Late to the BLU Party

[jon041065]

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Well blue is my favorite color and might have been why I went frost as my spec for death knight when WotLK came out. But let's keep that a secret.

For me, I wanted a job that could learn and use enemy spells throughout the full game. I was really hoping for a tank like this person's write up. https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...concept_pitch/
To me that would have felt "blue mage" enough to satisfy that fantasy and still be fun to main. Playing jedi shadow/sith assassin on old republic made me fall in love with caster based tanks.

I also just love the melee/caster hybrid. It's what I normally play as if there's that choice. FFXIV's rdm is pretty fun but wish it was building up a meter with melee combos for a big spell finisher. That's what I thought blu was likely to end up as and be the melee version of brd or mch.

The learning method isn't super important to me and there's been multiple versions of how to learn spells in past FF games so they didn't have to go with this one but they did and that's fine. I was more in favor of hunt logs that would say "go kill 20 cactuars" and then you would get 1k needles. Again, the learning method wasn't that important to me because how spells would be learned wasn't the most important part of blue mage to me. I wanted a job that was as 50/50 as possible between melee and casting with the spells being enemy abilities.

Having OP spells isn't part of the blue mage fantasy for me and there have been suggestions by myself and others for how to make spells like death and bad breath work in a raid setting. As well as concepts and ideas for how to make blue mage feel unique beyond just reskinned spells with the correct names.

I like the idea and aesthetic of blue mage. I like that it had the potential to really ride the line between being a melee or a caster. I like the idea of using enemy spells to make the job feel different. I like that it's so different compared to typical fantasy tropes. These were the things I was looking for when I was one of the people begging for blue mage to be in the game. To be able to get the killing blow on a new savage boss in current content using goblin punch. To then go farm up some crating mats for new expac items and use something like Trine or Grand Delta to aoe down mobs. To be able to do more than just my trinity role because of the various spells that blu could potentially use despite which role SE might have assigned to it. Not many mmo players these days like to do things beyond "just tank/heal/dps and don't worry about dpsing/your utility" and blue mage could have finally felt like "I'm home" in terms of jobs for someone like me that does enjoy trying to play to all the strengths my job/class has. It's why I miss the off healing that enhance shamans had on WoW during the MoP expac.

Trying to be as faithful to "blue mage" as possible wasn't as important as a job that felt like blue mage and I could actually main. This isn't even that truthful to blue mage BESIDES using the more common learning method. No other main FF title had more that 30 blue magic spells besides FFXI. No other main FF title let you make builds besides FFXI. No other main FF title excluded blue mage from the full game after it was unlocked besides FFXIV.

[Zareshi]

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Heh, limited. Was RDM's iconic aspect/identity that it could replace a healer/caster? Or that it pulled from both schools and could melee? Realistically the only unique thing was that it could Dualcast in FFV.

I'm not against the idea of having jobs specialize in other content (PotD/HoH, masked carnivale, etc), I just hate that BLU is set into it's box away from everything and that the choice is forced on me to either do this content alone, or run other/current content with friends. Afterall:

..while RDM shines in this side content, it's still a fully playable job in the rest of the game.

RDM can also fill that flex role in other side content too, deep dungeons just feature prominently in my mind for them since they're the solo kings in those places.

Going back to BLU though; for me the idea of BLU has always been fun. I don't know that I'd go so far as to say I find it funny, but it was really unique using the same skills that were trouncing your party against other monsters. Black Mage always got bigger fire/thunder/ice spells, white mages always got bigger cures. Blue Mage was throwing back breaths and some oddball abilities to either damage, support, or even hinder (Hi, Roulette) in fights.

As for XIV, how the abilities would be learned isn't as important to me, though it does make for some nice side content. Honestly I could see the only reason you originally (back in FFV etc) would have BLU learn abilities by experiencing them was as a tutorial to the player as to how that ability worked. 1,000 Needles does 1,000 damage, ok. Aqua Breath is party wide damage. Bad Breath royally messes up the party and run away on sight. Compared to Black Mage where Fire makes fire, Fire 2 makes bigger fire, etc.

For me BLU is about using the monster's spells back at them yourself. I'm understanding though of the world design of XIV, that to have it be a fully realized job the abilities would not be as ridiculous as they could be in older single player games where that was a more viable approach.

After throwing the gameplay and the toolkit out, there isn't much left...

The same could be said of any job, really.

That's one of the short comings to MMOs. You need to consider balance when you create something, and what works when it's a single player game won't always work on the larger setting (in this case the broken abilities). You can distill the essence of the class you want to make, and turn it into something unique that fits your world.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...concept_pitch/

This is a fantastic pitch and example. I would like to see some aspect of learning the abilities added to it, but it's not as important to me. That could even be done via job quests. I also find it funny they called renaming tank LB so far out.