“2x job” instead of “limited job” ?

[Darkstride]

It just seems unnecessarily complicated.

I don't even understand why SE considers it to be so crucial that a Blue Mage has particular spells that would make it wildly unbalanced in parties. Does Level 5 Death really need to be implemented as usable spell? I'd be more than happy to never even see that spell exist in FFXIV.

I think it's more than possible to just make a Blue Mage that aligns with the current job structure. The job can be thematically accurate to Blue Mage without having 100+ unnecessary spells to learn.

[Elamys]

this might be bad... cause not u (the player) will decide which skills you will focus on but the hardcore raid-community. The problem with Blu Mage in general is that you can build "Builds" like in most other MMOS. Something what is absolutely out of the current game design FF14 is using. If u take Blu for endgame you can actually cut 80% of their skills at all cause it would just be the raid-build which would survive in the end.

Facing this point - the whole job idea of getting 1001 skills to just use 5 of them in the end wouldn't make things better, would it?

Those numbers are pretty wildly inaccurate, but I digress. Most of the abilities across every job aren't used consistently. They're support, utility, niche abilities. BLU in the example I put out could possibly keep a variety of those other abilities, making it a solid support job, but the core rotational abilities could change to reflect tank, healer, DPS. Again, it would need a lot of work and balancing, but it's certainly not impossible. I mean, the hardcore raid community might decide "never bring a BLU specialized for healing" but that's not really any different than what we have right now, is it? Where certain jobs are shunned? And yet even those jobs still have players.

I don't even understand why SE considers it to be so crucial that a Blue Mage has particular spells that would make it wildly unbalanced in parties. Does Level 5 Death really need to be implemented as usable spell? I'd be more than happy to never even see that spell exist in FFXIV.

My guessing for why they went this route is because they didn't want to have a repeat like with summoner, where people still complain because they got egis instead of full size primal summons. People want to have wildly powerful abilities like Level 5 Death as ridiculous as it seems. The choice was pretty clearly between giving people a weak version of these spells, not giving them at all, or giving them but restricting where they can be used. People want the fantasy of BLU but they can't have it exactly as it was in other games and still have it work in XIV. I warned the people in my FC about that constantly, that when BLU was added it was probably going to be a disappointment.