Blue Mage Content

Blue mage is conceptually one of the coolest classes in the game and can be a lot of fun to play, but it feels like there isn't much reason to play it about a month after an update.

What kind of content would you like to see to give blue mage more replayability?

I know a lot of this is pie in the sky and much has probably been said before, but its fun to brainstorm and who knows, maybe we'll get lucky and inspire someone at Square.

Here are some thoughts I had:

A Blue Mage Exclusive Variant Dungeon

Blue mage has more potential for interacting with variant dungeon environments than any other class by far. Imagine paths that are unlocked by hydro pulling a tree down across a gap, shock striking a pole to charge an elevator, bomb tossing a cracked wall to reveal a hidden hallway, using sea shanty to fill a pond and raise lilies to walk across. The possibilities are endless.

Since Dawntrail takes place in Tural, it would be a perfect opportunity to expand the lore of Blue Mages and the Whalaqee tribe. Each path could have unique monsters with skills you can learn, and bosses at the end of the path can drop Whalaqee Totems.

A Blue Mage Exclusive Deep Dungeon

I think its unlikely we'll see blue mages in the existing deep dungeons, it would be too difficult to balance, but if a deep dungeon was made specifically with them in mind, I think that could introduce a lot of interesting challenges.

There could even be exclusive pomanders that interact with blue mage spells in unique ways, thus incentivizing doing multiple runs with a variety of skills and load outs. Maybe there could be a mode where you start with water gun and have to acquire spells as you go deeper.

The rewards for the deep dungeon could be exclusive blue mounts, minions and glamours. Its been a long time since we got the Morbol Mount, this would be a perfect opportunity to add more. We could also get more flashy blue mage weapons and outfits. I for one thing not having Titan's 4-wheeler from Sepulture be a mount was a real wasted opportunity.

Blue Mage Exclusive Gold Saucer Games

With some of the skills we have as blue mages, there is a lot of potential for fun gold saucer activities. Think something in the vein of Mario Party. Imagine an arena split into four zones, each player has a totem in their zone, there is a giant bomb monster in the middle that you can move with knockback and pull abilities, as the bomb takes damage it gets bigger and bigger until it explodes, then another drops in the center. Each player protects their totem while trying to destroy the others.

Or how about this, we all love doing massive flash burst damage with blue mage. What about a mode where you're on a line, and slowly monsters start coming towards you and you have to kill them before they reach your zone. Over time more and more monsters start coming at you and you get higher rewards the longer you're able to survive?

Another fun option would be an obstacle course race. Players could compete to see who can finish with better times or taking the least damage from obstacles. There are also skills like J-Kick or Loom that could be very fun for moving around obstacles, maybe a well timed Diamondback to reduce the damage you finish with would be worth the loss of mobility. The speed runs would be very fun to watch.

Blue Mage Gear that can interact with skills

Similar to how aetheric mimicry changes the way skills work, what if content could drop blue gear that interacted with blue spells when equipped. Here are some ideas:

• Eden Ramuh could drop a staff that adds a paralyze effect to the splash damage from shock strike.
• Ravana could drop a chest piece with insect wings, it could add a light regen to exuviation.
• Titania could drop a chest piece with fairy wings, it could add a movement speed increase to anyone hit by to exuviation when not in combat.
• There are multiple cactuar monsters that drop cactuar parts. Maybe they could be used to craft a chest piece that damages enemies who hit you when using cactguard.

Items like these would give a lot of incentives to run this content as a blue and make each blue feel a bit more unique, especially if the items can only drop in synched full blue parties. Plus the potential visuals for some of these is great.

Blue Mage Quality of Life

I bet we can all think of a couple changes that would make a huge difference in quality of life when playing Blue. Here are some that come to mind.

• Being able to retry/restart a level in the masked carnival without having to leave the instance. If you're going for an achievement and fail, its a real pain to start over.
• A dedicated category in the party finder for blue content. That way we don't have to scan the descriptions.
• Aetheric mimicry changing your role for the purposes of filling a party finder slot.
• Aetheric mimicry not turning off unless you have a valid target selected. I'm sure we've all accidentally turned off our mimicry mid content and its awful
• I'm sure this has been said a million times, but a blue mage limit break would be amazing, especially as final sting has become less relevant with higher level content. We could even have the limit break be different based on what mimicry you're running. Its a real bummer watching the limit gauge fill up on blue content knowing its going to waste.

If you edit your first post you won't have the character count limitation.

I'm all for more blue mage content, it's a lot of fun!

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Originally Posted by Canadane

If you edit your first post you won't have the character count limitation.

I'm all for more blue mage content, it's a lot of fun!

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Good to know, thank you :)

I don't disagree with the ideas pitched, but I think they could start simpler and just allow BLU to do all the dang battle content.

Memoria Misera Extreme not being enterable by BLU seems very strange, and I don't see why they don't have achievements for non-endboss savage encounters for BLU.

