Blue mage at patch 4.5

[Oreos]

The truth is that there is a middle-ground here.

Give Blue Mage this exciting, new, solo-leveling and skill acquisition experience. Allow for a massive amount of skills to be learned and used on your own in any way you see fit. And then tweak some of these skills to be balanced for party play while maintaining the spirit of the job, as they have done for literally every other job in the game.

[kikix12]

You really have to look at the big picture here you're saying that my arguments go against freedom?

Um...To look at "bigger picture" you need to look from various perspectives. I assure you, that's exactly what I do and what you seem to be adamantly against.

Think about it this way. There are two alternatives. They add Blue Mage this way or not at all. These are the only options because THEY are the ones that make this game and THEY decided that. They didn't want to cripple the Blue Mage and make an entirely new job, then slap the title on it.

If they added Blue Mage, they added to what you can do. Now you can do stuff as Blue Mage. Stuff that have not really been accessible before, even, unique to Blue Mage. You cannot do certain things (but content-wise it only applies to new stuff, Deep Dungeons and PvP).
If they did not add Blue Mage, you wouldn't be able to do anything with it (duh!). You'd never get more to do, nor anything unique to do. You could do LESS than you can do, thus they wouldn't give you more freedom.
If they did add Blue Mage and then removed it...yep. That would take away some of your freedom.

No matter how you look at it, if your point of view is from what IS, and not what COULD BE (which is a horrible way to review anything), then this is a positive addition to freedom, not a negative. You never get the freedom that is later limited. Basically, you just GET less freedom than you'd want, but why would they endanger the whole game just to give some players that extra freedom, and do that on the spot? Because you keep ignoring the fact that it is all an experiment that is likely to evolve.

[diruulth]

dead on arrival.

[Viridiana_Sovari]

This is a waste of development time pure and simple. They made more compromises with SMN, BRD, and RDM than they would have had to with BLU.

They literally could have implemented it the same way, tweaked how abilities worked for balance and to have some sort of rotation, and the abilities make it if in a specific role. Make it so that depending on your level you have to have a certain number of skills slotted to queue for content.

Would it have been harder to balance...sure. But it would have also been the first job with some actual depth in the game doing it that way. Instead we get a half measure that will be nothing but disappointment.

The saddest thing is that since this content is coming out in 4.5 people will be really bored for 6 months and play the content... which will cause them to see it as a success and replicate it for another job the community wants just to disappoint all over again.

[Balipu]

This is a waste of development time pure and simple.

Have you played it? Don't think so. Personally I will wait till I actually try it before making a judgement. Also 4.5 will bring the mistery Gold Saucer attraction and a new incentive to farm doge mounts. So if you aren't having fun with broken pimp, you can do other stuff.

[Arkdra]

This is a waste of development time pure and simple. .

I guarantee you that exponentially more people will do this than ultimates. Even if you expand the concept of doing ultimates to include the couple thousand people that watch ultimate progression on twitch.

[Kkun]

It's a good thing that they're trying new things. However, I personally am a bit disappointed with BLU along with others. I was hoping for it to be like other classes but with the monster learning mechanic and some form of gate keeping, skill limitations (banning certain skills/having a nerfed version for grouped content) or perhaps preset skills for balancing while introducing skill choices. I originally thought this would be the case, and that BLU won't ever be perfectly balanced in the sense that it is not as powerful as others but still somehow viable and not overpowered/broken. As someone who enjoys most of PVP I was also hoping for it to be at least playable in PVP with a set of monster skills but unfortunately it isn't.

Though unlikely, I still hope that its limited job status gets removed in the future.

[Mimilu]

Having slept on it, I'm going to try to wait and see how BLU and the Masked Carnival play out before going one way or the other.
I will say that I am a bit disappointed that you can't play relevant/current content with it.
I'm also interested on how they are going to make the Masked Carnival relevant and what rewards we will get from it.

[Fyce]

They made more compromises with SMN, BRD, and RDM than they would have had to with BLU.

Could they have made a BLU fit into the mainstream content and current job mould by removing some of its iconic aspects that are unfit for regular party play? Yes.
Did they want to do it? No.

It's fine to break the mould from time to time and make new things.

[Exiled_Tonberry]

This is a waste of development time pure and simple. .

This is what really gets me. I don't even want to know how much time and resources was put into BLU and making content specifically for it, only for people to lose interest at level cap because it's not good enough to put actual time into it.