Blue Mage: Are you kidding me!?

[Ceallach]

I honestly think blue mage is fine as it is. You don't really use Vercure much as a red mage once you have a raid on lock, but that just means you're fulfilling your role as a DPS more. Does that mean red mage having Vercure was a mistake, or that it being a DPS was a mistake? No. But it does mean red mage couldn't really get better healing actions in order to avoid overshadowing actual healers.

Now apply this to blue mage. This is a job that can literally do anything, that would never fit into a single role like paladin, dragoon, or white mage. The blue mage would have to gear up, spells and all, for the role he or she would be playing. But once you've learned every spell and obtained your equipment, what stops the meta from being 100% blue mages? In order to fulfill these roles, blue mage would have to be able to perform as well as the rest of the jobs in the game, if not better. But add in spells like Level 5 Death (and let me remind you that no one who works for Square Enix has said whether bosses are going to be immune to this or not), and blue mage is a guaranteed "better" job because you can just one-shot the boss and be done with your raid or trial in five minutes or less.

Or, perhaps blue mage will be underwhelming compared to any other jobs, and therefore would be ostracized in raiding environments because people care too much about the meta to begin with. This is a game in which any job can clear any content, after all.

Simply put, this is not Guild Wars, and if blue mage is your reason for not playing this game, I suggest you just don't come back. This game has so, so much more to it, so if one little thing like this is going to ruin everything for you, I don't think you have the capacity to appreciate the whole. Now, if you're disappointed with blue mage, but you can still look at other aspects of the game without letting that get in the way, I've no problem. But I'm really just tired of how small-minded people are being.

[Seraphor]

Just a minor nitpick, I've been seeing the term "pro-BLU" and "anti-BLU" from a few people now, I believe that this is misleading, the argument is really about "pro-Blue Mage as a limited job" and "anti-Blue Mage as a limited job." Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but there wouldn't be such an outcry from the "anti" crowd if they didn't have a love of Blue Mage to begin with, whereas anti-Blue Mage makes it sound like they're against the job.

How about we stop using either to prevent pointless tribalism?

[Kabooa]

The blue mage would have to gear up, spells and all, for the role he or she would be playing. But once you've learned every spell and obtained your equipment, what stops the meta from being 100% blue mages?

A basic understanding of game design and balance.

[whiskeybravo]

That's exactly what a lot of people on the pro-BLU side are doing as well. Trust me, I acknowledge the flaws with BLU, I'm just scepticle of the solutions proposed by the community. It's not as simple as allowing it to do content that it isn't designed for, and I'm worried that the anti-BLU crowd is being short sighted in what it wants. If the anti-BLU crowd is who the Devs listen to, I worry that one of two things will happen.

1) BLU is forced into content that it isn't designed for, causing job imbalance and a ripple effect that will affect many aspects of the game.
2) Far more likely, the "boycott" will give the Devs the impression that BLU was a failure and not worth investing more resources into.

This is all before we have even got a chance to play the job. It could well be that next week we find that BLU has been designed in a way that would not suit party content in the slightest.

I don't think you need to be a game designer to critique a game's design, and that's actually a pretty slippery slope if we start to apply that sort of logic to other areas of life, whereby nobody's opinion is valid unless they are a "professional". Because, you know, professionals have never made mistakes and are perfectly infallible in their decision making.

It could very well be that BLU is fun within it's sphere of content, but that doesn't change the fact it's not designed to be like the jobs we've come to know and love, or hate. It doesn't change the fact that it's going to consume dev time to create specialized content for this one off-job that has no bearing on the player's overall progression within the game, nor is it a part of the content loop that keeps players logging in long-term. I'd use the comparison to Eureka '"side-content" but really Eureka is at least tied to relic weapons/gear which everyone in the game can benefit from if they so desire - I don't see an equivalent benefit for BLU. It's just there to be completed and once you're done it's forgotten about until the next BLU patch where they get to do more. It's hard to consider it any more a part of the game than the Adventures of Hildebrand, albeit a bit more interactive along the way.

But perhaps it's just my Extremely Pessimistic View. I'd like to think players are reasonable enough to accept that traditional FF jobs need to be modified to fit into the role paradigm of this game, and the onus is on SE to make it work and be fun.

[Fyce]

Such as?

I mean, what are you referring to as "Regular battle content"?

