore stands to reason that it can be changed as appropriate to fit into FF14. And let's not get into job integrity when we have white mages acting like elementalists, dark knights not using their hp to fuel their abilities, red mage using a bastardized mystic knight combat style in addition to adding holy and flare to their repertoire, dancer barely being a support, bard mixing previous bow job archetypes into its playstyle, sage being a completely new playstyle versus what previous sages were...

The whole point of Blue Magic is using monster abilities. That's it. And no, that's not what I mean. Maybe an example will explain it better.

Guild Wars 1. You pieced together a skill set from a pool of abilities. Based on what type of build you were going for, you would pull from one or two attributes of skills. Let's take ritualist because base class it's the most diverse in what roles it can perform.

Ritualists have four attributes - channeling magic, communing, restoration magic, and spawning, each with a multitude of skills to pick from.

You have healing ritualists, who would pull specifically from restoration magic, and maybe spawning and/or communing depending on how much non-healing support they wanted. Then you had nuker ritualists, who would focus mainly on channeling magic skills. Then there were spirit spammer ritualists, who would focus on communing skills. Even with only eight skill slots for your action bar, it was not limiting and had some of the most creative build diversity of any online game I've played.

The same general idea could be implemented for BLU. Expand the mimicry function - change it to mimicking a type or monster based on the role the BLU wants to perform. Give BLU different ways of doing things - a mimicry for caster dps, one for melee dps, one for DoT based dps, tanking, healing (maybe even different types of healing, who knows there are so many possibilities!). Let these mimicked roles power up certain spells and add MORE spells to the overall BLU list, so the BLU can have choices to round out their build after they have their core role abilities. As it stands now, BLU isn't all that creative. There are a few redundant spells, a few spells that never get used outside of very niche instances in the Carnivale and even then I'd still say there are some dead spells on the list.

I'm very much an advocate for getting rid of the 2 minute burst, but since that will likely never happen (we can discuss for days how questionable SE's decision making may or may not be lol) I'd rather have the job available in that form while still being able to do its side content/synced shenanigans for achievements and whatnot.

Posting on mobile is pain...

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Originally Posted by MikkoAkure

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That Yoshi quote isn't the weapon you think it is. People absolutely should have their abilities before going into content. If I get a player in 40+ content without a job stone, I'm kicking them. If I get a player in high level content that skipped their job quests and didn't pick up their abilities, something the game doesn't force you to do btw, I'm kicking then. If BLU were bumped up to a regular job, it absolutely should have some kind of limit to prevent it from queuing into content without an appropriate number of spells for the level of content. My above solution would actually help - if a BLU wanted to focus on being a healer, they only need to get X number of Blue Magic spells tied to the healing mimicry. In extremes and savage, everyone is expected to have all of their abilities so... what's the problem, exactly? BLU might take longer to get abilities for than other jobs? Oh no the horror, the people that care about the job will still do it. Having a job that gains abilities a different way than other jobs isn't somehow making said job incapable of doing content... it just requires a bit more effort.

Back in ShB I accidentally skipped the 70 job quest on GNB and didn't have a vital ability while I leveled to 80. It wasn't until I was doing content as GNB at 80 that I realized. I absolutely shouldn't have been able to do that, and I feel bad for the people I griefed.

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Originally Posted by TheDecay

It's not either/or if they actually invest in expanding the balancing team beyond 3 people, all of whom are also on other teams.

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Why on earth people are taking this adamant stance that this is an either or situation is beyond me...

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Originally Posted by Zebraoracle

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It's not accidental it's just I'm sorry but it honestly feels like you're trying to overcomplicate your points and making excuses for the sake of your argument.

You're still bringing up the meta excuse which I keep telling you, Blue Magic isn't supposed to be balanced in the first place.

Then you keep saying about changing spell effects which I'm gonna tell you know ever since FFV introduced blue spells, every other FF game that reintroduced those same spells still retains those same effects for the most part. White Wind will always be a party heal based on your current HP, 1000 Needles will always be a static damage spell and so on and so forth.

Again youre missing the entire appeal of Blue Magic for it being a class that doesn't care about balance. If the class focuses too much about balance then we're back to square 1 with it being just another job that got neutered for the sake of the game's meta.

