My idea on how to fix BLU

I've been thinking about how BLU could be fairly easily reworked into a real class. Sure there'd be work involved in re-balancing the skills to fit in with our other classes, but I think the bigger problem is how to get it to the point where figuring out what the skills do becomes the only remaining issue.

For the most part, I've tried to come up with suggestions that would mostly rely on mechanisms already found in other places within the game. With the exception of my suggestions for the blue spell book and the masked carnivale, I wouldn't imagine most of this would require many changes to the core of the game instead shifting most of the work to creating a small set of base skills for BLU to use in normal content. Since blue spell book and masked carnivale wouldn't be needed for normal content, it would be ok to remove them from the game temporarily until they could be re-worked and added back in later.

Change the BLU weapons we already have to have stats similar to the aetheryte earrings and have them cap out at level 60 (ilvl 250). This way no work has to be done to make a bunch of BLU weapons for leveling it from 1-60 and just 60-70 weapons would need to be made (or just wait until Shadow Bringers, and do this for 1-70 and 70-80 instead).

Make the chance to learn a skill be 100% always. Want to make sure people have the skills for their rotation? Don't lock it behind any RNG. While you're at it, remove the restriction that the BLU must be alive.

Learning skills from primals certainly seems neat, but it's horribly impractical for progression. Why? Attempting to enter end game content to learn a skill that should potentially be part of your rotation would always put you at a disadvantage to BLUs repeating that same content. Let main BLU skill learning happen from 3 sources: overworld mobs, leveling dungeon bosses/mobs, and BLU quests (honestly, some of the earlier SMN quests could be used as templates for how BLUs gain primal skills).

Scale back on the total number of BLU skills. It's unrealistic to expect any kind of reasonable balance of ~200 (or whatever it is I've heard planned) skills for one class when you can't even bring but 24 of them max anyway. Honestly, to make BLU not be completely out of whack, it needs to be able to learn only exactly all the skills it will ultimately end up with and have no ability to customize them (whatever other customization we've ever had before has been taken away: attribute points, cross-class skills, and even not having limited slots for role skills anymore).

Pick one role and stick with it to have the skills work primarily for. Personally, I'd love to see BLU developed into a tank since a mage tank sounds quite interesting; however, I wouldn't be opposed to another caster DPS. (monsters don't tend to use a whole lot of healing skills, so it'd be a big stretch to try to turn BLU into a full healer)

Make the job quests require all the relevant skills up to that point to even start the quest. Specifically, the last job quest should require a BLU to have all of their spells learned (as of the whatever the current expansion is at that time). This shouldn't pose a problem for players in the context of my other suggestions because they will have likely picked up the dungeon runs via leveling roulette or running dungeons manually, and hunting the needed overworld mobs is not much different from the 2.0 hunt logs except that you'd only need a single kill of the target mob (and please, make sure you tell players exactly where to find those mobs).

Make BLU exp gain work exactly like other classes. Since they'd then be able to use leveling roulette and DF, I don't think this will be a problem.

Develop a PvP skillset so that BLU can participate in PvP to earn exp from there as well like normal classes.

Add level requirements to all BLU main skills. This will allow BLU to be balanced similar to other jobs when level synced and prevent abuse of BLU attempting to learn and then use high level skills while under-leveled.

Wiping all learned skills would probably be necessary to implement this, although I don't think a level wipe would also need to happen as the effort to level up didn't feel particularly more or less as I got my alt up to 50. If anything, it was a bit slower due to the speed bump of dealing with RNG learning of certain skills as I was already in the 40s by the time the job-quest skills were changed to 100% learn rate meaning I only benefited in that change only with respect to Glower by that point. Wiping BLU job quest completion would also be necessary due to the quest rework required to work in the new skills learned via job quests.

So, basically we'd get a BLU with stat scaling similar to other classes, still learns skills from monsters, has a set skill set to form a real rotation from, and the ability to participate in all content while also level syncing similarly to other jobs.