Since, having BLU level up with overworld content (Which is what they're designed for currently with their boost to overworld experience) has little impact on most people's concept of "Regular battle content" which would be dungeons...

If we talk about BLU in dungeons (If we allow them to access DF) then, the main concern of everyone who promotes the trashing of the job, is "What if BLU player has not learned spells X, Y, Z which we for some reason consider "Critically important" for use in faceroll DF content?". To which, it's easy enough to implement Job Quests that surmount to "Go learn spells X, Y, Z", still keeping the core of the class (The learning of spells manually), but also enticing players to go and pick up the "Critically important" spells.

I put emphasis on "Critically important", because as right now, people playing normal jobs often fail to actually use core skills for their class and DF content still can still be completed just fine. Like, as I've posted in another thread:

This happens even in max level content that's also gated behind item level requirements. So, you can forgive my scepticism that a few BLU players who might not be running the "Most optimal" skills is somehow cause for concern to the point where "Regular Battle Content" is broken beyond belief and requires BLU players to be completely removed from accessing it. I mean, by that definition, we should also outright ban SAM, NIN, BRD, DRG, BLM and any other class that people don't use optimally from using DF or accessing raids, because "People might not use skills"

"Regular battle content" is basically every instanced battle content (which does include Eureka, Deep Dungeons, etc. even if the design of those resonate more into their own echo chambers). This content is designed around what the current trinity system is based on, with roles having a very defined purpose and capabilities. To be able to properly fit on this tight balance, BLU would need to fit these boundaries and patterns. It currently does not.

Regarding your argument about "critically important spells", these spells would be what most consider a basic "rotation". The current Blue Mage doesn't even have one. But this is actually beyond the point. You are comparing bad players who won't do their rotations correctly, with a job that has the natural possibility of not even being able to be played. These are very different issues. One boils down to the player itself being incompetent, the other is a restriction of the job itself (so, a player issue in one hand, and a game issue in the other). Even the best player in the world cannot perform well on a Blue Mage that has no skills. Besides, you are talking about a small subset of terrible players, while Blue Mage's learning shenanigans hits absolutly everyone.
Another point being: what if a few "critically important" skills are hard to get? What if these skills are even harder to get as times goes on because less and less people are willing to help new Blue Mages to get their skills? Some players would hit a wall at some point.

The "just make some skills mandatory" solution is all fine and dandy when you just write it like that, but is one of these things that I was refering to when I talked about issues and flaws that would arise. If you dive just a little bit into how could be implemented such a solution, you'll dig up problems after problems that you'd have to solve without even knowing if it'll work in the end and if you will be able to stay more or less true to your initial design intents.

And your point being?

People are here complaining about people complaining because "We haven't even played the job yet".

But when the initial complaints are about the fact that cannot be used in the majority of the games content (Thus relegating it to a really minor amount of usage, akin to that of a Gold Saucer side activity) then having been able to play the job or not has no bearing on the actual basis of the complaints.

Now, IF the complaints where to do with the power level or the fun of actually using the job, then yes, there would be merit in trying to undermine arguments by highlighting the lack of hands on experience with the job.

I'm not talking about trying the job before complaining. I answered specifically to your point about BLU not being able to do "actual content". What I'm simply saying is that every class/job category in this game have its own content and cannot participate in some other. Fisher cannot raid. Alchemist cannot do dungeons. Black Mage cannot craft. Paladin cannot gather materials. These categories of classes/jobs are not equiped with the proper tools nor are balanced to do the kind of content they weren't designed for. Limited Jobs, despite having a fighting related toolkits, are simply another category of playable classes/jobs that are only able to do what they are designed to be able to do.

Finally, it's not an issue about if they could've made BLU as a regular job. They definitly could. But that's not what they wanted to. That didn't fit the vision they had for such a peculiar job.

[Skos]

Just a minor nitpick, I've been seeing the term "pro-BLU" and "anti-BLU" from a few people now, I believe that this is misleading, the argument is really about "pro-Blue Mage as a limited job" and "anti-Blue Mage as a limited job." Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but there wouldn't be such an outcry from the "anti" crowd if they didn't have a love of Blue Mage to begin with, whereas anti-Blue Mage makes it sound like they're against the job.

I think it's even simpler than that.
It's just "pro-BLU" vs "anti-limited jobs".

