Quality of Life Changes for Blue Mage

Hello everyone, so recently I have completed my journey with Blue Mage (BLU) – obtained all spells and I wanted to share my experiences as well as provide suggestions on what adjustments I think BLU should receive. First off let me say that the job thematic appearance is perfect and fits exactly what a BLU should look and feel like – peculiar mages with a heroic theme. However, when it came to their execution I feel that it was a bit rushed and not much thought was given to certain circumstances that should have been addressed long ago.

Dependency Problems
Let’s start off with the most concerning issue; Blue Mages have a dependency problem. Unlike the other jobs in the game BLU has to hunt for their spells, it’s a part of their identity and understandable; however, you cannot expect a BLU to search for 3-7 other people to help them get spells without some type of compensation for their trouble. How can this be remedied? Here are some quality of life suggestions.

• Allow BLU (Caster DPS) to access the duty finder but with a limitation. In order for players to get paired with BLU in dungeons they must either be a BLU themselves, or they must enable a setting that reads “allows pairing with limited jobs”. By itself it won’t really motivate players to enable it, so what I propose is whenever a player has this option enabled and is paired with BLUs any non-BLU will automatically get the “adventure in need bonus” as a gift for partying with a BLU. If the BLU is removed from the party the bonus will become null to prevent abuse; however, if the BLU leaves the party from their own freewill everyone who was there before will still get the bonus. (I must also stress to make this option easily visible in the duty finder menu, for players that do not usually go into the settings.)

Survivability Problems
The second issue with BLU is their survivability. One of the greatest hurdles I had while getting my primal spells was in the Leviathan Extreme and Garuda Extreme battles. In order to survive their ultimate attacks I would depend on a healer to shield me while using anything defensive in my arsenal – Diamondback/Toad Oil, to survive the slaughter. Whether we like it or not the way to kill old primals has changed and we cannot expect players to do mechanics the old way because we decided to join a pony farm, or wondrous tale to attempt to even have a chance of getting our spells. But I’m sure many of you would say to then make a BLU learning party; however, the issue with that is nobody joins those since there is nothing in it for them, and a BLU party cannot tank the primals efficiently nor deal good damage. So how can this be remedied? Here are some quality of life suggestions.

• BLU HP should scale on par with what tanks HP was at the BLU cap. (Defense remains untouched)
• Mighty Guard: Remove damage penalty. New penalty is doubles MP cost of all spells. (To discourage them from always keeping it on. They aren’t tanks, but they should be able to solo efficiently.)

Damage Problems
The third issue with BLU is their single target damage. When it comes to AOE damage they definitely are one of the best; however, when it comes to single target damage they are really lacking compared to the other jobs of the same level cap. I think the potency of single target spells need to be reevaluated. Sure you can say to use a spell combo, but in many encounters you cannot use a spell combo because the boss/enemies are immune to the effect; In addition for the effort and time it takes to obtain primal spells they should be much more powerful. So here is what I think should be remedied with quality of life improvements.

• Sharpened Knife: Base potency increased to 200.
• Water Cannon: Base potency increased to 180.
• Off-Guard: Duration/Recast increased to 1 minute.
• Eruption: Base potency increased to 300. (Increase based on recast, effort, and spell that is shared with recast.)
• Feather Rain: Base potency increased to 280. (Increase based on recast, effort, and spell that is shared with recast.)
• Glass Dance: Base potency increased to 500. (Increase based on recast, effort, and spell that is shared with recast.)
• Mountain Buster: Base potency increased to 380. (Increase based on recast, effort, and spell that is shared with recast.)
• Shock Strike: Base Potency increased to 380. (Increase based on recast, effort, and spell that is shared with recast.)
• Veil of the Whorl: Duration Increased to 1 minute. (Increase based on recast, effort, and spell that is shared with recast.)

Obtainability Problems
Finally, the final issue I wanted to touch upon today and the one that I feel needs the most attention is the RNG of the spells we need to obtain to do our job. As we know the higher the rank of the spell the harder it is to earn; however, the chance to learn some of these spells is outright ridiculous for the amount of effort we have to put in. For example the primal skills took me 30+ kills with ramuh taking me 130+ kills. It shouldn’t be this hard to get something that is part of the job kit. Here is what I suggest:

• Rank 1 Spells: 100% chance of learning upon killing an enemy that uses the skill.
• Rank 2 Spells: 80% chance of learning upon killing an enemy that uses the skill.
• Rank 3 Spells: 60% chance of learning upon killing an enemy that uses the skill.
• Rank 4 Spells: 40% chance of learning upon killing an enemy that uses the skill.
• Rank 5 Spells: 20% chance of learning upon killing an enemy that uses the skill.

