Quote Originally Posted by Aegis View Post
Fun.
There's a point where balance > misguided notions of "fun". Utsusemi was "fun" but also borked encounter design on several levels. Boss soloing was "fun" but also had lasting repercussions for the jobs involved (RDM in particular has been treated as a leper because of it when it comes to changes that involve making it something that's not a cure/refresh/haste-bot). That list also goes on and on.

I have nothing against fun and ideally a game should be fun and balanced, but balance supercedes your misguided notion of "fun" because said misguided notion of "fun" has lasting effects on the game as a whole.

Quote Originally Posted by Nalien View Post
So were most in XI, but people seem to praise Blue Mage there. For the most part I'd say the monster skills in this game and XI are mostly the same... We have spiders with a move that inflicts slow, bats that can drain HP, plants with knock back... Actually, we've got quite a few useful monster abilities; slugs can inflict Pacification, for example (yes that isn't useful at endgame, but regular dungeons and PvP it is amazing, having it not tied to blocking even more so). We've got enemies that can inflict status effects like Dropsy. There are plenty of enemy moves which could have a purpose on Blue Mage.

I'm not going to list them all, but whenever I'm playing I'm frequently going "That would be good for Blue Mage". There are a lot of monster skills that do a lot of different things, there is plenty for Blue Mage to pick from; they're only bland in animation IMO.
I agree. Blue Magic in general is pretty bland, even looking at older FFs where they were basically elemental spells with different names/microscopic twists or extremely gimmicky.