Both sides are misinterpreting each other when it comes to this.
The people that are pro-BLU are fine with the current iteration of BLU and understand why it's a limited job, though it is as you say; repeated "anti-BLU" posts coming from the "anti-limited jobs" side can cause the wrong impression. (As if to say that they're against BLU as a concept itself.)
Whereas on the other hand the pro-BLU crowd seems to try to deligitimize the "anti-limited jobs" arguments out of love for this (somewhat) faithful iteration of BLU, not considering the other side is against the concept of limited jobs and not against BLU.

Sorry if that seemed like an incoherent mess of rambling, I'm really tired and a little drunk at the moment. Hope I got my point across without repeating myself too much, I tend to go on tangents when talking about subjects I'm passionate about.

As for my own stance on the matter, when BLU was initially revealed to be a limited job I lost my shit. Went through the 5 stages of grief in the timespan of about 4 days. Then went back, read some interviews about BLU with Yoshida, thought about some things regarding the concept of limited jobs and now I'm in the camp that's cautiously optimistic for BLU.
There's a lot of good things that can come out of BLU in my honest opinions. It could very well lay the fundamentals for things like challenging solo content, which the Carnivale seems to be about, a relevant overworld that has a function outside of crafting, gathering, treasure maps, hunts and questing. An alternate way of "progressing" (as in progressing towards end-game) on a class. A class in which it's all about the journey, not the destination.

Do I think it's fair to call BLU a "job"? Honestly, it's a job in name only. It functions completely differently and separately from any other DoW/DoM class in this game. Whether that's a good thing or not remains to be seen. Thinking about it, I'm more excited for potential future content than I am about BLU actually being released.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'll give it a chance, moreso for the novelty than anything else. The most important question about BLU that I want answered is going to be: "Is it FUN?" After all, why would I do something if it isn't fun? I don't care if it's ever able to do end-game, I don't care if I'll be able to farm whatever capped tomestone with it, as long as it's fun. And from what I've seen so far I think I'll be enjoying this.

BLU seems to be Square's way of experimenting with a completely new concept, which is something they have often been criticized for.

It also raises some concerns though. Will the overworld be able to provide enough mobs for all the Blue Mages looking to get their spells? Will it be able to actually be a solo experience or will I be forced to party up to get spells at some point? How much development time is Blue Mage (and all future limited jobs for that matter) going to take away from level-capped content? If Square can find a good balance here it might all work out.

[redcurrant18]

Blue Mage already has mandatory skills that it acquires through its job quests, like other jobs. The bulk of its skills also deal burst damage similar to Black Mage. A core part of its rotation is restoring its own mana through Blood Drain, similar to how Black Mages restore their mana using Blizzard spells. Spells obtained from slaying the Chimera in Cutter's Cry also combo with each other, and there is another combo that can be used when an enemy is inflicted with petrification. Once a Blue Mage has skills such as these, it can combo magic and deal damage in a variety of ways.

It is a highly useful job, but I wouldn't go so far to call it game breaking because restoring its mana does take a while when you consider the high mana cost of spells like White Wind and Bad Breath and the low potency of Blood Drain. Also if bosses are already immune to stun in most cases, I don't think it could be that difficult to make future bosses immune to some of Blue Mage's status effects.

[Kalise]

I honestly think blue mage is fine as it is. You don't really use Vercure much as a red mage once you have a raid on lock, but that just means you're fulfilling your role as a DPS more. Does that mean red mage having Vercure was a mistake, or that it being a DPS was a mistake? No. But it does mean red mage couldn't really get better healing actions in order to avoid overshadowing actual healers.

To be honest, I think that says more about how impactful healers are than anything about RDM's power. What with the whole trying to minimize time spend actually using heals and maximize time spent DPSing on Healers meaning that a DPS with a single heal skill has potential to actually overshadow actual healers if they received additional support for that side of their job...

Now apply this to blue mage. This is a job that can literally do anything, that would never fit into a single role like paladin, dragoon, or white mage. The blue mage would have to gear up, spells and all, for the role he or she would be playing.

In THEORY they can do anything. In practice, it's quite possible for them to not actually be adequate at tanking/healing in actual content. It's all dependant on the potency of their skills and the balancing done.

Like, it's quite possible for them to have a "Tanking" stance that allows them to be hardier while soloing and then use crafted gear all melded for VIT/DET but that's still a far cry from having the higher defence tank gear, innate stats on tank gear, tank only stats such as Tenacity and the plethora of CD's needed to negate all the Tankbusters which are the only meaningful damage on bosses.

