Please reconsider stance on blue mage

[Brine_Gildchaff]

It's because during the whole 1.0 > ARR transition they "simplified" too much. The Elemental Wheel refers to not just having x and y elements but how they behaved between players and enemies, which, as you said [...] Affinities always existed, but they got rid of it for ARR for a more "simpler play."

It's not about "simplicity", and I wish people would stop using that ancient canard. Affinities were removed because if they weren't, nobody would EVER let a black mage play in their party against Ifrit, or Ramuh for that matter. And on the flip side nobody BUT black mages would be allowed in parties to fight, say, Shiva. The problem is that if you make affinities, as they existed in previous titles, they will cause black mages to do wildly varying damage against various bosses and the community of this game would react even more absurdly than when the potato-tank strat for Ramuh was discovered, or how they did to 2.0 WAR.

[faris]

That quote's ridiculous. Some of the best DDs in XI were blue mages, and they fit into party settings perfectly. I understand that 11's system of only setting a few spells at a time for active use (plus traits) would be a little hard to implement into XIV, but that as a reason would be far better than what's stated. The quote above (at least to me) sounds like "We have no way of forcing blue mages to be good ones by questing all their spells, so the answer's no." which is pathetic to the extreme tbh. I know this is a casual mmo, but that really is ridic.

EDIT: is anyone else also really insulted whoever said that assumes that keeping track of spells PLUS gear is somehow beyond us as players? I'm a BLU from XI, and I feel so insulted rn it's unbelievable.

[Magis]

snip

BLMs having only 1 main damage spell and one mp regen spell is the "simplification" Tupsi is talking about. This in itself killed the elemental wheel. The two go both hand-in-hand. Also if the game expanded more on making various damage dealing classes unique in their own way, you'd have more reasons to bring something else over BLMs. This appears to an extent in XIV where BRDs are sought after for their buffing capabilities, and melee DPS are used for their powerful one mob limit break (even required for things like Super Slug in T6).

[Zarzak]

..which is why we should believe them when they say they would just ruin the BLU if they put it in this game...

You're not very good at the whole context thing are you.

Talraen is arguing with the people who say that like BLM lacking elemental wheel BLU would be fucked by saying that BLM DOES have elemental wheel (does not)

It's not about "simplicity", and I wish people would stop using that ancient canard. Affinities were removed because if they weren't, nobody would EVER let a black mage play in their party against Ifrit, or Ramuh for that matter. And on the flip side nobody BUT black mages would be allowed in parties to fight, say, Shiva. The problem is that if you make affinities, as they existed in previous titles, they will cause black mages to do wildly varying damage against various bosses and the community of this game would react even more absurdly than when the potato-tank strat for Ramuh was discovered, or how they did to 2.0 WAR.

How does this even make sense to you?

"Ifrit? BLMs load up your ice nukes"

"shiva? BLMS load up your fire nukes"

Worked perfectly fine in EQ and XI... Or you know... every FF game ever. "its a ice elemental? Burn it with fire!!!"

Hell EQ we had SOME (not all) mobs who worked exactly like FF.. Aka if you hit it with fire you could actually HEAL it. Wasn't hard.

[ApolloGenX]

You're not very good at the whole context thing are you.

Talraen is arguing with the people who say that like BLM lacking elemental wheel BLU would be fu

I wasn't referring to his post. I was agreeing with your last statement about the implementation of BLMS... and that is why I trust them when they say they would implement it terribly. The game is too watered down for any kind of interesting classes.

[Zarzak]

I wasn't referring to his post. I was agreeing with your last statement about the implementation of BLMS... and that is why I trust them when they say they would implement it terribly. The game is too watered down for any kind of interesting classes.

It is pretty old now but did you see the player made concept for fencer/red mage a while back? Would never happen but that would be the only way to keep their limited skill set and make a class work. Which is too complicated so they will not do it because... THINK OF THE NEW PLAYERS IN 5.0!!

[LineageRazor]

How does this even make sense to you?

"Ifrit? BLMs load up your ice nukes"

"shiva? BLMS load up your fire nukes"

You pretty much illustrated exactly why elemental resistances were removed from the game. You just left out one line:

"leviathan? Wait, we don't have any BLMs. Screw you, guys, I'm dropping and requeueing until I get in a party that has a BLM" /ragequit

To be honest, though, I don't LIKE the fact that elemental resistances were removed. They've been a core part of FF for a long time, and outright removing them was a lazy, lazy move. It would have been better to load up more jobs with element-based moves (no reason Rage of Halone can't be ice-based, for instance) so that it doesn't always boil down to "elemental fight? Must have BLM!"