Thank you! For spending the time to read these suggestions.

To add on to skill acquisition from someone who also got all the spells.
I wouldn't mind the chance remaining the same if you had a progress bar that went up each time you saw and killed the foe with the spell. At least then you'd always feel like you were progressing, it shouldn't be something like 99 but say for Primal level spells 50 attempts, it took me 250 for Garuda, it just didn't feel rewarding when I finally got it, not getting it 49 times would be fine as I knew I'd get it on the 50th it would feel like progression filling the bar and getting it early through RNG would then actually feel good.

Being able to sustain better (tank) would certainly be nice~ :D. With the change of tank stance especially, and the fact they had some trouble tanking already, Mighty Guard feels not so mighty lol.

Another idea that added suitability that I liked was the idea that as you learned spells you basically increased your ilvl, this could be one of the ways blue mages could become quite strong but also encourage progression of all the spells. Such that rushing spells would mean groups are helpful but if you go in order of difficulty then you can solo the job the entire time. Level 50 Blue Mage with all abilities learned (from the level 50 grouping) would be able to toe to toe any of the level 50 content. Of course so long as you bring the certain skills and damage needed (can't fish slap the extreme primal to death), like an idea I had for a skill I envision blue needing for certain content is Molt which causes you to drop a molting of yourself that will temporarily take your damage up to a point as well as take any markers you currently have at casting.. meaning you could dodge some of those instant kill tank buster swapping mechanics (allowing smaller and solo groups to complete certain content not designed for them).

Personally for blue mage I'd love to see more of a sort of "glue" between spells, and a cadence evolve. Right now everything has a cast time and quite a number of spells have no interaction or a very rigid interaction (a lot of this also making many spells appear as different colors of the same potency, except when in the arena where elements matter). It'd be nice if there was something done to encourage builds and a variation of flow. Like one example was perhaps boost is a long cooldown spell that boosts the series of next spells (rather than a spell you cast after all your DoTs or any other spell with a potency larger than x), fire angon might trigger after other fire spells, water cannon is enhanced by using other water spells (like building up pressure concept), and more. Creating this feeling of building a card deck or special effects like you might feel when playing Diablo 3 and gearing your spells with runes and your equipment with specific legendaries that lend into each other.

Just something to make it feel more connected and at the same time make buffs feel less like:
https://i.imgur.com/gI2jLXK.gif

Which I'm worried will only increase as new spells are added (that are buffs), if there isn't something else to encourage builds and combos. Since as we get more buff related spells you might just see "+these 10 attack up buffs, and then cast your DoT for YUUUUGEE potency". lol. Sort of made a list of random interaction concepts: here.

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Originally Posted by BlitzAceRush

To add on to skill acquisition from someone who also got all the spells.
I wouldn't mind the chance remaining the same if you had a progress bar that went up each time you saw and killed the foe with the spell. At least then you'd always feel like you were progressing, it shouldn't be something like 99 but say for Primal level spells 50 attempts, it took me 250 for Garuda, it just didn't feel rewarding when I finally got it, not getting it 49 times would be fine as I knew I'd get it on the 50th it would feel like progression filling the bar and getting it early through RNG would then actually feel good.

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Long ago I thought it would be cool if each spell had EXP from watching it go off (with some randomness), but I didn't think about having to track every single spell to be honest lol..

At this point I think it could be fairly nice if perhaps every time you fail to learn a spell you gain a buff that increases the chance to learn the spell, said buff then doesn't need to be saved in the system per spell. Perhaps making it spell specific just in case SE is worried about you purposefully trying to fail X spell to boost Y (though that's sort of a niche case solution, I doubt that'd be a very effective and common answer to things lol). Also that when you fail to learn a dungeon spell the buff is increased more than if it was an open world. Such that your worst case for instanced content is a lot lower than open world (which is easier to hunt). May need to store the buff somewhere if there is no way to pass it to instanced content, or if SE wants it to remember when you log off, but if it can be pushed through instances then technically it only needs to be stored as a buff (fail = if no buff then buff else buff + 1). I'd really appreciate growing % learning because as anyone who has probably gathered in this game seeing "90% chance to gather" sometimes = 0% lol. I've had 5 90% fail in a row and I was wondering if I should go buy a lottery ticket XD.