I'm sorry but your tldr arguments keep missing this basic point of why Blue Mage is Blue Mage.

I may be getting my people mixed up, but isn't this one of Titanmen's many many alts?

This really isn't a good argument, heck, ChatGPT could hold a better debate regarding the merits of loosening BLU's limitations.

Come on out titanmen, i know you're there, come out and play.

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Originally Posted by TheDecay

It's not either/or if they actually invest in expanding the balancing team beyond 3 people, all of whom are also on other teams.

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And how would they do that exactly without overcomplicating things? Do remember this is a casual game btw

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Originally Posted by Atelier-Bagur

It's not accidental it's just I'm sorry but it honestly feels like you're trying to overcomplicate your points and making excuses for the sake of your argument.

You're still bringing up the meta excuse which I keep telling you, Blue Magic isn't supposed to be balanced in the first place.

Then you keep saying about changing spell effects which I'm gonna tell you know ever since FFV introduced blue spells, every other FF game that reintroduced those same spells still retains those same effects for the most part. White Wind will always be a party heal based on your current HP, 1000 Needles will always be a static damage spell and so on and so forth.

Again youre missing the entire appeal of Blue Magic for it being a class that doesn't care about balance. If the class focuses too much about balance then we're back to square 1 with it being just another job that got neutered for the sake of the game's meta.

I'm sorry but your tldr arguments keep missing this basic point of why Blue Mage is Blue Mage.

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Blue Mage's identity is being a magic user that uses monster abilities. That's it. It's identity isn't "I'm a broken mage that breaks the game". If that were the case, we wouldn't see each iteration of it after 5 be fairly weaker. I think 6 is the last time it was actually very strong, and even then you had other stuff like Sabin in the game to counter balance it. If you think BLU's identity and purpose is to be broken, then boy howdy do I wanna introduce you to Kimahri and FFTA.

And I never said change white wind from a party heal, I said adjust it to fit within the context of FF14. You're warping what I'm saying into something I'm not.

And, once again, I'm going to say, AGAIN, that this isn't an either or situation. You can have your game breaking abilities. A lot of them don't work on bosses anyways! You can still use them for tomestone farming!

But if you're just going to chalk what I said up to excuses and just call my post a tldr and not actually respond to it, then whatever, man. Keep living in this world where you let SE trample over things instead of holding them to an actual standard. Sucks foe the rest of us that lose out on our favorite jobs in the series, but oh well!

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Originally Posted by Zebraoracle

Blue Mage's identity is being a magic user that uses monster abilities. That's it. It's identity isn't "I'm a broken mage that breaks the game". If that were the case, we wouldn't see each iteration of it after 5 be fairly weaker. I think 6 is the last time it was actually very strong, and even then you had other stuff like Sabin in the game to counter balance it. If you think BLU's identity and purpose is to be broken, then boy howdy do I wanna introduce you to Kimahri and FFTA.

And I never said change white wind from a party heal, I said adjust it to fit within the context of FF14. You're warping what I'm saying into something I'm not.

And, once again, I'm going to say, AGAIN, that this isn't an either or situation. You can have your game breaking abilities. A lot of them don't work on bosses anyways! You can still use them for tomestone farming!

But if you're just going to chalk what I said up to excuses and just call my post a tldr and not actually respond to it, then whatever, man. Keep living in this world where you let SE trample over things instead of holding them to an actual standard. Sucks foe the rest of us that lose out on our favorite jobs in the series, but oh well!

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You sour the discussion when you go off the assumption your standards are better or mean more than another's.

BLU is special because of how it currently works. Just saying. I wouldn't enjoy BLU working like the other jobs do.

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Originally Posted by IkaraGreydancer

You sour the discussion when you go off the assumption your standards are better or mean more than another's.

BLU is special because of how it currently works. Just saying

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You're gonna say that and then immediately turn around and say "it's better this way" because you like the way it is? This is such a hypocritical post. Why is your standard better than mine? We can all have our opinions on the job, and I'm expressing my distaste in how SE has implemented one of my historically favorite jobs and trying to brainstorm ways to make it work. You come in here and say I'm claiming my opinion is better, but then state your opinion as if it is fact/better than mine. Okay dude.