It would also be wise to make the bonuses granted by elemental weakness relatively minor so that you don't feel like a party is hopeless if it doesn't exploit it - FFXI did this fairly well; creatures with elemental weaknesses usually didn't take extra damage from those spells, but instead were less likely to resist them and take half damage. A BLM with top-of-the-line gear wouldn't care about elemental resistance (cast Thunder V FOREVER!!!), but a less-optimally-geared BLM could still keep his numbers reasonably high by exploiting that weakness to make sure his spells didn't get halved, even if those spells weren't quite as powerful.

[Velhart]

How does this even make sense to you?

"Ifrit? BLMs load up your ice nukes"

"shiva? BLMS load up your fire nukes"

Worked perfectly fine in EQ and XI... Or you know... every FF game ever. "its a ice elemental? Burn it with fire!!!"

Hell EQ we had SOME (not all) mobs who worked exactly like FF.. Aka if you hit it with fire you could actually HEAL it. Wasn't hard.

Shiva party, looking for more. BLM's only with ilvl120+ gear, spam Fire strat.

And then 8-9 other PF groups with the same exact message. Balance is quite a thing.

[Giantbane]

YHow does this even make sense to you?

"Ifrit? BLMs load up your ice nukes"

"shiva? BLMS load up your fire nukes"

Worked perfectly fine in EQ and XI... Or you know... every FF game ever. "its a ice elemental? Burn it with fire!!!"

Hell EQ we had SOME (not all) mobs who worked exactly like FF.. Aka if you hit it with fire you could actually HEAL it. Wasn't hard.

The problem is that it's pointless. You can implement it two ways.

One, where every skill on the elemental wheel boils down to "generic nuke with elemental property". They all operate the same way and have the same exact damage, you just need to change spells depending on what you're casting at. At this point, you're just changing the nuke depending on the target which doesn't represent a whole lot of choice nor does it make the class very interesting.

The second is where each skill is different. The problem with this approach in an MMO is that you'll have certain classes of spells that work better than others. This causes the class' performance to vary wildly based on what the vulnerability of the target is. You'll get into situations where BLMs become too weak while fighting targets that are not vulnerable or immune to their best spells. These fights, nobody will want a BLM because they suck. And/or you'll have fights where the target is vulnerable to their best spells and then people only want to bring BLMs to those fights because they're too good. Neither of those situations are ideal in an MMO, where every job should have a role in any fight.

The astral/umbral cycle does away with all that nonsense and replaces it with a somewhat more interesting rotation than the "Spam X against Y" that you end up with in either of those two scenarios. While it is a little weird to be spamming fire against Ifrit, it works better for the game and is a good thing on the whole.

[ariaandkia]

While having a blue mage as a class would be great (not sure if we are even on the same discussion anymore, this was already on page 9 by the time I saw it), the community as it is now would not be able to handle it.

We already have people who have a hard time using their classes and there are plenty of people who refuse to play with a group that doesn't have specific classes. (To be fair to people, I somewhat am in that boat for certain things because it is so rare for a party to do well with say... Levi farming with 2 WHM, 2 WAR, and 4 BRD at min iLv, but it is less that I refuse to do it without a specific class and more of that I refuse to do it with specific combinations that regularly fail (when your DPS is struggling with max echo without your healers switching to DPS...)).

And often times, people expect people to do fairly exact roles. For example, one time I was using a very strong DPS rotation. My party almost kicked me because I wasn't using the 'standard' rotation. Even though my rotation did more damage. They pretty much gave me the: 'use the standard or we kick you' choice. After a while, I started using the standard not because it was better but because after a 4 hour queue, I don't want to get kicked. Even if it means that the party will wipe a few times.

Another time, I was healing as a solo healer in Levi. Party got mad at me for not DPSing and then got mad at me for letting people die when I did DPS. (They got hit by levi's dives, but it was apparently my fault for not healing them through it-the reason I wasn't DPSing was so that I could keep the party's hp up enough to survive dives) A few tries later, I ended up taking a dive trying to keep the party alive because there was that much damage going out to the party that I had to finish the heal and ended up getting knocked off. I got kicked and blacklisted. Then got blacklisted by someone who wasn't even there because they had heard that I died in Levi.

In short, right now, the community hates it when you don't play exactly how they want you to. Blue mages would not do well in our current community scenario.