Likewise, BLU Ultimates should exist. Players don't care if they maybe can't be completed by design because of lack of access to LB, they'll figure something out if they can. All SE needs to do is prevent parties with BLU from getting the rewards, and add a separate reward for full BLU or something. Same for Deep Dungeons and Field Explorations. Who cares? It's all old anyways, just apply the same 'can't enter auto matching queues as BLU' or something if separating BLUs from players that would prefer not to play with them is an issue.

BLU literally existing breathes life into old, dead content. Please allow us to play that content with BLU if we choose.

A couple more ideas.

Blue Exclusive Fashion Accessories and Barding

We all know that glam is the true endgame, the fact that blue mages mimic monsters offer some unique opportunities for monster glams and some great chances to incentivize people to play things like old fates.

Similar to the Ixion fate, we could have fates that have a chance to drop components if you're a blue mage based on how well you do.

For example:

• Morbol Notorious monster fate. This could drop components for a morbol tentacle fasion accessory or barding. Animated morbol tentacles could be perfect for some glams.
• Any fate involing Moogles. This could drop components for a moogle pom and/or wings.
• Magitek Colossus Notorius Monster. This could drop components for colossus armor glams or maybe even a colossus mount. Its a classic Final Fantasy monster that looks really cool.

Blue Mage Fate Log

The Blue Log for dungeons was an awesome addition, it provides a nice incentive to do dungeon runs as a blue. We could do the same thing for fates, require that someone get gold as a blue to prevent people from doing one hit and running.

Milestones in the log can unlock titles, glams, minions etc.... It would give a nice incentive to do fate trains as a blue. Some of the older fates are basically abandoned right now.

Some ideas that I have had in the past that I think would be cool:

Omega + Eden Mount
Please.

Just let us into expedition content
Eureka and Bozja would both be awesome playgrounds for BLU. I know that balancing would be difficult or even impossible, but the zones are already not balanced well.. so I think it'd be fine. Additionally, Bozja especially is quite lacking in activity overall but if we allowed BLU enthusiasts in it would bring a lot of activity! And on this note..

Ultimates
Seriously, just let us do them. How can there be concerns about balance when GNB/DNC/SMN are allowed to do the level 70 Ultimates? UCOB has been 7 manned, cleared with all tanks, cleared with 100+ deaths.. the balance and prestige are already ruined. We already have the ability to check if a party is fully BLU, so just make a separate achievement and reward for 8 BLU and only reward the original achievement and totem if a group has 0 BLU. Even better just disallow entering the duty unless you have 0 BLU or 8 BLU.

Blue Mage Battle Royale
I had this idea a long time ago. It's basically a generic battle royale-style game with all BLUs. Everyone starts with Water Cannon and there are random (weak) monsters from which you can learn other abilities. Defeating another BLU gives you their spells, and so on. It's been mentioned as something the dev team had thought of as well, so I'm high on hopium that it will happen eventually. Obviously this would involve a monstrous amount of development work, though.

Collaborative Masked Carnivale Duties
These would need to be strictly optional, but imagine a boss-rush where you need to handle the boss levels either simultaneously (similar to Utimates) or just one after another. If the former, allowing for 2-4 BLUs to do it together would be great.

More interesting combat loop
Right now we Moon Flute to dump all our high potency spells and then mostly spam a filler spell for 2 minutes. It would be interesting to add more variety. I had some ideas in this video, but the TL;DW is that I'd like for there to be a reason for BLUs in a party to take different spells from one another.

Obviously I don't expect a ton of dev time/effort to go into making brand new things, but it feels like there is some obvious low-hanging fruit here for us.

I've thought about some things to improve or benefit blue a lot. I've even contemplated making a thread like this for a while. Very happy to see someone else took the initiative on it.
So for my ideas:

The most important thing make achievements for Odin, Varis, and WoL to keep that content alive. If nothing else gets changed for blue mage Square please fix this. The fact they didn't make a method for clearing as all blue on WOL was a terrible mistake and a horrible precedent. Memoria has no good reason for blues being excluded. Right now it looks like the exclusion is because its tied to the Bozja quest line but that's horribly stupid seeing as blue mage can't even do the MSQ so we already have to unlock everything on a different class. I feel players are smart enough to figure out doing Memoria doesn't mean we can go into Bozja especially when trying to queue will exclude them anyways so really why was this decision made? All it does is keep Memoria dead outside of the occasional TT farm. Odin is the same way. Blue's revolving around keeping those old EX's alive by requiring no echo is something you need to take advantage of.

Blue deep dungeon like you mentioned. Though I envision just a bit differently. Since we blue mages have so many filler spells but they are all rendered pretty useless for blue content due to the fact sonic boom exists I think a deep dungeon where each level you get a random blue spell would be very fun and fit quite nicely into the roguelike nature of deep dungeons.

