Late to the BLU Party

[Burningskull]

Easiest way to make Blue Mage work in this game is to just make it job quest centric. Ex.

You go to your trainer, he says go learn X skill by fighting X mobs. Let's say cactuars. You go out into the world, fight the cactuars in the open world till you learn the spell. This way you don't have 49+ abilities that you have to balance and worry about which ones a Blue Mage has or doesn't have and the Blue Mage has about as many abilities as the regular jobs. Add some gimmick where one spell combos into another spell like for example 1,000 needles > 10,000 needles, etc. etc. Or some other gimmick like if you use one spell followed by another spell the party gets a buff or the mob gets a debuff or what have you.

Just a thought but take a book out of Ninja's book in FFXI. Let's say you use Aqua Breath. The mob now has a debuff called Soaked. If you use Thunder Breath or Lightning Breath, w/e it's called, it'll do more damage cause you used Aqua Breath first.