SE, the concept of "Limited Jobs" is a really bad idea, turn back now

[whiskeybravo]

I would much rather have had blue mage implemented like a normal FFXIV job with the monster abilities it learns being part of its job quests and chosen to work within the normal structure of class abilities for FFXIV. It just does not feel right to have a job that can't actually go into duty finder, etc.

I imagine if we could go back in time to conduct a poll of which version of BLU people would prefer, it'd be this.

[XelphatolTylenolCepacolAlcohol]

I would much rather have had blue mage implemented like a normal FFXIV job with the monster abilities it learns being part of its job quests and chosen to work within the normal structure of class abilities for FFXIV. It just does not feel right to have a job that can't actually go into duty finder, etc.

I imagine if we could go back in time to conduct a poll of which version of BLU people would prefer, it'd be this.

I co-sign this. That is 100% what I expected, and I would have been completely satisfied. Being hit by a monster skill has been the most common way in the FF series, but has not been the only way. Hell, just on the fly, I could think of our job quests being monster hunts, and then consuming the monster (or a certain part of the monster) or its soul to obtain its power. Like Quina or Shang Tsung.

[Moogly]

Did... you miss the live letter? They talked about Blue Mage for like, 40 minutes.

They talked about the nintendo switch for more than a year, and everybody was laughing at how bad it was going to fail and how nintendo had such a twisted view of modern gaming....

So you saw 40 minutes of BLU slides and a 1 minute video : of course you know what it is going to be all about and can confirm it will suck.

Yea sure.

I rather stand with Yoshi P, who's been able to deliver us quality content most of the time, than listen to some random people on forums who have no clues about game design.... and give judgements on things they haven't even put their hands on............

[Melichoir]

I would much rather have had blue mage implemented like a normal FFXIV job with the monster abilities it learns being part of its job quests and chosen to work within the normal structure of class abilities for FFXIV. It just does not feel right to have a job that can't actually go into duty finder, etc.

Ok. So your position is that it is more important to you that you can play it in parties, than it is to keep it closer to its design aspects. That is, you want more party play, at the cost of BLU being, well, a Blue Mage.

Because that seems like a really wierd and silly argument if you actually thought about how Balancing would actually work.

-Lets consider this then. So you would start off with limited skills, and would be required to learn skills from Monsters. Ok. So youve just created a class who now learns skills more difficultly than other classes. That means in party play, unless you have all the skills for your lvl, youre gonna be dead weight to the party.
-Then you have to consider. How many skills will you have access too? If you give them access to "as many as they want so long as they learn them," that gives BLUs overwhelming advantages party wise compared to other classes. So youre gonna have to limit what skills they could learn, or how many skills they can use at any given time.
-Then you need to consider balance of skills vs other classes. In solo content, having powerful skills makes sense cause your survival depends on it. In party content, that power is divided up between members. To ensure BLU would be balanced in a party, that means gimping the spells learned from monsters. Youll have your generic dot, generic AoE, Generic single target skills. You may have some skills with CC on them, but theyll be limited in scope because High DMG + CC is OP in a party setting. So what becomes the play mechanic of the class then. It was "Learn all these powerful monster skills." But now thats being ham-stringed by balancing it against a party setting. So it just becomes a caster who has a harder time learning skills and will be essentially more akin to BLM but without any of hte shifting mechanics. And if you add specialty mechanics, then its no longer a BLU, because its core identity is learning skills from monsters.



This is the problem. If the gimmick of the class is learning skills from monsters, then the only way that works in a party setting is to limit the scope of skills, and limit the power. And with nothing else to offer, the class then loses its identity because the whole idea of monster skills is that they are exceptionally powerful, but would be reduced and put more in line with other casters. And mind you, most casters are fairly similar in the sense of available skills, but differ in play styles and gimmicks specific to the class.

With all this in mind, do you believe deep down people would be more satisfied with this? Or would it be much more likely people complain about how dumb downed BLU is and how bad a job SE did implementing it.

Theyre giving us something different, and trying to give us the BLU experience. It came with a cost. But I think thats fine compared to it being a lackluster reskinned caster with no real self identity.