Now I know such a small skill set relative to the current one would basically break the concept behind the masked carnivale and the blue spell book. In the short term, I'd recommend removing them Diadem-style for a re-work. For that, I'd suggest:
The blue spell book contains unique spells not part of the main skills of BLU. As a tradeoff, however, they can only be used overworld, unsynced instances (if it isn't a techincal problem to restrict it only to unsynced, otherwise, no blue spell book spells in DF at all), and in masked carnivale. This is a great place to bring in iconic, but potentially difficult to balance skills like white wind, 1000 needles, self destruct, transfusion, and level 5 death/petrify/etc.

Reduce the number of selectable skills from 24 to 12 (or 10, similar to role abilities). As a tradeoff, the main class skills all remain usable in masked carnivale. This would allow for BLUs to maintain a base level of effectiveness while still mixing in any gimmicks meant to be used in the masked carnivale. The reduction is primarily meant to make this an add-on to the main skills while also preventing hotbar overload.

Since the blue spell book would not be required for normal DF content, if you absolutely felt like these skills had to be locked behind RNG, it'd be acceptable (though still not desired).

Likewise, any primal skills meant for the blue spell book would also be acceptable to be learn-able through hard/ex primals due to the fact that even if learned they'd be of no use in there (except maybe when unsynced).

Unlike the main skills, blue spell book skills would not have level requirements and therefore would not be affected by level syncs making them always usable for FATEs.

With that, the masked carnivale and it's feel largely remain, and BLU gets to do pretty much everything it already does in the overworld by bringing in these fun, but imbalanced skills.

In summary, we'd have:
BLU learning skills from monsters? YES
BLU able to participate in all DF content? YES
BLU can be balanced with other classes in DF content? YES
BLU gets to use balance-breaking iconic spells? YES, but limited in the sense that they can't be used in normal DF content.
BLU can be a player's main class? YES

These changes make too much sense. So I doubht they're going to really follow them.

Jokes aside, I think this approach would definitely work but it requires them to do quite a lot of stuff. Although, I don't think they'd have to remove that many spells, reworking some abilities would be more feasible. I would suggest adding 1000 Needles to the scaling list so it doesn't destroy things.
When it comes to the self-destruct spells, removing them would be fine, but also limiting one self destruct per party instance, as well as (in party content) making it impossible to resurrect the player during a fight, so it can't be abused.

In my opinion, considering its roots, BLU would make sense as a melee mage. It was possible to play it that way in FFXI, and as others have stated, to make it work the opposite Red Mage would, with mostly dpsing in melee while occasionally using spells that could be used in ranged, perhaps with a rotation in mind.

I have to state once again though, that having a system like this that would work somewhat like it does in GW2, would require some serious effort. While I'd be more in favour of having a BLU that could work everywhere without having this duality, since it would probably require too much time from SE thus making it unlikely, as long as BLU can work like the other jobs I'm on board.

They have yet to implement anything else, and hopefully they won't continue with the "limited job" shenanigans. It is much easier to balance BLU than people make it out to be, and this is one way they could do it IF they're willing to put in the effort.
Hopefully we'll be able to secure justice for BLU, but for now we simply need to show support around the forums and so on.

the chance to get spells are fine the only issue is the scaling

also if it was 100 percent it wouldn't be worth playing blue mage. ....

blue is suppose 2 have only 25 percent chance 2 learn spells.. if you cant deal with farming abilitys you have no right 2 play a blue mage

25% chance means one in four runs of whatever duty will net you the spells.

There is absolutely no way it is a 25% chance to learn any non-guaranteed spell.

Quote:

Originally Posted by TaiyoShikasu

25% chance means one in four runs of whatever duty will net you the spells.

There is absolutely no way it is a 25% chance to learn any non-guaranteed spell.

No kidding. I helped an FC member farm ponies from scratch (even unsynced, if you don't have a healer, BLUs white wind can help keep a BLM alive that's tanking the EX primals). She's now the proud owner of the full set of ponies, and I still have exactly 0 primal spells for my alt. Basically, when I'm in Limsa on my main and I pass by the NPC to start the BLU quest, I give a nasty look and move on ASAP.

Ah, well, time for BLU to go gather dust in the corner by itself. There's no way it's going to get attention and fixed with all the drama about gender locks and healer disappointments.

At the very least, I never planned on maining BLU, though I feel for people who want to main it. I feel it's a missed opportunity for a melee-magic tank personally since that would have given us a really unique play style.