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Originally Posted by Zebraoracle

Blue Mage's identity is being a magic user that uses monster abilities. That's it. It's identity isn't "I'm a broken mage that breaks the game". If that were the case, we wouldn't see each iteration of it after 5 be fairly weaker. I think 6 is the last time it was actually very strong, and even then you had other stuff like Sabin in the game to counter balance it. If you think BLU's identity and purpose is to be broken, then boy howdy do I wanna introduce you to Kimahri and FFTA.

And I never said change white wind from a party heal, I said adjust it to fit within the context of FF14. You're warping what I'm saying into something I'm not.

And, once again, I'm going to say, AGAIN, that this isn't an either or situation. You can have your game breaking abilities. A lot of them don't work on bosses anyways! You can still use them for tomestone farming!

But if you're just going to chalk what I said up to excuses and just call my post a tldr and not actually respond to it, then whatever, man. Keep living in this world where you let SE trample over things instead of holding them to an actual standard. Sucks foe the rest of us that lose out on our favorite jobs in the series, but oh well!

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You do realize your method of balance is just going to have SE stifle and hold back on Blue Mages potential right? This is the reason for why Im against this idea of having Blue Mage be part of the regular jobs because thats just going to limit the developers from employing fun abilities for the sake of keeping it balanced.

Sure Blue Magic isn't as broken in the other games like FFV but that didn't keep them from still giving them unique effects and abilities to experiment. Blue Magic still retains that core principle, it's so much more than just "abilities you learn from monsters".

It's very ironic how you keep saying that I'm letting SE trample over things when that's exactly what your trying to do with the job. You seriously think they'll continue to develop the class with its current core mechanics? You are more deluded than I thought. You're actively ignoring the job balancing history and they're just going to keep dumbing it down and down till it gets homogenized. Then what?

Face it, you have no answers.

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Originally Posted by Zebraoracle

You're gonna say that and then immediately turn around and say "it's better this way" because you like the way it is? This is such a hypocritical post. Why is your standard better than mine? We can all have our opinions on the job, and I'm expressing my distaste in how SE has implemented one of my historically favorite jobs and trying to brainstorm ways to make it work. You come in here and say I'm claiming my opinion is better, but then state your opinion as if it is fact/better than mine. Okay dude.

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Reading comprehension. I never said better. I simply said it's special atm because of how it works differently than other classes. Nowhere did I say better. Nothing hypocritical at all. YOU are the one telling people to let them trample over them and that they arent holding SE to an actual standard.

Nowhere did I claim my standard is better...You're Cleary charged n upset and it shows. Calm down and take in what you're reading dude.

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Originally Posted by Atelier-Bagur

You do realize your method of balance is just going to have SE stifle and hold back on Blue Mages potential right? This is the reason for why Im against this idea of having Blue Mage be part of the regular jobs because thats just going to limit the developers from employing fun abilities for the sake of keeping it balanced.

Sure Blue Magic isn't as broken in the other games like FFV but that didn't keep them from still giving them unique effects and abilities to experiment. Blue Magic still retains that core principle, it's so much more than just "abilities you learn from monsters".

It's very ironic how you keep saying that I'm letting SE trample over things when that's exactly what your trying to do with the job. You seriously think they'll continue to develop the class with its current core mechanics? You are more deluded than I thought. You're actively ignoring the job balancing history and they're just going to keep dumbing it down and down till it gets homogenized. Then what?

Face it, you have no answers.

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No answers? Alright.

I'll say it yet again.

1. SE can still add those fun abilities for you to use in old/low level content/tomestone farming/etc like you do now. They manage to add new skills to every other job every expansion as well, so... You guys are so stuck on this either or situation when it doesn't have to be that way.
2. I have said already I'm an advocate for removing the two minute meta. That includes getting rid of the homogenization we both dislike. If Square would actually do this, it'd work wonders for everyone.
3. Hold SE accountable and to a standard, let them know what we like and dislike in job design.

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Originally Posted by Zebraoracle

No answers? Alright.

I'll say it yet again.

1. SE can still add those fun abilities for you to use in old/low level content/tomestone farming/etc like you do now. They manage to add new skills to every other job every expansion as well, so... You guys are so stuck on this either or situation when it doesn't have to be that way.
2. I have said already I'm an advocate for removing the two minute meta. That includes getting rid of the homogenization we both dislike. If Square would actually do this, it'd work wonders for everyone.
3. Hold SE accountable and to a standard, let them know what we like and dislike in job design.