[Fyce]

You made a cheeky post trying to be trolly and funny and I called you on it. Don't start out being passive aggressive and then get hurt when someone retaliates.

False? You still haven't proven that it was false. if you are going to accuse someone, at least have proof of the accusation. I even said I would amend my post. Yet you're still being passive aggressive.

You are the one who made the positive and bold claim that "everyone that has asked for BLU has anticipated the standard fair of abilities that every class gets". You didn't provide any proof to back up that claim. And now you ask me to show you why you shouldn't say that everyone shares that view? You understand how easy that is? You understand that I only have to find one person in the world who don't share that statement to invalidate it? Well okay. You asked for it.

Me. I never expected BLU to be treated like all the other jobs. Number of skills included. Why? Easy: the toolkit usually given by Blue Magic doesn't fit FFXIV at all. Learning skills in combat is such a unique mechanic that it basically makes the number of skills irrelevant, as the game could simply make you learn a bazillion of skills until you're set with a choice that suits you (which is exactly what they did). And finally, because the director and producer himself explicitly said that they would not be able to make it fit.

There goes your "everyone".
BUT! But... I'm not done yet. I understand that it might feel a bit cheeky (again) and I don't want you to feel cheated (lol, I actually simply want to crush these extremely annoying and dishonest arguments that can be boiled into "everyone thinks like me!", but shhhh, don't tell) so I'm providing you with actual examples of multiple people not thinking that BLU would be able to fit the mold, some of them suggesting drastic changes to the core design of the jobs to allow SE to implement "weird jobs".

Here
you
go
!
(Thanks to Fawkes for taking the time to provide some of them I didn't found)

Oh and, before you say it, yes, I'm aware that some people actually do think like you. But that's not the point. The point is to say that some people don't, which is something you apparently didn't think was possible.

Now, I hope you understand that I won't debate with you any further. You've put a huge burden on me after you made a positive claim, and I had to take the time to provide you with something that was actually very obvious: some people don't have the same opinion as yours. I don't even know why I wasted my time with that, but heh.
And I hope that if you want to change your stance to "most people think..." you'll provide statistical good data. Because that's how things work.

Again you are taking things out of context to fit your own agenda. BLU has been a pretty requested thing for years now and many in the community have given out good ideas on how they could implement it and still fit into FFXIV and give the sense of BLU that is envisioned (which really is hard to do since BLU drastically changes from title to title, they could of done just about anything with the class so long as it used monster abilities). So expecting SE to change their stance on something like that isn't outside the realm of normalcy when its had such a following and is iconic to the FF franchise and its also been done in another FF MMO of all things. Its not like asking for Chocobo Knight something way out there.

Taking your opponents arguments and debuking them when they are wrong is the basics of arguing. If you say to me "the sky is blue, 1+1=3, fire burns", I have all the rights to call you out on your second claim. That's not dishonest or taking thing out of context. That's simply not agreeing with one argument.
As for "the community gave ideas!", that's true. But that doesn't mean that they were good ideas, or that SE should be bound into listening them.
I'm not enforcing my agenda or anything. I'm not the one making baseless claims to rally "everyone" to my cause. But I'm the one that understand that this is not a democracy. The majority doesn't mean jack in a theme park MMO. If SE wants to do something else with their battle job, they bloody well can do so. They don't have to listen to anyone if they don't want to. And that's something you don't seem to understand.

[Melichoir]

I imagine if we could go back in time to conduct a poll of which version of BLU people would prefer, it'd be this.

Anyone who keeps brining up the "I want it to be implemented so it can be used like all the other classes," please describe to us, in your own words, how you would balance it? And be clear and to the point about details. Cause Ive been thinking this over a bit, and I am more in line with the Devs. Balancing it would not be possible without it being OP or without it having its identity gutted and gimped.

[Nariel]

Anyone who keeps brining up the "I want it to be implemented so it can be used like all the other classes," please describe to us, in your own words, how you would balance it? And be clear and to the point about details. Cause Ive been thinking this over a bit, and I am more in line with the Devs. Balancing it would not be possible without it being OP or without it having its identity gutted and gimped.

