Thank you for making Blue Mage unique!

[Belhi]

I don't think its wrong when the situation presented was specifically toxicity, but you're right, the other end of the spectrum does exist. In fact it exists right now. You have players all the time who don't know their rotations or who insist on playing Ice Mages. Just like you can't design a system to be jerk proof you also can't design one to be idiot proof. FFXIV doesn't assume players can't understand a rotation and so removes rotations from the game.

However, I would argue that it's possible to add customization to the game without allowing it to get to the point of totally invalid builds. As an example, consider a simple skill tree as used in other MMOs. Imagine a class at level 10 gets to pick between a 15% passive speed buff, a charge skill like Monk's fire tackle, or an ability that makes you immune to the next AoE you hit. All three are utility moves, mostly designed to work around AoE. One just makes it a little easier all the time, one lets you get back into the fight after dodging an AoE and deal a little extra damage, one makes it so you don't need to move at all occasionally. None are useless, some are more useful than others in some fights while being less useful in others.

Most mainstream MMOs that use the model FF14 uses have progressively stripped back a lot of the 'customisation'. Just look at WoW. Yeah sure they have 'talent trees' but they tend to be rather dull variance and almost always there is one clearly superior to the others in most cases. I am not saying FF14 couldn't do with a bit more though. I do think FF14 has gone a bit too far into playing it safe. That said, considering their issues often with Job balance maybe they are just afraid of complicating things further by adding more variables.

However there is a difference between a bit more customisation and what in reality BLU is. BLU just doesn't fit the structure and the role structure exists for a reason.