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My brother, SE isn't going to keep the tomestone farming methods builds viable for current content like Ram's Voice + Ultravibration because they don't intend for balanced jobs to melt down mobs in an instant, they also don't intend for the myriad of easy insta heals, buffs and debuffs for when they design future instance encounters.

Seriously the more you try to make these excuses the angrier I get because you are not listening at all. Nobody wants for SE to change the class's arsenal design at all. You and other people keep asking for Blues viability in current game is just gonna end up making the class homogenized, which is a point you still fail to answer back to.

Zebraoracle, the only one who's being the stifler for creativity is you and its sad that you fail again and again to realize this. You're only looking at the present rather than the future.

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Originally Posted by Neoyoshi

I may be getting my people mixed up, but isn't this one of Titanmen's many many alts?

This really isn't a good argument, heck, ChatGPT could hold a better debate regarding the merits of loosening BLU's limitations.

Come on out titanmen, i know you're there, come out and play.

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First, I don't know who Titanmen is and I factually have one main account I play on with only 2 toons account wide. This and my main on Aether datacenter.
Second, maybe ChatGPT could do better. But the information I relayed are my genuine feelings on this topic. I consider BLU as a Limited Job to be a mistake and if they introduce BST as one, in my opinion, would be another big mistake!

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Originally Posted by Zebraoracle

In extremes and savage, everyone is expected to have all of their abilities so... what's the problem, exactly? BLU might take longer to get abilities for than other jobs? Oh no the horror, the people that care about the job will still do it. Having a job that gains abilities a different way than other jobs isn't somehow making said job incapable of doing content... it just requires a bit more effort.

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The problem is that no other job in FFXIV that is integrated with all the other jobs for content that has this level of complexity where 100+ spells are required to be balanced with each other as well as with everything else in the game and it has its own side-content as well. I think it's delusional to think that SE would do all of this for just one job only out of twenty and maintain it every single expansion to be balanced with the other jobs and the main content that is being released. Why should BLU get extremely focused support, more dev work, more abilities, and special content over everything else in the game? That is what I think is arrogant.

The only option I see we could have had for BLU that make sense integrated with everything else would have been a limited BLU that had the same number of abilities every other job has and perhaps a job quest that establishes that monster-learning happens off-screen for most spells while abilities other jobs get after completing quests could be explained as monster-learned spells we get in the quest. I would have preferred a BLU like that and I was a BLU main in FFXI. It's still disappointing to me, but there are other people who enjoy that content and I knew people who like BLU who don't think it's really BLU unless you're hunting spells just like there are people who don't see FFXIV's RDM or DRK as anything like past RDMs or DRKs.


Also, missing a couple of abilities because the player is lazy is one thing, but missing a whole swath of spells is another. Roulettes with BLU missing spells would be a nightmare since it would be expected that only a fully-equipped BLU would be balanced to just a normal RDM of the same level. You could have a threshold of "core" spells BLU needs, but a BLU missing spells beyond the core would still be objectively weaker than one with them all, as well as every other DPS. No other job is asking for so much time in order to reach the bar of being acceptable.

Ye olde idea of BLU just doesn't work in the model of this specific MMO exactly like how the old ideas of lots of other jobs don't exactly fit and had to be changed. Compromise has to be made somewhere and I don't understand why you think that BLU needs to have everything and be able to do anything just because it's your favorite. Compromises don't generally make everyone happy and I don't think this compromise made enough people happy enough to support the content they created for it. That said, I don't think they're going to throw away all of the side-content they created for the job just to overhaul it and give themselves more work balancing it to be a job that is meant for main content.

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Originally Posted by MikkoAkure

The problem is that no other job in FFXIV that is integrated with all the other jobs for content that has this level of complexity where 100+ spells are required to be balanced with each other as well as with everything else in the game and it has its own side-content as well. I think it's delusional to think that SE would do all of this for just one job only out of twenty and maintain it every single expansion to be balanced with the other jobs and the main content that is being released. Why should BLU get extremely focused support, more dev work, more abilities, and special content over everything else in the game? That is what I think is arrogant.

