People who are mad about the "limited job" didn't actually want Blue Mage.

[PortalScience]

First off: The whole first paragraph is a strawman about someone who "doesn't want BLU". Let's ignore this unnecessary rudeness.

Yes, BLU is niche... NO BLU is not rare. BLU is in 5/6/8/9/10/11 and all of the tactics games.

I think most people are only mildly upset with the RNG system to get abilities. In most other FFs, you have to see/get hit by/defeat the mob, and it is a gauranteed drop, but this isn't a big problem, if you assume SE wants it to take a long time to finish the collectathon. As a reminder, that is BLU's identity - the collectathon class. You collect a lot of abilities, it takes forever, and most of them are useless, but they are fun in that you have to seek them out.

However, as with all collectathons, there is usually a reward to this. You can use these spells in fights, and a few of them have some cool utility that makes BLU interesting (like mighty guard). The complaints everyone has is that this limited job system is saying you can't do the majority of modern content, which would traditionally be the reward. This is where people are upset. The version of BLU given sounds like a minigame, not a job.

But here you say, modern content "can't be done the way the game is made", this is simply false. Very few BLU abilities break the game the way Death/Petrify does (1000 needles and aqua breath are both traditionally weak attacks in the late game, due to health scaling), and these could be disabled. How could we disable these? Let's look at in-game precedent:

* Resurrection, while cross-classable, could not be used by PLD in combat.
* Stoneskin II (the old AOE version) could not be used in combat.
* The fix to the ungarmax glitch was to do a check of what kind of dungeon you were in, and disable it if you weren't in squad dungeon.

Would this be ready for 4.5 or even shadowbringers? No, and I don't think most people expect that. However, SE is really making it sound like they have no intention of finishing the job to be usable in even CASUAL end-game content.

[SonKevin]

Snip

BLU is rare. Blue Magic might not be as rare, but a dedicated BLU is rare. 6 didn't have a Blue Mage in NA release, 8 only had blue magic for a limit break, 9 ate the monsters and gained their skills. I can say that 10 had Ronso which can be close to BLU and the Tactics games had them all.

You're right that you can't do a majority of the modern content. This is because they don't want to balance the class. They want this class to be unique in ways that they can't let other classes be unique. If they were to balance it out so that it's equal with all classes then it's not really worth it. Why would I spend hours trying to get a skill that will do nothing, but give me a normal attack. At that point they might as well drop it in favor of gaining skills at the end of a quest and by then you've got another class that is exactly the same as every other class in the game.

The in-game precedent is a bad argument. They removed both of those examples because they were remnants of 1.0 and no longer made any sense. FFXIV 1.0 was unique in the way it shared certain skills that don't translate well to the current FFXIV. The last one was a literal glitch.

[Elerus]

White Mage's main shtick is healing comrades, not learning unbalanced moves from monsters.

Now we went from a "No True Scotsman" argument to moving the goalpost. Look if you like what they're doing with Blue Mage then fine - it's your opinion, you pay your sub. But your original post made this grandiose statement about everyone who was arguing against the current implementation of Blue Mage. The truth is the "nay" crowd have a lot of reasons and not all of them are the same: some are long-time fans of Blue Mage who wanted this to be their main, some are afraid that "limited" job could actually become a long-term thing and one day it'll be the job THEY always wanted that gets turned into another "Lord of Verminion" side-show, and some are simply calling this out from a mechanical standpoint.

edit: oops, forgot to quote what I was responding to.

[SonKevin]

Now we went from a "No True Scotsman" argument to moving the goalpost. Look if you like what they're doing with Blue Mage then fine - it's your opinion, you pay your sub. But your original post made this grandiose statement about everyone who was arguing against the current implementation of Blue Mage. The truth is the "nay" crowd have a lot of reasons and not all of them are the same: some are long-time fans of Blue Mage who wanted this to be their main, some are afraid that "limited" job could actually become a long-term thing and one day it'll be the job THEY always wanted that gets turned into another "Lord of Verminion" side-show, and some are simply calling this out from a mechanical standpoint.

edit: oops, forgot to quote what I was responding to.

You tried to boil my entire argument to saying that because x can't do this minor thing then it's the same thing as Blue Mage can't be its actual job.

[PortalScience]

BLU is rare. Blue Magic might not be as rare, but a dedicated BLU is rare. 6 didn't have a Blue Mage in NA release, 8 only had blue magic for a limit break, 9 ate the monsters and gained their skills. I can say that 10 had Ronso which can be close to BLU and the Tactics games had them all.

6 added it back in, and that brings the total games that had it to 9 main games (plus a whole bunch of mobile/etc).

You're right that you can't do a majority of the modern content. This is because they don't want to balance the class. They want this class to be unique in ways that they can't let other classes be unique. If they were to balance it out so that it's equal with all classes then it's not really worth it. Why would I spend hours trying to get a skill that will do nothing, but give me a normal attack. At that point they might as well drop it in favor of gaining skills at the end of a quest and by then you've got another class that is exactly the same as every other class in the game.

When you ask why would you spend hours to get the skill that does nothing... why do you play blue mage in those other games. The collection of skills that are mostly marginally useless is how the class has always been played. How often did you use Moon Flute in the original FFV? I unlocked it and never used it. Half the fun is finding them all, then picking the ones you like. Not every ability needs to be useful all the time (your main class is paladin, how often do you use Ultimatum?). BLU has MORE spells, which means you can pick and choose more. This is also why Death/Old/Flare/Graviga are all gated behind multiples, making them more rarely used. Why would you do that? Because it is fun to have it all, and to use it in the solo stuff. Remember that noone is saying end the solo option, we are saying, make it solo FOCUSED rather than solo ONLY. Not being able to use the class except for side-content is really disappointing. If SE had said "no matchmaking YET" and emphasized the YET instead of explaining it like it was permanent, people wouldn't be as upset.

The in-game precedent is a bad argument. They removed both of those examples because they were remnants of 1.0 and no longer made any sense. FFXIV 1.0 was unique in the way it shared certain skills that don't translate well to the current FFXIV. The last one was a literal glitch.

There are plenty more examples. I was picking them because the code would be easier to copy paste. In the current content, many CCs (Low Blow/Interject/Fluid Aura/Break/Sleep/Foot Graze) are often unusable on bosses. Some damage moves can't even be reduced by Passage of Arms.