Same for healing. They might have heals, such as a RDM. But again, they might not have the same throughput, resource management and utility of an actual healer to make it viable.

This will be something we find out when we get to play them (But also, it's something that can be talked about now, in the sense that it is something that the balance team could choose to do in order to allow BLU to be a normal job but without becoming a "OP" meta job that dominates every other class)

But once you've learned every spell and obtained your equipment, what stops the meta from being 100% blue mages?

Utility that other classes bring? The fact that maybe they wouldn't be better at every role compared to every other classes?

In order to fulfill these roles, blue mage would have to be able to perform as well as the rest of the jobs in the game, if not better.

Again, this is entirely dependant on IF the balance team wanted to actually try and balance them to actually viably compete in all 3 roles. Rather than balance them to compete in a single role and just have solo utility that takes the form of the other 2 roles.

But add in spells like Level 5 Death (and let me remind you that no one who works for Square Enix has said whether bosses are going to be immune to this or not), and blue mage is a guaranteed "better" job because you can just one-shot the boss and be done with your raid or trial in five minutes or less.

Add in spells that could easily be given restrictions and has already been mentioned by SE to not work on final bosses in dungeons and you make the class OP...

Great argument. Very compelling.

Not like they can't literally just prevent the use of obviously OP spells like Level 5 Death in duties. As well as other spells having lowered Potency during duties so they can still be strong but not OP outside of fulfilling the fantasy of using OP monster spells in the overworld (Maybe you also limit their potency vs Elite Hunt marks so people don't just run around one shotting A/S ranks)

Or, perhaps blue mage will be underwhelming compared to any other jobs, and therefore would be ostracized in raiding environments because people care too much about the meta to begin with.

This wouldn't even be a problem. Since, 1) Not everyone is a hyper competitive raider who is super strict on meta only. 2) Classes can be rebalanced. If BLU is underperforming, they can get buffed at a later date so they are more acceptable in raiding environments.

This is a game in which any job can clear any content, after all.

Except Blue Mage, apparently.

But I'm really just tired of how small-minded people are being.

Hahahahaha, I like that comment. Especially, when you're being very narrow minded about how BLU implementation MUST be either extremely OP being able to perform all 3 roles equally if not better than all other classes AND have their OP abilities have to work on every target in the entire game no exceptions, OR they have to be anaemic in their power (Which is somehow and issue that requires they be hard limited in the content they can actually access... If just not being meta is grounds for that, why did WHM and MCH just get buffs to tide them over for 5.0 reshuffles instead of being banned from accessing raids?)

In fact, most of the arguments for limiting BLU stem from narrow mindedness. Either from the people who are giving the arguments, or the very notion of the argument itself.

In essence, the things I've noted are:

1) "People would complain that they have to do extra things when they main BLU instead of just rushing MSQ > Raids!"

Which is suggesting that the majority of players in the game are so narrow minded, that they are incapable of comprehending a new job that has a different progression systems. Thus the job needs to be limited so... People can't main it?

It would be simple enough to clearly label the job as something different and when doing the quest to unlock the job, having a warning pop up that essentially tells you that the job is different and its progression system is more time consuming than other jobs because of that.

2) "BLU's would be ostracized for not having spells X, Y, Z in group content!"

Which is suggesting that there can't be anything in place to push BLU players towards picking up what people would consider "Core" spells. Whilst still retaining the feel and gameplay that is unique to BLU in terms of learning enemy spells.

Not only that, but it's not a particularly common occurrence to ostracize people for not USING skills on already existing classes. Like one of the things mentioned is that BLM gets an AoE spell at level 18. But how many level 18 BLM actually use it when it costs so much and that level tanks don't often pull half the dungeon at a time to make AoE damage worthwhile? (Especially when melee classes don't get their AoE's until level ~40 and healers don't get their AoE damage skills until level ~50)

3) "They have OP spells!"

Implying that such SPELLS can't be limited, in lieu of the ENTIRE JOB. Like, why is it so easy to accept the ENTIRE JOB being limited in its use, but so hard to think that maybe, just maybe, you could limit the problem spells?

It's not unheard of for an MMO to give classes fluff spells that are only useful in overworld content/solo rather than being staple in Dungeons/Raids. In fact, this is the case for many Tanks as is, with their Enmity combo and Tank stance being relegated to disuse for much of their time...

