Blue Mage: Are you kidding me!?

[Kalise]

"Designed for solo play" doesn't mean "exclusively played in solo". It doesn't even exclude the possibility of needing some group play.
You can learn a lot of spells in solo, and the Carnival is done in solo. This is the majority of what Limited BLU has to offer.

Read Yoshida's quote again.

He doesn't say "It's designed for solo play"

He says it IS for solo play. "We may as well make it into solo content you can enjoy on your own"

That is literally saying, that it, as content, can be done solo. Not "Well, most of it is solo, but you have to group up to get some spells, which is one of the primary things to do on the class..."

Blue Mage doesn't have "core skills" or even a "core rotation".
You are still pushing that argument without giving any details as to how it would need to be done exactly. What are these core skills? Where to learn them? How to learn them? How many there are? How are they tied to the "limited" part? What happens when more skills are released? These -and even more- are all questions you have to answer if you want your solution to be used as a proper argument. If you don't, then I can as easily say "it won't work", without having to explain why. The best you did was to take Fire II as a single example and said "they could've done something". That's no way near enough, and you haven't shown any kind of authority or knowledge on the matter that would allow us to trust your solution without detailed explanations.

Perhaps if you bothered to read anything instead of picking out certain things and assuming you have an ultimate answer for it.

As I've said time and time again, the "Core skills" thing is an argument PEOPLE FOR LIMITING THE BLUE MAGE CLASS are bringing up. THEY'RE the ones saying "BLU's would get ostracized from party content because parties would want them to have certain spells"

To which, I say, that those certain spells that people would wish for BLU's to have, those "Core skills" if you would, could be streamlined into regular BLU play without affecting the tenets inherent to the job.

As far as "Where to learn them?" "How to learn them?" "How are they tied to the "limited" part?" "What happens when more skills are released?" go, if you took your head out of your ass for 2 minutes and read a full post you'd know that I suggested something akin to:

Job Quests that refer you to go and learn skills. The quest doesn't hand you the skill like with other classes doing Heavensward job quests. You still have to go and learn it just like every other BLU skill.

However, due to the necessity of having these skills (Skills which would form up the baseline of the class for group content. So, some ST skills, an AoE skill and a bit of utility), they adjust the rates for learning them to be higher, just like they've mentioned that different spells have different chances to be learned, so that they're easier to learn.

Voila, you have "Core" skills, that every BLU would be able to pick up without too much hassle or time invested that would allow them to function in content. With extra skills being luxuries that they learn of their own volition.

If new skills are released, well, if it comes with an expansion and level cap increase, new "Core" skills come from Job quests in the same way. If they're not "Core" then they just go in as regular skills they can learn if they wish.

Then, if you come back and say "Well they don't have 'Core skills'" then I'll just take that as a concession of that particular argument, the one that Yoshida himself stated:

If we made BLU a normal job with party play in mind, there was a high risk of other players forcing you to bring certain actions

If we were to implement BLU as a normal job, there would be restrictions like "I can't raid until i learn all my new moves" or "I can't go to dungeons because i haven't learned those AoEs".

Meaning that argument is irrelevant and inconsequential for in terms of whether BLU can function as a normal class.

When someone tells you that "honestly I don't think that it really fits MMORPG party settings", "I think it would work solo", "I'm concerned when it comes to playing in a party players", "we wouldn't be able to balance the system so it wouldn't revolve around procuring your abilities", "this wouldn't be practical enough to fit in an MMORPG party setting", you don't see that as a red flag?

Honestly, the only quotes there (If they are quotes, the only quotes that I know of are just simply stating essentially "We would have to implement [BLU] in a different way to other jobs") that would suggest something radically different, is the ones referring how it wouldn't really fit into a Party.

But, that said, nothing they've shown so far nor that has been datamined has looked so unbelievably unbalancable in group content.

They really seem to be hinging on the fact that having to actively go and learn your spells is SOOOOOO bad that everyone would hate the job and people who played it.