Blue mage identity is learning spell from monster and making them their, not being an over powered mage. How is that difficult to do compared to learning song by myself after a quest or any other way we learn our skill in job quest ? What kind of mysterious reason force those skill to being far too much powerfull ? Like Yeah bad breath as it is would be OP but why used by a Blue mage it can't be a damage debuff per exemple ? How Mighty guard can't be a simple single or party wide defense boost ? How any other skill can't be balanced like any other ? Because shiva does 7.500 k damage with her skill Blue mage should do the same regardless of his own capacity/strenght ?

[ScarecrowJames]

So because it would require actual interaction, because it can rely on people stronger than it if people don't want to fully do it at level, it's not MMO like? Human interaction? THE HORROR!

Yes require human interaction in content that would be a curbstomp. SO MUCH FUN!

[XelphatolTylenolCepacolAlcohol]

Ok. So your position is that it is more important to you that you can play it in parties, than it is to keep it closer to its design aspects...

A Blue Mage's only universal feature, throughout all installments, has been that it learns monster abilities. That's it. The mechanism as to how has varied. Job quests are a completely viable option. We had items in 8, eating in 9, and using an ability in 10. A job quest is perfectly acceptable.

-Lets consider this then. So you would start off with limited skills, and would be required to learn skills from Monsters...

If they're part of job quests, how are they more difficult to learn? We already have some crucial skills tied to job quests for the other jobs.

-Then you have to consider. How many skills will you have access too?...

Yes, just like how other jobs are limited. I don't think anyone is calling for the entire catalog of Blue Magic in the history of FF to be available. There just need to be a few token abilities thrown into the mix.

-Then you need to consider balance of skills vs other classes....

Yes, the properties of BLU spells could not be 100% identical to their incarnations in other games and would have to be adjusted to be balanced in FFXIV's system. Really, all a spell chiefly needs is cosmetics. Most other things are negotiable. Let's take Mighty Guard for example. It normally casts Shell, Protect, and other defensive buffs for several turns. In FFXIV, we could make it so that increases defense and magic defense by 8% for 5 seconds. There, I just made a version that can be used in XIV. I take particular issue with this argument, because from what we gather from the Live Letter, the team just ported incarnations from previous installments (which would obviously be broken) and did not tailor them at all to XIV.

This is the problem. If the gimmick of the class is learning skills from monsters, then the only way that works in a party setting is to limit the scope of skills, and limit the power. And with nothing else to offer, the class then loses its identity because...

The whole idea of monster skills is NOT that they are exceptionally powerful. A few Blue Mage spells were very powerful in certain games, but those are outliers. Most had quirky effects and were just for fun, and some were completely useless in their respective games.

With all this in mind, do you believe deep down people would be more satisfied with this?.

I respect your opinion here, but I have to disagree with it. I think more people would have preferred what you described compared to what we received. There's token complaining with any job reveal, to the point that it's almost de rigueur, but it would have been much more tamer than all this.

[Shadowshinra]

I hope you understand that I won't debate with you any further.

Now I know you weren't talking to me and I don't with to continue debating either since it's clear we could go on all day and all night and that's not fair on ether of us lol, however the examples you picked aren't the best, despite the posters wanting reworks of the system to provide BLU I'm sure they would have wanted their version of BLU to be fully playable in all environments as well, just saying.

Anyone who keeps brining up the "I want it to be implemented so it can be used like all the other classes," please describe to us, in your own words, how you would balance it? And be clear and to the point about details. Cause Ive been thinking this over a bit, and I am more in line with the Devs. Balancing it would not be possible without it being OP or without it having its identity gutted and gimped.

I'm no game designer but I'll go with this way I've seen thrown around a few times since the announcement, they add a second 24 slot bar like what they're already adding, but when placed into said bar creates a "balanced" version of the attack, eg Breath attacks become the same baring perhaps stun and silence effects but with a 250 potency or something (throwing out random numbers), since all jobs sort of have a gimmick for their attacks BLU's new gimmick is that it has no set rotation, just it's attacks which can be used in any order though I'm sure people will come up with a "best rotation" like any other job

Quickly created this in paint after reading the message