Blue Mage might actually be a good thing.

[Nariel]

snip.

Why lock blue mage then.

Could have been the same without locking blue only to this, looting spell to use in mask carnival in a separate skill pool. Can't believe its impossible to just make them unusable outside of carnival while I can't use logos action outside of eureka.

[Arkdra]

Why lock blue mage then.

Could have been the same without locking blue only to this, looting spell to use in mask carnival in a separate skill pool. Can't believe its impossible to just make them unusable outside of carnival while I can't use logos action outside of eureka.

No real reason to lock out blu specifically, they just did. Coulda been dancer, or the gunblade class, wouldn't matter to me. As to why not both though? More effort than they can reasonably put into it would be my guess. Let's really examine what they can do.

1. What we have now. 49 skills and special solo instances where the expectation is you tailor your skill loadout to the fight. Even bringing back old and tired elemental resistance. In theory, they could make some really difficult and fun fights for this depending on how wild they go with the skills. But 49 skills, all of which need to be learned through practical play and potentially blocked off by challenging content is just not workable to the greater game. I.E. Skills x y and z are mandatory power skills and are locked behind instances 1 2 and 3 and if only 10% of blu's finish those instances then blu becomes the biggest pariah. Or they make the masked carnival a sleep walk maybe, but I definitely doubt that. Never mind the constant potential for blu's to just make up nonsense rotations and generally be even more terrible than jobstoneless knobs.

2. Standard job. 25ish skills, all learned by, "Getting hit" in a solo instance. The plain jane option. Totally workable, but the masked carnival stuff would be devoid of any teeth for sure since skills used in the normal content require getting through them. A reasonably safe option and, if I am being completely honest, one that I am baffled they didn't go with.

3. The split. 25ish actions comprise the core of the job and are what you use in 99% of the content. Masked carnival has a pool of the other 24 skills and you have a limited number you can take into masked carnival (probably 3, maybe 5). This is only a little better than the standard job method to be honest. There isn't really much design space to work with if your special skill pool is that limited so the carnival stuff ends up only a little less boring. Plus fitting them into what is already a reasonably complex rotation (since it has to play like a standard job) would be tricky for most players and just more of an annoying gimmick than something fun.

If you would have preferred option 2 or 3, that's fine. I get it. But I prefer option 1.

[Seraphor]

It’s nice that they’re doing new things with content but locking an entire job it seems a bit unfair, especially for people who really wanted to be a real Blue Mage.

As for this being SE’s answer to better endgame content, what about those of us who don’t particularly care about Blue Mage? Do we just have to suffer through all the same stuff again?

What about people who dont care about Eureka, or crafting, or raiding?
Not all content is for everyone.

[Valdegarde]

If you would have preferred option 2 or 3, that's fine. I get it. But I prefer option 1.

I don't think we'll be able to reverse time and allow option 2 to be a reality, but we can technically hope for option 3. Option 3 please!

And I don't think it has to be that limited, perhaps out of the 49 skills, only a handful are truly broken enough to be unusable in other content (level x stuff, Bad Breath, Self Destruct) and the rest are slottable depending on type. Blue Mage might have different options for certain skills, for example Fire Breath is a cone and has dropoff damage, Aqualung is also a cone, weaker but does not have drop off damage, Trine is circular AoE, a Blue Mage must slot one of these for AoE. Then there's maybe...a couple skills (7-8?) given automatically by job quests, these are the essentials like Magic Hammer for MP restoration.
That means they can free up more than 24 skills to potentially be viable for the rest of the game and providing some freedom and player choice without being unbalanced.
Does it look likely they will go this route? No. I guess we'll see in 4.5. It's a thin hope I'm holding out, but I feel it would satisfy a majority of the playerbase than the 50/50 we have now (which I feel is optimistic, it looks like less than half considering polls floating about.)

I feel like if we could stop trying to slice eachother's throats out and get together as a community and present some united front solutions that the majority can sign off on, there may be more of a hope for an amenable solution for everyone. And THAT would be a good thing.