Nothing about the class seems particularly bad:

Leveling up via Overworld? Sure, no problem. Maybe limit the class so they can't DF while leveling up, pushing them towards Overworld leveling and ensuring that BLU's end up picking up a few skills by the time they're able to join in with PuG groups.

Learning your skills? Okay, maybe a little annoying for some people, but hardly the big bad demon that they seem to be making it out as. Especially when with a bit of thinking about solutions you can come up with ways to mitigate the major problems, such as certain skills being seen as necessities and not all BLU players going and learning them before trying to enter group content, being mitigated by my aforementioned suggestion of having the job quests guide you to go learn the skills that people would consider necessities.

Multi-role capabilities? Is entirely dependant on how powerful they make the tank stance and healing spells. If they tune them correctly, they'd be useful for solo/outdated content, but the job would be just a magical DPS in groups.

Overpowered spells such as instant-death effects? Can be limited so certain targets are immune. High potency skills can be tuned down to strong, but not unreasonable levels. Status effects? Make some enemies immune.

That's about it. That's the "Unique" and "Limited" stuff from BLU. Outside of these specific things, they're literally just a normal job.

[ReiMakoto]

The very absence of a rotation is enough not to fit in the design space of the normal jobs.

But it clearly does have a rotation if you've seen its abilities, where are people getting absence of a rotation from, the very nature of having abilities means that something will have a rotation unless literally all the abilities are no better than each other.

[Kabooa]

But it clearly does have a rotation if you've seen its abilities, where are people getting absence of a rotation from, the very nature of having abilities means that something will have a rotation unless literally all the abilities are no better than each other.

Some don't realize that rotations aren't binary. A rotation is simply what maximizes certain output, the manner in which it happens differs.

Competing resource systems, priority ability systems, raw 123 systems, cost/benefit systems, all of them are considered 'rotations' without being A -> B -> C -> D -> A

[redcurrant18]

Tank stance reduces damage by 70% and increases defense by 40%. This spell and other key ones are gained after you learn a certain amount of Blue Magic. White Wind works similar to how it always has, which is unsurprising, but it also consumes an excessive amount of mana. Lots of the spells do, therefore there are other spells that you are forced to go out and hunt as part of the job storyline that also prove useful. As in, you cannot proceed with job quests until you acquire the desired skill. For example, when you get the skill to restore mana early on.

[zylo1010]

I can't wait for Tuesday. I want to experience how it is before complaining anymore. I mostly play solo anyway and Blu has been my favorite class since ff5. So it might be perfect for me. Hopefully they allow us to do story missions later on. That's the big kicker for me.

[Blueyes]

Multi-role capabilities? Is entirely dependant on how powerful they make the tank stance and healing spells. If they tune them correctly, they'd be useful for solo/outdated content, but the job would be just a magical DPS in groups.

Overpowered spells such as instant-death effects? Can be limited so certain targets are immune. High potency skills can be tuned down to strong, but not unreasonable levels. Status effects? Make some enemies immune.

That's about it. That's the "Unique" and "Limited" stuff from BLU. Outside of these specific things, they're literally just a normal job.

I want to highlight this. All of BLU's spells, including their costs and recast timers, is accessible to the public. And I can tell you right now, Blue Mage is not so off the walls broken that a full rework would be necessary in order for it to function as a proper job. In actuality, Blue Mage is extremely close to being well-balanced. If bosses retain their expected resistances (and even if they currently don't, it would be a fairly simple process to adjust) Blue Mage is left with, what, five problematic spells tops? Out of 49. And those spells aren't set in stone. They can be adjusted.

[KageTokage]

BLU honestly looks as though it has a rotation about as complicated as you'd expect from a level 50 class.

I'm thinking their opener is probably going to be Off-Guard > Peculiar Light > Eruption > Song of Torment > Bristle > Shock Strike/Mountain Buster > Bristle > Glass Dance (You'd need some haste to pull this off comfortably due to the GCDs involved matching Peculiar Light's duration normally).