"But won't it feel awkward when you step into a dungeon and half your skills aren't usable!" is a retort to such limitation.

But, this is dependant on BLU being given such a large volume of directly OP skills to learn. Ones that, can't just be tuned down in potency during duties by their very nature (I.e. Level 5 Death). If there isn't so many OP spells, then you won't have to lose much when you enter a duty.

Also, again, it's based off the idea that the playerbase is so narrow minded that they would get upset that they can't just enter a raid and Level 5 Death all the bosses...

4) "They can be any role!"

Again, it comes from the narrow mindedness that there can't be actual balance done on the class.

Is RDM a healer because it has Vercure and Verraise?

Is SMN a Tank because it has Titan-Egi?

Are DRK, PLD and WAR DPS classes because they have Blood Weapon, Sword Oath and Deliverance respectively?

Or are they just tools within their kit that give an essence of another role but the jobs are balanced to the point where they are still only good for a single role?

It's not impossible for BLU to be balanced where it has Tank/Healer skills, but still only fulfils a DPS role outside of solo or outdated content because of the strength of said skills.


So yeah, the crux of at least my view point, is that, because people en masse are supposedly unwilling to accept the idea of a new job that has some different mechanical functions as a way of adding in a new dynamic to playing the game and thus would just complain endlessly if BLU was able to access all content in any way, shape or form.

That BLU and by extension, any future "Limited Jobs" that may be implemented as additional jobs with different dynamics to mix things up and add a little spice to those omnijob players (Or to attract people who just like to play with those little quirks), need to be segregated from the majority of the game and pretty much just secluded to their own little mini-game (That there's no guarantee will actually receive updates over time...).

Which, is frankly, BS.

There exists many different avenues to mitigate all of the various "Potential" issues (Since, well... We haven't got the job yet, how do we know that everyone will be complaining about having to go learn their new skills while "Everyone else is rushing through the MSQ"? How do we know that BLU's will be ostracized from group content because of not having spell X, Y or Z?)

Heck, there's even the option of releasing BLU as a normal job, able to do all content with the various different things implemented to mitigate the main issues that come to many people's minds and then if, for some reason, it becomes impossible to balance the uniqueness of the job vs how everyone is complaining about them, THEN they could make the decision to limit the job out of certain content.

But releasing it with the express purpose of not being able to do content, just feels disappointing. It feels as though they didn't really try to make BLU work and instead they're just using it as a cash grab.

In addition, to that precedent they're setting for any future jobs that might be cool or have interesting gameplay changes but because of fear of people complaining (Hint: People always complain. It doesn't matter what you do.) they'll just be relegated to mini-games instead of actually pushing the boundaries and making space for both traditional and non-traditional gameplay jobs.

Having more varied gameplay within jobs not only provides a different change of pace for veterans who might get a bit burned out on grinding DF to level up all their jobs, but also opens up more room for new players to find the game appealing if they enjoy the quirks of a particular non-traditional job.

[Huntrss]

We will find out Tuesday 4 more days until Blue Mage.

[Deceptus]

Blue Mage already has mandatory skills that it acquires through its job quests, like other jobs, they might get traits though. The bulk of its skills also deal burst damage similar to Black Mage. A core part of its rotation is restoring its own mana through Blood Drain, similar to how Black Mages restore their mana using Blizzard spells. Spells obtained from slaying the Chimera in Cutter's Cry also combo with each other,

This whole paragraph is just so much false information. They don't get abilities from job quests. They have 49 spells and learn them all from either the field or from Wahlaqee totems (sp) Almost all of their attacks are some form of AOE, not really burst. There's one major burst combo and that's really it. (Peculiar + Moon Flute + Bristle + Ability)

. . .and there is another combo that can be used when an enemy is inflicted with petrification. Once a Blue Mage has skills such as these, it can combo magic and deal damage in a variety of ways. "

And that petrification only has a "chance of successful attack is low". Great. More RNG based gameplay.

My biggest issue as I've said before is the Devs have doubled down on how powerful BLU is supposed to be for the content it can play. I'm not seeing it. If they can't join group content because they'd be OP, make them OP dang it. Everything super powerful has some sort of drawback. Small chances of things landing (has RNG ever been fun?), Spells killing you (can's solo with them), Moon Flute results in a 15s pacify where you can't move.