[Raixa]

Me, looking forward in playing this job. Hmm, just wondering.. it gonna be a pain doing relic weapon quest for this job('if we have one') since we need a pre-made party instead of duty finder.

[Seraphor]

I don't think we'll be able to reverse time and allow option 2 to be a reality, but we can technically hope for option 3. Option 3 please!

And I don't think it has to be that limited, perhaps out of the 49 skills, only a handful are truly broken enough to be unusable in other content (level x stuff, Bad Breath, Self Destruct) and the rest are slottable depending on type. Blue Mage might have different options for certain skills, for example Fire Breath is a cone and has dropoff damage, Aqualung is also a cone, weaker but does not have drop off damage, Trine is circular AoE, a Blue Mage must slot one of these for AoE. Then there's maybe...a couple skills (7-8?) given automatically by job quests, these are the essentials like Magic Hammer for MP restoration.
That means they can free up more than 24 skills to potentially be viable for the rest of the game and providing some freedom and player choice without being unbalanced.
Does it look likely they will go this route? No. I guess we'll see in 4.5. It's a thin hope I'm holding out, but I feel it would satisfy a majority of the playerbase than the 50/50 we have now (which I feel is optimistic, it looks like less than half considering polls floating about.)

I feel like if we could stop trying to slice eachother's throats out and get together as a community and present some united front solutions that the majority can sign off on, there may be more of a hope for an amenable solution for everyone. And THAT would be a good thing.

The problem with this kind of compromise is that BLU is being built as a horizontal progression system.
You dont rush to the end if the road and then start the end game, collecting the skills is the end game, its not going to be easy, that's the whole challege.

You cant pick out a set of skills as their core rotation, because the nature of learning them sporadically and randonly means it cant have any rotation. Every skill has to be viable on its own.
And you can't rely on people acquiring all of the skills befeore being included in content, bevause they wont learn all the skills for a long time, they're not meant to.

It'd be like locking you out from end game content until youve acquired every mount in the game.

This is why the two systems are incompatible.

[Valdegarde]

I guess we'll see how the skills are actually used when Blue Mage is released. But I fail to see how my suggestion prohibits any kind of cohesion in a rotation, albeit a flexible one. There has to be some kind of basic damaging spell at LEAST so that a Blue Mage can even get to say, level 10, right? Some form of AoE damage? They have to restore MP somehow, I imagine. Some aspects of the job naturally have to have some kind of basic elements present to even be usable solo.
In any case, it was a wild suggestion. I'd like to see more people working together instead of shutting eachother down. Like you just did.

[Sigma-Astra]

What about people who dont care about Eureka, or crafting, or raiding?
Not all content is for everyone.

None of that content involves having a new job being locked out of doing things other people want to do with it. Everyone can play the job that they want to play in Eureka or raiding if they so chose to do so. Anyone can pick up crafting if they so chose to do so and do everything under the sun that they are allowed to do with DoH and DoL jobs.

Not everyone can do what they want to do with Blue Mage and are strictly tied down to one pathway; one route to take the job. That's what you're missing. People are complaining that jobs have become too cookie cutter and don't break the mold enough, well guess what? Blue Mage is still a cookie cutter job that doesn't break the mold because it's been condemned to a "special" baking sheet that no other cookies can be baked on with it at this point.

[Duskane]

ive been trying to think of Cookie cutter analogies all day for Blue mage and all i can say is its terrible at baking

[Liale]

The problem with this kind of compromise is that BLU is being built as a horizontal progression system.
You dont rush to the end if the road and then start the end game, collecting the skills is the end game, its not going to be easy, that's the whole challege.

You cant pick out a set of skills as their core rotation, because the nature of learning them sporadically and randonly means it cant have any rotation. Every skill has to be viable on its own.
And you can't rely on people acquiring all of the skills befeore being included in content, bevause they wont learn all the skills for a long time, they're not meant to.

It'd be like locking you out from end game content until youve acquired every mount in the game.

This is why the two systems are incompatible.

collecting skills is not going to be as hard as you seem to think it will be. about the 2nd day out there is going to be a list on reddit of where to get the skills, people will go down the list and farm the skills and then it will be over. It is basically going to be atma 3.0