Their filler is likely just going to be spamming Water Cannon and using Bristle-boosted primal abilities and Peculiar Light as they come off cooldown, while also making sure to keep Off-Guard and Song of Torment up. Moon Flute can be also used if mechanics or a phase transition are going to force you to stop attacking for 15 seconds. Moon Flute + Bristle-boosted Final Sting can be used at the last moment to finish a boss off so being dead doesn't actually cause any DPS loss.

Depending on how much MP all of that costs, you might need to use Blood Drain to regen some MP too, though, or simply forgo using some skills until Lucid Dreaming and/or Refresh bring your MP back up to comfortable levels.

[ReiMakoto]

I'm thinking their opener is probably going to be Off-Guard > Peculiar Light > Eruption > Song of Torment > Bristle > Shock Strike/Mountain Buster > Bristle > Glass Dance.

Their filler is likely just going to be spamming Water Cannon and using Bristle-boosted primal abilities and Peculiar Light as they come off cooldown, while also making sure to keep Off-Guard and Song of Torment up. Moon Flute can be also used if mechanics or a phase transition are going to force you to stop attacking for 15 seconds. Moon Flute + Bristle-boosted Final Sting can be used at the last moment to finish a boss off so being dead doesn't actually cause any DPS loss.

This seems to be right, however i think that all 5 of the primal skills, will share a cd as they are the only ones that have the "shares a recast with blue magic skills". So its a case of pick 1 which you like, but i guess we'll see tuesday.

[Fyce]

Read Yoshida's quote again.

He doesn't say "It's designed for solo play"

He says it IS for solo play. "We may as well make it into solo content you can enjoy on your own"

That is literally saying, that it, as content, can be done solo. Not "Well, most of it is solo, but you have to group up to get some spells, which is one of the primary things to do on the class..."

Have you even seen the Blue Mage presentation at fanfest? There was one slide with big bold letters saying "Designed for solo play". And there was another slide about BLU's progression with a mention of party play.

Oh and, I don't see in that Yoshida quote you took where does it says that it's exclusively for solo play. It just says that you can enjoy it on your own, which is true for the majority of what Blue Mage has to offer.

Perhaps if you bothered to read anything instead of picking out certain things and assuming you have an ultimate answer for it.

As I've said time and time again, the "Core skills" thing is an argument PEOPLE FOR LIMITING THE BLUE MAGE CLASS are bringing up. THEY'RE the ones saying "BLU's would get ostracized from party content because parties would want them to have certain spells"

To which, I say, that those certain spells that people would wish for BLU's to have, those "Core skills" if you would, could be streamlined into regular BLU play without affecting the tenets inherent to the job.

As far as "Where to learn them?" "How to learn them?" "How are they tied to the "limited" part?" "What happens when more skills are released?" go, if you took your head out of your ass for 2 minutes and read a full post you'd know that I suggested something akin to:

Job Quests that refer you to go and learn skills. The quest doesn't hand you the skill like with other classes doing Heavensward job quests. You still have to go and learn it just like every other BLU skill.

However, due to the necessity of having these skills (Skills which would form up the baseline of the class for group content. So, some ST skills, an AoE skill and a bit of utility), they adjust the rates for learning them to be higher, just like they've mentioned that different spells have different chances to be learned, so that they're easier to learn.

Voila, you have "Core" skills, that every BLU would be able to pick up without too much hassle or time invested that would allow them to function in content. With extra skills being luxuries that they learn of their own volition.

If new skills are released, well, if it comes with an expansion and level cap increase, new "Core" skills come from Job quests in the same way. If they're not "Core" then they just go in as regular skills they can learn if they wish.

Then, if you come back and say "Well they don't have 'Core skills'" then I'll just take that as a concession of that particular argument, the one that Yoshida himself stated:

Meaning that argument is irrelevant and inconsequential for in terms of whether BLU can function as a normal class.