The only option I see we could have had for BLU that make sense integrated with everything else would have been a limited BLU that had the same number of abilities every other job has and perhaps a job quest that establishes that monster-learning happens off-screen for most spells while abilities other jobs get after completing quests could be explained as monster-learned spells we get in the quest. I would have preferred a BLU like that and I was a BLU main in FFXI. It's still disappointing to me, but there are other people who enjoy that content and I knew people who like BLU who don't think it's really BLU unless you're hunting spells just like there are people who don't see FFXIV's RDM or DRK as anything like past RDMs or DRKs.


Also, missing a couple of abilities because the player is lazy is one thing, but missing a whole swath of spells is another. Roulettes with BLU missing spells would be a nightmare since it would be expected that only a fully-equipped BLU would be balanced to just a normal RDM of the same level. You could have a threshold of "core" spells BLU needs, but a BLU missing spells beyond the core would still be objectively weaker than one with them all, as well as every other DPS. No other job is asking for so much time in order to reach the bar of being acceptable.

Ye olde idea of BLU just doesn't work in the model of this specific MMO exactly like how the old ideas of lots of other jobs don't exactly fit and had to be changed. Compromise has to be made somewhere and I don't understand why you think that BLU needs to have everything and be able to do anything just because it's your favorite. Compromises don't generally make everyone happy and I don't think this compromise made enough people happy enough to support the content they created for it. That said, I don't think they're going to throw away all of the side-content they created for the job just to overhaul it and give themselves more work balancing it to be a job that is meant for main content.

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Thank you for being more level headed than I am. Every point you made here is pretty much why trying to make Blue viable in current content is a bad idea. But people insist on looking at the base surface rather than the whole thing.

Moogle Tomestone Mage was a mistake and I'll die on that hill.

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Originally Posted by MikkoAkure

The problem is that no other job in FFXIV that is integrated with all the other jobs for content that has this level of complexity where 100+ spells are required to be balanced with each other as well as with everything else in the game and it has its own side-content as well. I think it's delusional to think that SE would do all of this for just one job only out of twenty and maintain it every single expansion to be balanced with the other jobs and the main content that is being released. Why should BLU get extremely focused support, more dev work, more abilities, and special content over everything else in the game? That is what I think is arrogant.

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But... this is what we already have, now. BLU already has more abilities and spell effects and UI elements and custom content than any other job. The only difference is it can barely be used for anything relevant.

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Also, missing a couple of abilities because the player is lazy is one thing, but missing a whole swath of spells is another. Roulettes with BLU missing spells would be a nightmare since it would be expected that only a fully-equipped BLU would be balanced to just a normal RDM of the same level. You could have a threshold of "core" spells BLU needs, but a BLU missing spells beyond the core would still be objectively weaker than one with them all, as well as every other DPS. No other job is asking for so much time in order to reach the bar of being acceptable.

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Have you played with a healer who only, apparently, has Eukresian Diagnosis? I have, it sucks, they barely contribute anything. Or how about an Ice Black Mage, or a Mudra-less Ninja? Bad players are going to be bad no matter what job they're on. No other job gets coddled like BLU does, and it's baffling. Like do people seriously accept that other jobs can be god-awful in pugs but, "Oh heavens no, we can't let there be a bad blue mage! Better shelter them and keep them at home!" Except even that falls apart because if you plan to do the high-end BLU content, guess what, you need your BLU skills anyway.

And if someone's going into high-end content and wants to play the job whose entire identity is learning skills from monsters, they should probably go and learn skills from monsters. I don't think expecting people to put in the tiniest effort for the central idea of their job, at least for high-end duties, is a bad thing.

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That said, I don't think they're going to throw away all of the side-content they created for the job just to overhaul it and give themselves more work balancing it to be a job that is meant for main content.

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Oh I doubt they will too. While they probably should buckle down and make an unlocked BLU, which would be a helluva lot less work than an entirely new job, they won't. So the best we can do now is hope to quarantine the mistake to one job and hope they don't repeat it.

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Originally Posted by Powercow

But... this is what we already have, now. BLU already has more abilities and spell effects and UI elements and custom content than any other job. The only difference is it can barely be used for anything relevant.

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I think you missed the other half of what I said.

