Please reconsider stance on blue mage

[Alukah]

Thats crazy. Cause I swore I had multiple options when I was leveling arcanist.

I UNDERSTAND THAT FFXIV IS NOT FFXI. But please understand, that when discussing something completely theoretical, it makes sense to reference the only other iteration of a particular class/job in an MMO setting.

Not when referencing XI means your suggestion could be ignored by the devs, as they don't want to make this MMO a copy of XI.

A DPS blue mage won't be any less of a blue mage than XI's, it would just be a different kind of blue mage, just like XI's was different from the classical blue mage.

[LineageRazor]

It's all very nice to say "Stop taking inspiration from XI", but you're not exactly offering an alternative to how Blue Mage could work in this game.

Actually, I did, in this very thread even.

You probably won't like it much, though, as, indeed, it IS pretty much just a glorified nuker with a few debuff spells tossed in. Quite similar to past iterations of BLUs in Final Fantasy. To be honest, though, even BLM in this game is not like BLM; the way BLM operates is rather different than BLMs in previous final fantasies, including FFXI, with its occilation between Astral Fire and Umbral Ice. If BLU was a straight nuker, it'd already be quite different from both BLM and SMN, the other two magic damage jobs.

As for the monster wheel being effective in FFXI, in certain cases it was godly. I remember the fun back in the initial days of Abyssea when BLUs discovered that Regurgitation was fully effective on Itzpapalotl, the Wamoura NM in Abyssea - Attohwa. This spell was water aspected (countering Itzpapalotl's Fire nature) and Lizard family (countering Itzpapalotl's Insect family). Because of this, it was able to consistently Bind the monster. A trio of BLU's spamming Regurgitation and occasionally healing one another from the fire nukes the mob cast could bring down a mob that occasionally gave full alliances trouble.

More recently, BLUs self-skillchaining using Amorphic Spikes is crazy good against the Naakual Hurkan. Amorphic Spikes is a Piercing attack, which is strong against birds of all kinds, and also Amorph family, also strong against birds.

Remember, too, that FFXIV USED to have monster families, and class abilities that could exploit that. Marauder used to have an ability called Trunk Splitter, which did extra damage against plant mobs, for example. Those abilities, along with the elemental wheel, were ripped out with the upgrade (sidegrade? downgrade?) to ARR to avoid imbalance. No, suggesting SE add monster corralation back into the game is a good way to get your BLU idea tossed into the circular file post-haste.

[Nalien]

No, suggesting SE add monster corralation back into the game is a good way to get your BLU idea tossed into the circular file post-haste.

I'm so glad you're here to tell us exactly what SE does with our suggestions. I seem to remember people saying the same thing about NM suggestions way back, thinking about it...

This suggestion would not be difficult to balance. No other Job has family based skills (all the old ones from 1.0 could actually be adapted to Blue Mages Class skills, go figure). It would literally just be a Blue Mage thing to make it stand out instead of being another bland Job. The only balancing issue would be balancing the single Job, which is something they have to do anyway, it's no where near as problematic as something like the elemental wheel. They could even make it much easier to understand by automating the whole thing; Make a Lancet style ability that registers the enemies family type and gives you a selection of enemy skills from the family that trumps it in a pet style hotbar. Done, now Blue Magic takes up one ability slot and the other four Job abilities can be freed up for something else, perhaps have another ability like that for taking skills from the enemies family as well, depending on how they work the skills. Another Job skill could make all family based skills (like Trunk Splitter) work regardless of family, since you know, the premise of the Job would be using family types and skills. Only other issue is learning the spells, which is still something I think just belongs in quests.

I'm not even suggesting implementing the exact same system from XI, I'm simply suggesting taking the same concept and adapting it to this game. The concepts for Blue Mage in XI were good, why not adapt them for this game? Turning a blind eye to such concepts would be incredibly stupid, and I like to give the developers a bit more credit than that. Different for differences sake is rarely a good thing.