Don't like Blue Mage? Here is how to convince SE to change it...

[Bernhardt]

wat
It's being implemented. There isn't an "if".

It's going to breathe a lot of life into the overworld, into older solo content, and into just downtime from other things when you don't necessarily want to go do other solo content.

This echos a lot of what people were saying about the relic grind. Except at the end of the relic grind, you got something you could bring into current content raids. So blue mage is like a worse relic weapon.

[Acidblood]

So, why should we assume that, when the ultimatum is utterly false?

One's options are not limited to solely "endorse everything you hate about something you pay for" or "stop paying for it".
Nor are our options here solely "get a butchered BLU" or "don't get BLU at all".

I'm trying to work out if the backlash over Blue Mage is mostly due to the way that Blue Mage has been implemented, or simply (assuming) that Blue Mage will never be playable in high-end duties / raids?

i.e. Would you be just as angry if, when asked about Blue Mage, Yoshi P had said 'nope, never going to happen'?

[Oreos]

To be fair, if you are going to discontinue your sub because of this one thing (BLU) then you probably didn't have much investment in the game to begin with. Stopping sub because of the incoming datacentre moves, yeah I could understand some players doing that, but definitely not for this.

That's an extremely dismissive attitude. What is and is not important is not an objective concept.

I have absolutely no concerns or worries over the datacenter reorganization, as my group of friends and static are unaffected. That doesn't mean people upset over the move "didn't have much investment in the game." It simply means that change doesn't really matter to me. But I can still understand why people would be upset.

I've played this game since the launch of 2.0. I've taken breaks a few times over the years, but I've always had a deep investment in the game and the friends I've made here. On Saturday, I canceled my subscription because I feel it to be the best way to demonstrate my immense disappointment with SE's decisions regarding BLU. You don't have to agree with me, but dismissing a person's feelings towards something because you don't feel the same way is extremely narrow-minded.

[Krokov]

Ah yes the cavalier "go ahead and quit!" attitude that I've found so parochial and charming in the World of Warcraft and League of Legends community.

Ironically they're usually juxtaposed next to posts of people bemoaning empty friendlist and dying guilds.

Games like FF do not die from one poor decision (unless, let us be honest, it's truly a massive failure on a Biblical scale) but rather they suffer from death by a thousand cuts.

Today the people who wanted Blue as a full job quit. Don't miss them? Fine. Next time it's the people who didn't want "Beasmaster" or "Puppeter" as a limited class who decide to leave. Maybe Square decides to stop releasing "full" classes in future expansions since the creative space is just getting so gosh-darn crowded they can't figure out how to implement them and hey it's so much easier and faster to do unbalanced, noncurated, limited classes.

I would rather encourage the creators to make solid foundational design decisions. There is nothing wrong with wanting to add more solo content to the game. There's nothing wrong with having a unique tier of content for Blue Mage (I wish they would add it for every class, they could reward unique glamours, mounts, or titles). What is wrong is the false dichotomy that unique solo content has to be made to the exclusion of the rest of the game. There are ways to have both. I left WoW because of Blizzard's malaise and sheer laziness over Battle for Azeroth. Believe me when I say one does not want the same disease taking root here.

Just curious what was it about Battle for Azeroth you didn't like?

[BubblyBoar]

It's pretty terrible that people think that its okay to sacrifice a popular FF series class to make the overworld more populated. Why does BLU have to pay the price for that to happen? Why couldn't the dev team created a fun system for the open world that every class could enjoy while BLU was made to enjoy all the content? Why are people acting like the open world could never be saved unless BLU was implemented? Do people not have any imagination?


Likewise, what about BLU has to be broke and overpowered. It has plenty of spells in its history that could be used to make a balanced job while all the extra gimmicky stuff can be implemented as it is right now. Why does it have to be one or the other and not just both?

[Oreos]

This doesn't have to be an either-or situation.

I adore the leveling and spell acquisition facet of Blue Mage. I think it is a wonderful tribute to the job's history. Keep this unique experience and let us gather as many spells as you can throw at us. Let us be unbelievably OP on our own.

And then balance a specific set of 24 spells that allows BLU to participate in endgame content. We don't need Level 5 Death to be one of those spells. Goblin Punch, Magic Hammer, Matra Magic, so many regular, non-absurd spells exist that would allow for the job to keep the unique identity while still being balanced.

I 100% agree that more solo content is a good thing for the game. But not at the expense of the job being excluded from current content.

[Elerus]

Just curious what was it about Battle for Azeroth you didn't like?

