BLU for Duty Finder and Raids! Show your support!

[Arkdra]

4 of you said the same thing basically and I'm not quoting all of you. The angle that other people are already bad so why worry about blu is fallacious. Yes, sure, some idiot sam only spamming hakaze because he is an ice samurai is already a menace, but blu as it is currently being shown allows you to build your own loadout. You've got 49 skills and you pick 24 of them. If you don't immediately see how this is a massive problem for the average player then I don't know what to tell you. Yeah, there's nothing that will prevent some idiot being complete trash no matter what job they end up on. There's also a very large range of players who aren't complete abject failures but also ain't that great and it's these players here that go from being a mediocre dps on bard to why is this idiot in tank stance on blu (like every smn you've ever grouped with that kept titan egi out). Or why are they only doing a single target rotation (because their AoE skills are hard to get).

tl;dr the potential failure points of blu are much more ample and likely to trip up people who would be otherwise passable and focusing on the complete dregs of the playerbase as a counterpoint is spurious.

[Elerus]

people don't marry themselves to a job concept before it even comes out.

I'll make sure to save this quote for when (if) Limited Beasmaster, Puppeteer, or Dancer comes out and we can do this all over again. The "concept" of Blue Mage did not begin in FFXIV.

[Arkdra]

Here is the bullet list of blue mage traits throughout the entire series:

1. Learns monster skills.
2. Is terrible and contributes nothing useful outside of a very tiny handful of outliers.

So if you are married to having a clown car full of bad abilities, you shouldn't be surprised that they won't let you take the clown car on the roads because you are a threat to others.

[Videra]

Here is the bullet list of blue mage traits throughout the entire series:

1. Learns monster skills.
2. Is terrible and contributes nothing useful outside of a very tiny handful of outliers.

So if you are married to having a clown car full of bad abilities, you shouldn't be surprised that they won't let you take the clown car on the roads because you are a threat to others.

Who hurt you? You've been nothing but bitter in just about every post you've made.

[MrKimper]

I find it interesting that Yoshida didn't directly answer this question. I've had my suspicion about which actually came first. Is it the whole truth that Blue Mage has been released as a Limited Job because they couldn't figure out how to get Blue Mage to work? Or are Limited Jobs their solution to pushing more jobs out the door in a manner that requires less work and Blue Mage just happened to be the first job to receive such treatment?


So Blue Mage has been heavily advertised as a proper new FFXIV job, when in reality, it isn't. Got it.

I just sigh and shake my head as I read through this interview. I just hope that, in the future, we can convince Yoshida that his goals can be achieved without forcing a job to be omitted from content.

He's not going to change his mind. If anything this interview is proof of it, he's twice as adamant about this as he was about MCH needing buffs.

[Valdegarde]

I'll make sure to save this quote for when (if) Limited Beasmaster, Puppeteer, or Dancer comes out and we can do this all over again. The "concept" of Blue Mage did not begin in FFXIV.

It's coming from a place of being hurt by Blue Mage, which is real dark, I know...but some part of me really wishes they go the Mog route with Dancer and forcing them to have a small chance of learning a specific dance under every weather condition in the game in their limited DPS job gameplay, including like Ultima and Odin weather and such.

After all, it wouldn't be Dancer without that, right?

There haven't been any other main character Dancers in the series (besides Penelo if you count spinoffs), so to be fair to Dancer it kinda has to be this way or the fans would be upset and it shouldn't be allowed in FFXIV.

That's mean sarcasm and I wouldn't really want to wish that on anybody. But, the same logic really does apply and when people throw around things like "being married to a job concept" or all the weird justifications from the dev team about what jobs and fun are 'supposed' to be like, it's not so nice when it's something you're looking forward to, is it?

[Videra]

He's not going to change his mind. If anything this interview is proof of it, he's twice as adamant about this as he was about MCH needing buffs.