We have all of those abilities on BLU right now, but actually having them be balanced with the other jobs would be a recurring struggle. No other job has this many abilities. Things are currently allowed to be unbalanced, whether it's too strong or too weak, because BLU doesn't need to be compared to the other jobs at all and is separate content.

There's no way that the developers would be willing to port all of that into an unlocked job without streamlining it. SMN had a whole rework just because they didn't like having to balance the pet, BLU wouldn't end up unscathed and would probably end up like I said, with no more monster hunting and a much smaller pool of spells granted at level up or story quest.

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Originally Posted by Powercow

Have you played with a healer who only, apparently, has Eukresian Diagnosis? I have, it sucks, they barely contribute anything. Or how about an Ice Black Mage, or a Mudra-less Ninja? Bad players are going to be bad no matter what job they're on. No other job gets coddled like BLU does, and it's baffling. Like do people seriously accept that other jobs can be god-awful in pugs but, "Oh heavens no, we can't let there be a bad blue mage! Better shelter them and keep them at home!" Except even that falls apart because if you plan to do the high-end BLU content, guess what, you need your BLU skills anyway.

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Like I said, having bad players missing some things already exists and is a bad thing. I don't know how "this is already a problem, so I'm OK with making it worse" is an acceptable argument. I don't see a world where a high level without a job stone or an ice mage is more common than someone missing spells on BLU.

I think the resolution to this issue is to dispense with calling it a Limited Job altogether. I think they had BLU in particular in mind as side content with its own full on user experience, and certain compromises needed to be made to get the content out on time, and so we have what we have today.

They would have been better off not calling BLU a job of any kind. It should have been its own quest line, but again you can't level 1-70 or similar without engaging the job system, probably because it was easier to implement. Players who play FF14 to roll BLU as a main could possibly be disappointed by this, but how many people would that be exactly?

I personally like the BLU content because it completely flips the game upside down and allows experienced players to approach older content in a fresh and new way, and in my view that is something expansions should do but they have gone super traditional with how that stuff gets rolled out. I wish that table-turning was a little more fleshed out but am pretty satisfied with how it's been implemented to this point. The one criticism I have is that BLU isn't updated enough so the content is extremely niche and can make getting your achieve mints done or completing your goals much much harder to coordinate since it's not something for everybody.

Anyway, to the original point of my reaction to this: I think BLU was never intended to be a job in the traditional sense other than when it was first being sketched out. To get things done by whatever deadline they have, they co-opted the job system to make it work, and someone at the meeting said, hey how about we flip the table with this one, and went in the direction we have now. I would imagine any other new job introduced in a limited fashion will have similar tipsy-turvy things going for it as well, which I think is absolutely fine. After all, how much can you really change a 1-2-3 combo? What would BLU look like if it was truly balanced to fit the current meta? Would using Nightbloom or whatever be nearly as exciting? I honestly don't think so.

Thank you for ignoring my TED Talk.

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Originally Posted by MikkoAkure

I think you missed the other half of what I said.

We have all of those abilities on BLU right now, but actually having them be balanced with the other jobs would be a recurring struggle. No other job has this many abilities. Things are currently allowed to be unbalanced, whether it's too strong or too weak, because BLU doesn't need to be compared to the other jobs at all and is separate content.

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Oh no, I read it. Balancing out a good 99% of those skills wouldn't be especially hard and assuming it's impossible is just depressing to see. Have you no imagination? Plus, Scathe still exists, Summoner's Physick still exists -- SE has no problem with useless skills being on jobs.

Heck, if you end up with, say, 3 spells that effectively do the same thing with the same potency, the only real difference would be animation and spell effects, right? That sounds AWESOME. Aesthetic customization for a job, and all the work's already done in terms of art? Hell yeah dude that's sick. Imagine thinking, "okay I have a conal DoT spell, and I can choose between Bad Breath or Aqua Breath to really customize my animation." Or "alright for my line AOE, I have Drill Cannons or Glower, do I like shooting big robot hands or lightning eyes? Hm..." And, of course, those extra little effects like paralysis or petrify or whatever? Leave them on, but just like every other skill with those kinds of effects, they won't work on bosses or even most dungeon trash. Sure there might be a "better" spell for open-world content or FATE farming in that case but... who cares?