Well, I'm not sure how familiar you are with WoW but I'll assume you've played the game recently. I will also say I greatly enjoyed the Legion expansion. It was not without its flaws (AP grind springing foremost to mind) but the sheer wealth of content kept me interested. I adored the class Order Hall Campaigns and I dearly wish Final Fantasy had some sort of after-max level content for EACH class.

But on to Battle for Azeroth. In short it feels like Legion 0.5 with many of the systems taking a step backwards or being removed. Gone are interesting artifact weapons many of which had great stories or lore attached to them. Instead, everyone gets a generic necklace. Azerite traits are a confusing and muddled mess that Blizzard themselves have had to backtrack, buff, nerf, renovate, and remove just to try and make sense of them. When you get a piece of armor that is 20 iLvLs higher than your current item but it's a downgrade due to the traits that's just a low blow. On a more personal note I disliked the removal of PvP vendors (although that happened previously) which was further compounded by them doing away with PvP templates, merging PvP/PvE servers, and then utterly failing to balance their warmode option. You might think I'm crazy but I sincerely think FF PvP is in a better spot at the moment (outside of organised arenas groups).

To be fair the Mythic Dungeon system was nice, but that is a continuation of Legion's system. Also, and this is just me, but I'm a bit burned out on World Quests. Grinding reputation through WQs quickly became a chore, and I had several returning friends who quit out of frustration because they REALLY wanted to play one of the new Allied Races as advertised only to find out they couldn't because they skipped Legion and had never unlocked the time-gated reputation grinds from the prior expansions.

To put all this in a nutshell: after the gem, albeit flawed gem, that was Legion BFA just feels like a half-baked expansion. There were numerous bugs I encountered, unfinished class specs (hello Shadow Priest and Elemental Shaman), and a general feeling that the expansion as a whole could have really used more polish and time in development. I don't bear Blizzard any ill will and I hope they can turn things around and make the expansion shine, but given my increasingly busy work schedule I had to make a choice about where to spend my free time. I had a small group of friends already in FFXIV who encouraged me to jump ship. I did, and I have to say that current Blue Mage doldrums aside I've enjoyed this game and my complaints come from a place of love - I sincerely believe this game has a lot to offer and I want to see it continue to grow.

Anyhow, hope that answers your question, friend. Thanks for asking.

[Shurrikhan]

I'm trying to work out if the backlash over Blue Mage is mostly due to the way that Blue Mage has been implemented, or simply (assuming) that Blue Mage will never be playable in high-end duties / raids?

Those are one and the same. It doesn't need to have been implemented in a template fashion to have been made balanced for use in high-end duties. Instead, we've been given an implementation that precedents all further unique jobs being segregated from the real game, alike to another minigame or FATE-grind gimmick.

i.e. Would you be just as angry if, when asked about Blue Mage, Yoshi P had said 'nope, never going to happen'?

Yes. Though, to me those are again one and the same. The game will not receive Blue Mage. Instead, a minigame will receive the name, Blue Mage.


//

These bimodals question are of little benefit, though. Asking whether someone would like to be shot in the left leg or the right, or be paid the first half of their wages or the second half does nothing to address the real problem.

The better question would be something like "How can adding BLU improve the user experience?"

We've got the excuse to send people back into the 1-50 world to populate it for newcomers joining before Shadowbringers. Check.
We've got a neat bit of side-content in the form of Masked Carnival. Check.
But that's just a couple possibilities out of dozens. And yet, that's where the devs seem perfectly willing to draw the line, and not just "for the time being".

[Fyce]

Instead, we've been given an implementation that precedents all further unique jobs being segregated from the real game, alike to another minigame or FATE-grind gimmick.

While that's true, there's no evidence to suggest that BLU would've ever been implemented in the game without the "Limited Job" system. No matter if it was feasible or not.

[Acidblood]

snip

Thank you for answering.

And since you asked:

1. How exactly were you expecting Blue Mage, assuming it was implemented as a normal job, to be?
2. What user experience were you expecting (if any) that couldn't be gotten from another job?

Edit: For me personally, and given FFXIV's narrow combat and encounter design, I wouldn't have expected much, maybe a DoT mage with a heal (assuming ‘Caster DPS’ as a role). At least that wouldn't have been, button order aside, entirely a clone of RDM or SCH, however I certainly wouldn't have expected it to feel like a Blue Mage (similar to how I don't feel RDM feels much like a Red Mage) due to the extreme focus on DPS, and almost non-existence of significant debuffs, or buffs / heals beyond a limit, in FFXIV.