How Blue Mage Could Exist in FFXIV

[Nalien]

I expect Blue Mage to be a, well.. Mage... But I'd prefer it be a counter based tank, perhaps with a Runic (FFVI) style skill for absorbing incoming attacks to build a Blue magic gauge to throw out enemy skills.

That said, you can still give it a similar skill as a caster, something like Vercure but actually mechanically important. You cast a shield on your tank, tank eats Bad Breath to the face, you can now cast Bad Breath, for example. Heck even just a skill with a fixed potency/effect that varies animation based on the last enemy skill you saw/get hit by would do wonders to make Blue Mage feel like Blue Mage.

I doubt we'll see any such mechanic though, more likely the job will just have a selection of Blue Magic skills, learned via questing, that it can access somehow. Blue Mage in lore, not in gameplay. I'd like something akin to XIs Blue Mage but that simply isn't going to be viable with the strict role trinity XIV has... Still, they could maybe adapt the additional actions to function like classic Blue Magic, would make it more interesting to level up the job than others which just get access to additionals automatically... I'll keep my expectations low though... I feel like Blue Mage and Summoner are jobs that are just beyond the scope of this development team... Honestly I feel like the two are better suited as Deep Dungeon mechanics... Move Pomanders from chests to enemy drops and they're basically Blue Magic (just adjust the names/animations), Heaven-on-High already has superior summoning to Summoner, too... I really think a Deep Dungeon where you become a Blue Mage, regardless of your current job (although FFX fans are obligated to only go Dragoon, Lancet being another skill like Runic that could be adapted to let Blue Mage learn skills, I guess), would be a more satisfying way of implementing the "job", but I guess at this point we'll just have to see what SE shows us next...

[Kazrah]

I expect Blue Mage to be a, well.. Mage...

Here's the weird thing about Blue Mage: other than Stragos in VI being sorta considered one, Blue Mages typically never fit that stereotypical "mage" archetype, always having what spells they learned accompanying whatever martial ability they had.

One idea I had been tossing around when I made my original concept was to have something along the lines of Dark Simulacrum from the Death Knight class in World of Warcraft, where it was just an applied debuff that made the next spell cast by the target to be available for the caster to use once for themselves. The biggest issue was in trying to figure out how many limits there would be to the ability in regard to what spells could be utilized by the caster, as you wouldn't want a player to inherit a one-shot mechanic from a boss or something, yet you don't want the cooldown so watered down that there's no real point putting it on your bars. Blizzard I think saw this dilemma too, which is why they removed Dark Simulacrum from Death Knights and later remade it as a pvp-only cooldown for one specialization.

Ultimately, Blue Mage wouldn't be able to feel like one in XIV outside of cutscenes because the game simply doesn't function like that. Same goes with other mechanics brought up, like the "counter tank" that would fall far too weak when assuming an OT role or the "learning shield", which would openly promote bad gameplay. Even just pulling enemy effects from fights for player use beyond whatever the content you'd be doing already provides would require far too many resources since the server would have to remember every single one of those for everyone playing the job.

I feel like Blue Mage and Summoner are jobs that are just beyond the scope of this development team...

This I do agree with (mostly), which is why I'm more convinced that we won't see Blue Mage as a job so much as a job that will integrate some of the aspects of Blue Mage cherry-picked for a job more suitable to this game. They more or less did this with Astrologian inheriting a number of aspects from the traditional Time Mage, so I'd expect this would be as good as it gets.

As for Summoner, I'm not sure it's beyond the scope of the devs so much as just being in a dire need of an overhaul that the team likely doesn't have time or enough resources for.