This is unfortunately true. Oh well, I'm still fairly excited for Blue Mage on the whole. Even if I'm disappointed by the limited job moniker and restrictions. I will simply hope that, given a year or two in development, the team might figure out a way to implement it into the proper game.

[Arkdra]

It's coming from a place of being hurt by Blue Mage, which is real dark, I know...but some part of me really wishes they go the Mog route with Dancer and forcing them to have a small chance of learning a specific dance under every weather condition in the game in their limited DPS job gameplay, including like Ultima and Odin weather and such.

After all, it wouldn't be Dancer without that, right?

There haven't been any other main character Dancers in the series (besides Penelo if you count spinoffs), so to be fair to Dancer it kinda has to be this way or the fans would be upset and it shouldn't be allowed in FFXIV.

That's mean sarcasm and I wouldn't really want to wish that on anybody. But, the same logic really does apply and when people throw around things like "being married to a job concept" or all the weird justifications from the dev team about what jobs and fun are 'supposed' to be like, it's not so nice when it's something you're looking forward to, is it?

Dancer has a stronger conceptual identity than blu does.

Real talk, if Dancer is the next class and it's a melee healer, I might main swap. I want it to be a melee healer quite a bit. It's a role that goes pretty underutilized in MMO's and the last time I got to play one (rune priest) it was busted as hell and a lot of fun.

If they pull the ol' switcheroo and dnc is a limited job, I wouldn't really care. I already like playing sam, rdm, drg, war and drk well enough that surely at least one of them would be fine to play in the expansion (can't metaphorically ten-chi-jin all of them) and I would level my dnc and then get on with my life. I would definitely, 100% rather have a limited dancer job over it being another healer in exactly the same mold as the other 3 we already got.

@Videra thank you for noticing! In no particular order: Eureka, Gold Saucer mini games that take forever to grind out, lalafels, light grinding 500 garuda hm's. 13 minute raid encounters, and idiot rp'ers who take one of the precious few opportunities we get to directly converse with the producer of this game to ask if Alphinaud is actually half-elezen half-lalafel.

[Shougun]

tl;dr the potential failure points of blu are much more ample and likely to trip up people who would be otherwise passable and focusing on the complete dregs of the playerbase as a counterpoint is spurious.

A few of the people I know that mentioned something like that you're responded to also laid out / referenced ways to fix these issues though - they havent (not all) simply left the issues where they lie. Some have been asking for the more extreme version but the people I see most frequently are not.

Issue 1: Blue Mage joins a group with 1 skill.
Solution: Don't let Blue Mage join duty finder without the skills that work for the related content. In fact consider that for all jobs, not just Blue Mage (no more level 50 conjurers or people that are 5 job quests behind, although to be honest at least to me it's a rare occurrence lol).

Issue 2: Blue Mage has way too many skills to balance.
Solution: Don't try to balance all of them, select a subset that are balanced for both gameplay fun and fairness. To be clear I'm not suggesting the blue mage book needs to be removed, I'm talking about the duty finder side. The party finder / solo side can hold the other 100 skills lol.

Issue 3: Blue Mage has to learn their skills they're all about learning skills.
Solution: .. ... Let them learn their skills, because of solution 1 we'll have no problem. In fact in the long run blue mage may be cheaper to maintain. Each job getting a quest every 5 levels (or more) that has to be made up in lore, scripted, and then translated into many languages meanwhile blue mage is taking assets already in the game and needs no job quest except if SE wants to add one just because.

Issue 4: Blue Mage is all about customization! It's about the loadout!
Disagreement: Only in FFXI really, for the most part all jobs in all the games have had silly amounts of abilities and this is not special to blue mage (and abilities that do incredibly silly things, death is regularly a black mage spell too). Also if you consider learning "customization" then I'd also say many variants of FF had learning of skills via items, materia, scrolls, and what have you. So I don't think customized loadout is particularly a Blue Mage thing, and if their duty finder version couldn't be customized I would disagree with someone that suggested that's not very blue mage. Although, I am not against the customization in the old content (as SE plans blue mage currently) - could be fun for sure I just don't think you lose any substantial bit of blue mage by not having it either.