I also think there could be some fun in having blue mage activate some sort of special blue mage sync skill which greatly increases the chance of learning spells but syncs them to the content / monster they're targeting.

Let blue Mage party with their squadron at least, it's fine if they want to exclude them from regular party finder but squadrons should not care, your the overpowered leader already. That would make only the primal spells require help from other players.

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Originally Posted by Blindheart

Let blue Mage party with their squadron at least, it's fine if they want to exclude them from regular party finder but squadrons should not care, your the overpowered leader already. That would make only the primal spells require help from other players.

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Agreed! I have to say that I was surprised that this wasn't on the list of QoL improvements. As a new player who just got their Blue Mage to 20 last week, that was the first thing I tried, and I was surprised that the option was completely unavailable. It's bad enough that duty roulette is unavailable to me, but I understood when my daughter explained how OP blue mage was in instances. Why this restriction, though?

Getting the Primal/Trial spells sucked. That's the simplest way I can describe it. As OP noted, you basically need to bribe people or hope someone is very bored to run the same encounter dozens of times with no promise you're any closer to actually learning what you want. Sometimes BLUs do the "trade" thing where they'll run a higher level job for them, then switch, repeating until spells are learned. In some cases, this is feasible, but it also sorta feels like you're cheesing the system since it's not really what I'd call "playing the job" when all you're doing is mooching.

Personally, I'd suggest the following:
1) Primal/Trial monsters have Totems added to their loot pool that will teach their spell if not learned normally. These could only drop if a BLU is present.
2) The consumables Primals drop can be traded for a Totem, say something like 5 per.
3) Better improve chances with multiple BLUs in the party, with 4+ being 100%.
4) Add Carnivale versions of the various Primal/Trial/Dungeon Boss encounters that aren't super gimmicky. Their main purpose should be learning.
5) Award Tomes to helpers in instances when a BLU learns a spell. Further link an achievement to this process that could reward something like a mount. Ultros, maybe?

The ability to queue if meeting specific spell combos or doing things with Squadrons are certainly issues, too. I'd also like a healing spell that isn't White Wind, but I imagine that's in the update pipe. A reraise with a decent recast wouldn't be out of the question, either. I do agree that Garuda and Leviathan are problematic if skipping mechanics and not bringing a healer. I'd lump Ifrit in here too, but fortunately you can solo Eruption on normal. Having to wait so long for Shiva to go to bow mode is also not something you can expect randos to be patient with.

Honestly, there's not really anything about BLU that I see that would mandate it remain a limited job in the future. If they don't want us petrifying or dooming something, then by all means, just make those mobs immune like so many seem to be with paralyze.

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Originally Posted by Saidosha

4) Add Carnivale versions of the various Primal/Trial/Dungeon Boss encounters that aren't super gimmicky. Their main purpose should be learning.

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This would be ideal, but also funny to imagine. Here's Ul'dah inviting a number of Ixal into the city to summon Garuda for the entertainment of an audience.

Or just give us a BLU that can play like every other job.

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Originally Posted by BubblyBoar

Or just give us a BLU that can play like every other job.

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And there it is.

I think letting BLU into DF even with restrictions is too much.

What it needs is Squadron + Potd as soon as the lvl goes up to 60.
Also it needs potency buffs for all its spells + higher potency single target. I´m talking about buffs of 200%.
Tank stance needs adjustments too.

Also the primal spells suck.
I feel the drop rate should be the other way
Primal spells (extreme): super high drop rate 70% +
Primal spells (hard mode): high drop rate 40 % +
Dungeons: high drop rate 40% + (if needed for quests 100%)
Open world: low drop rate 5 -10 %

Im still looking forward to 5.1 and the new spells and increased lvl cap.
Maybe i will get my missing spells (levi + shiva) with lvl 60. (still hoping for droprate increase)