There, you only need to balance out the job having a certain number of skills, and if you get a new, say, single-target filler nuke, it's purely aesthetic. You could even have 2 BLUs in a party, both good players executing their job perfectly, and they could look wildly different. I dunno about you but to me that that sounds badass.

Oh, and since all the animations and the UI elements for customizing which spells to bring already exist, the majority of the work is already finished. It'd simply be a matter of consolidating which spells are in which category, and then even if a BLU doesn't have every conal-DoT spell, as long as they have just one of them they're perfectly functional.

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There's no way that the developers would be willing to port all of that into an unlocked job without streamlining it. SMN had a whole rework just because they didn't like having to balance the pet, BLU wouldn't end up unscathed and would probably end up like I said, with no more monster hunting and a much smaller pool of spells granted at level up or story quest.

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I'd agree with you, except they already added in all that stuff. All the special UI components and game mechanics for learning spells is already in the game. It'd actully be more work to take it out and replace it with what we have for other jobs.

I'm no stranger to SE taking the easy path when it comes to jobs, but they've already put in way more work for BLU than any other job in the game. Not sure why they did it with the intention of not letting it be relevant.

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Like I said, having bad players missing some things already exists and is a bad thing. I don't know how "this is already a problem, so I'm OK with making it worse" is an acceptable argument.

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So what's the solution to making it so there's no bad players? Even if BLU was given every single spell for free just for unlocking the job, I guarantee there'd be awful BLUs who only spam Bad Breath and Thousand Needles at level 90, or spam single target spells in AoE situations, etc.

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I don't see a world where a high level without a job stone or an ice mage is more common than someone missing spells on BLU.

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And nobody will honestly care. Oh people will gripe about 'em but you know what the party said to the mudra-less Ninja? Not a damn thing. Heck I got whined at by the other party members for telling the Eukresian Diagnosis guy that, honestly and truly, he can just nuke.

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Originally Posted by Powercow

Oh no, I read it. Balancing out a good 99% of those skills wouldn't be especially hard and assuming it's impossible is just depressing to see. Have you no imagination? Plus, Scathe still exists, Summoner's Physick still exists -- SE has no problem with useless skills being on jobs.

Heck, if you end up with, say, 3 spells that effectively do the same thing with the same potency, the only real difference would be animation and spell effects, right? That sounds AWESOME. Aesthetic customization for a job, and all the work's already done in terms of art? Hell yeah dude that's sick. Imagine thinking, "okay I have a conal DoT spell, and I can choose between Bad Breath or Aqua Breath to really customize my animation." Or "alright for my line AOE, I have Drill Cannons or Glower, do I like shooting big robot hands or lightning eyes? Hm..." And, of course, those extra little effects like paralysis or petrify or whatever? Leave them on, but just like every other skill with those kinds of effects, they won't work on bosses or even most dungeon trash. Sure there might be a "better" spell for open-world content or FATE farming in that case but... who cares?

There, you only need to balance out the job having a certain number of skills, and if you get a new, say, single-target filler nuke, it's purely aesthetic. You could even have 2 BLUs in a party, both good players executing their job perfectly, and they could look wildly different. I dunno about you but to me that that sounds badass.

Oh, and since all the animations and the UI elements for customizing which spells to bring already exist, the majority of the work is already finished. It'd simply be a matter of consolidating which spells are in which category, and then even if a BLU doesn't have every conal-DoT spell, as long as they have just one of them they're perfectly functional.

So what's the solution to making it so there's no bad players? Even if BLU was given every single spell for free just for unlocking the job, I guarantee there'd be awful BLUs who only spam Bad Breath and Thousand Needles at level 90, or spam single target spells in AoE situations, etc.

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I don't understand the point. NuSummoner is controversial enough with its meaningless rotation of coloured gemshines/ruins, this just sounds like it will dissatisfy those currently content and those that want blue mage to be allowed in current raids. I think vfx are generally turned off on other people so this customisation will hardly be seen either.

The reason more work has been put into it than the other jobs is the same reason fisher is the only fleshed out DoL. Someone cared enough to make it into a minigame in its own right.

I also don't think you understand just how much stronger blue mage is with optimal play than water gun mage

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Originally Posted by Allegor

Moogle Tomestone Mage was a mistake and I'll die on that hill.

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It's quite a fun mistake which is interesting.