Issue 5: Some of the spells are OP
Solution: Like sleep on black mage in the context that would be OP don't let them work so OP like (sleep doesn't sleep bosses). For example Death is a single target hallowed ground cooldown spell that will deal lethal damage to any non-boss related monster, boss related monsters will take 500 potency and a mortality debuff increasing damage to them for the next 10 seconds.
Or
Solution: Don't let the spells that work in duty finder be the crazy OP ones, let them be the spells that work in party finder.

Issue 6: So there is a set of skills that work in duty finder and a set of skills for party finder / not current content? How to manage?
Solution: Flip-able job stone (dual stone in essence), this will manage your gear, skills that can be put on the bar, the bar itself, and how the party finder / duty finder reads you (such that you can't fool the duty finder with your unbalanced set, it's easy to manage, and people in party finder know if you can do current content or if you're going in OP mode with restrictions on what content).

Issue 7: But I want that sweet solo content / casual aspect SE was selling, don't ask them to remove it!
Solutio--: Very few have asked for a pure purge (or any) of that side of Blue Mage. I've seen some but at least to me most are either uninterested but not wanting to damage content for others or want both (like myself).

Issue 8: It costs money and time!
/shrug, that's true and there is little I can say besides ask for it anyways. Like SE says preventing chocobo from messing with your duty queue is too hard, but people never stopped asking for it (and a long, long, while later it works lol). They found a way. It's true some things are just too dang expensive to do, but I don't feel blue mage is extreme (but is definitely time and money consuming without a doubt).

But I want to say they already have designed 100+ skills for blue (we will start at release with 48). Out of the 100+ they have planned I'm sure they can narrow down a selection of 24 that they can then tweak into a cohesive gameplay unit that is fun and fair. They already have the skill art, animations, and means of acquisition, thus Blue Mage becoming duty able is a cheaper job than just making a fresh job at least.

I don't really have a solution though, money and time are not limitless (wish they were, Yoshi if I had a lamp to rub for that I'd do it so you can make some instanced houses lol :3 <3).

Issue 9: Yoshi-P doesn't want to.
He's changed his mind before, but indeed another thing I can't do much about besides hope it'll change.

I think a lot of the better "probably not going to happen guys" arguments are being based off issue 8 and 9, because what can you do?

I'm looking forward to trying the solo/party finder version of Blue Mage, hoping it has some broken skills for party finder/solo content, and from the system I'd like to come back to this thread with a vague example with their current system how they might move Blue Mage into duty accepted status. So we'll see there lol.

Majority of the issues to me seem rather benign in that the solutions begin to reveal themselves in just casual discussion and are not uniquely terrible costs (unless you're suggesting 100+ balanced skills, which I'm not lol).

Lack of desire, money, or time.. those issues are much harder to deal with and I feel in the end those are the real reasons why Blue is as it is - I hope we can convince them to give players that casual solo / party finder side of Blue Mage and also add the duty finder main core. I also hope they consider to do the same to any other job. Perhaps next time they can start beast master off in the solo / party finder side but then work him in slowly after fleshing out the beast master's systems - this could be the new thing. I'd be okay if they started every "unlimited" / "advanced job" off as "limited" with a longer term plan to flesh out their interesting bits first (even if that's a many month project).

[Elerus]

It's coming from a place of being hurt by Blue Mage, which is real dark, I know...but some part of me really wishes they go the Mog route with Dancer and forcing them to have a small chance of learning a specific dance under every weather condition in the game in their limited DPS job gameplay, including like Ultima and Odin weather and such.

After all, it wouldn't be Dancer without that, right?

Dancer should also be restricted to female only according to Final Fantasy Tactics.