EX and Raid staffs - This one I really am baffled is not a thing. Every class except ours gets weapons from bosses and they will even go back a certain amount for new classes to get weapons. Our class has 0 stats related to weapons so there's no balancing needed so it should be a lot easier to add blue mage staffs to the weapon coffers. And since a big part of the experience for blue is getting those ex and raid achievements this would further incentivize people to try them as blue. Also just a real crime every update we only get 2 weapons.

A blue relic weapon - So right now the blue mage experience is pretty much the carnivale, the achievements, and the blue mage log. Now these are really fun to do but some added rewards to further make doing them is clearly a theme I am trying to go for. And I feel a relic weapon where you complete the steps through getting items from doing carnivale stages, purchased from using allied seals, unlocked from filling out the log, and special items for doing the exs and raids as blue to encourage going back and doing them would be really beneficial to the class. And a nice shiny weapon to match the other classes would be appreciated.

Blue Ultimates - seriously please let blues into ults. Blue is the most fun class and I want to see what sort of wild and silly shenanigans we can do in them. Its not like we can do the current ones anyways so the newest ults stay pristine or whatever and you can even prevent totems dropping if a blue is in the party to try and keep the xenolocking thing blue revolves around. Though please give us a blue ultimate weapon. Seriously you guys slack on blue glam choices. I do get that ultimates are very tightly designed experiences of which blues were not factored in nor should they be but at the same time there is 0 reason to not give them the full blue mage party achievement treatment. Yoshi P I am begging you for this.

Blue DRS - I know blues can't do Bozja and they don't fit well with the exploratory content blah blah blah. But I don't care to go into Eureka or Bozja with Blue, though getting to do BA with blue would be fun, we don't need to be let in. However DRS is queuable content. And its hard content. I think being able to do full blue runs with a Mightier than the Queen achievement after would be so sick. And the whole point of this class is to have fun. Make blue not be able to use actions to keep the xenolock and then let blues figure out the rest. Just let us in man.

And finally change the blue update period - So right now we get updated to the previous expansion at around X.45 of the current expansion. This is fine but I propose we change it to X.55 for the update to the current expansion. I know there's all this nonsense about blue being way too strong and while that is true at 60 and below the curve of power is getting closer and closer to regular classes. Now with .55 the current expansion is done. There's nothing else but waiting till the next expansion and a blue update to make all the content you just made fresh again for that down time would be appreciated. It would also just be nice to have a short period where we are on the same level. Where blues can play with their friends on regular jobs on current stuff. Just a little grace period where the entire community is together before the new expansion starts. It would just be fun and the tiers for all the hard content has already been cleared by this point so there's no blue wrecking the difficulty or whatever silly nonsense. It would be a nice way to have fun and send out the current expansion. Plus having to wait to the expansion after to go to the New World with the most New World class is just so freaking lame.

And then some misc things I want. Let blues into variants with the EW update. If we get excluded that will be so stupid, give us spell in waiting really that was like the ShB spell what a crime we didn't get it, another blue mage savage mount like come on that was a good reward for clearing the raid and the every other update would have been a good model for giving us mounts, more than one stage in the carnivale per update I think 5 would be a good amount with the last one being a boss as per usual, some way to set blue mimic type in pf without bosses recognizing them as roles - I realize this may be impossible but would be so nice for making blue parties it would kill the awkward silence phase of trying to see who will tank or heal when making a party with all the slots blue and eliminate non blues joining with the join as role and swap method. But of course blue parties remixing fights due to us being all one role is a crucial part of the experience so I would rather not have this if the only way is to make mimic be recognized as a role. And lastly blue mage lb would be nice. I think level 1 being caster lb, level 2 being healer lb, and level 3 being tank lb would be a cool and thematic way to give blues an lb. We can do everything after all.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Galt

I had some ideas in this video, but the TL;DW is that I'd like for there to be a reason for BLUs in a party to take different spells from one another.

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Some great ideas here.

I would love to see characters like Quina, Strago and Kimahri. We could have some really fun stories and unique glams like Stragos cape. The Gogo dance should absolutely be an emote you unlock by playing blue, I love that idea.

A large part of the fun of blue mage is how different it is than other classes, so I want to try to preserve that with limit break ideas. Here is my attempt at that.

I think for level 1 and level 2 limit breaks, we can just do the standard tank, healer, spellcaster limit breaks, there isn't much to that on other classes either, but I think when you hit level three it should be different.

Which one is used would be dependent on your aetheric mimicry.

Tank

Health can't fall below 1% for period of time. This would have a tanky effect, and interact with spells like Wild Rage and Revenge Blast. Blue Mage has diamondback to tank attacks, but this would allow the party to keep DPS up and maintain movement to do fight mechanics.

Healer

Reraise would be a good fit for blue mage. Final sting becomes less useful with each level cap increase, a reraise would help keep party members up overall, and even allow us to pull of a final sting and keep going.

DPS

Guaranteed direct critical hits for X period of time or for X attacks. This would be a nice burst of damage and is basically like a moon flute without the sickness after.