I sniped not to have a wall of text like that one. Not because I didn't read you. And since you've ignored my previous answer but kept pushing with your argument of "just force BLU to learn 'core skills'", I basically repeated what I already said to remind you that your "solution" had issues.

Anyway, you are still very vague in your explanations. "Job Quests" is not a good answer. At what level, how many skills (and what skills) would you have at level 15 when queueing for Sastasha and all other dungeons up until max level, how many job quests there need to be (over 120 skills are designed for Blue Mage), what kind of Job Quests -considering the fact that SE stopped linking skills to quests in the lore for future proofing reasons-, how do you handle level sync, what if new "mandatory skills" are added but the only space to put them is in quests far above the current player's level...
There's even more questions to ask on the only topic of "job quests". But I won't bother writting them because I'm pretty sure that you won't bother to give proper details (most likely because you can't). You'll just wave "just take 2mn and look at my previous posts", even if they answer nothing more. I already read them, by the way.

You are the one coming and saying "they could do it", as if you knew better than Square Enix themselves. So if you want to give game design solutions, you better do it properly. Because simply saying "Job Quests that refer you to go and learn skills" is not convincing and is still full of flaws.

Honestly, the only quotes there (If they are quotes, the only quotes that I know of are just simply stating essentially "We would have to implement [BLU] in a different way to other jobs") that would suggest something radically different, is the ones referring how it wouldn't really fit into a Party.

If you see "this would be a solo job" and that "it doesn't fit a MMORPG", and don't think it'd be different than any other regular job, you're either extremely naive, or you are simply not understanding what's being said (or both). Especially since tons of people already got it right and were talking about it. So, again, you have only yourself to blame here.

It was clear that Blue Mage would be treated differently. Countless people got it right, so did I. But you didn't get it. Accept it and move on instead of trying to find excuses.

But, that said, nothing they've shown so far nor that has been datamined has looked so unbelievably unbalancable in group content.

To your eyes, maybe.

Leveling up via Overworld? Sure, no problem. Maybe limit the class so they can't DF while leveling up, pushing them towards Overworld leveling and ensuring that BLU's end up picking up a few skills by the time they're able to join in with PuG groups.

Flawed solution, again, and lacking very important details.
Besides, you still seem to miss the obvious problem that your solution has: a Blue Mage is tasked to make a skillset with up to 24 skills. Forcing a Blue Mage to get "core skills" doesn't mean that they will put them (let alone use them) in their skillsets. Blue Mage is designed to be extremely modular (for the worst and the best). Your solution only works if you remove this modularity. Which isn't the design intent.

Learning your skills? Okay, maybe a little annoying for some people, but hardly the big bad demon that they seem to be making it out as. Especially when with a bit of thinking about solutions you can come up with ways to mitigate the major problems, such as certain skills being seen as necessities and not all BLU players going and learning them before trying to enter group content, being mitigated by my aforementioned suggestion of having the job quests guide you to go learn the skills that people would consider necessities.

"Mitigating" the problem is not enough given the tight design space and balance regular jobs are in. There has to be no problems at all. And as long as you leave "optional skills" in, there will be issues.

Multi-role capabilities? Is entirely dependant on how powerful they make the tank stance and healing spells. If they tune them correctly, they'd be useful for solo/outdated content, but the job would be just a magical DPS in groups.

These skills are already too powerful, and they are only part of the 49 skills out of the 120+ that are already in the works. And changing the skills when your job enter whatever instanced dungeon is not a good game design choice. It's -at best- a band aid that'd feel very clunky.

Overpowered spells such as instant-death effects? Can be limited so certain targets are immune. High potency skills can be tuned down to strong, but not unreasonable levels. Status effects? Make some enemies immune.

"Just rebalance half of the Blue Mage toolkit and make stuff immune". Yeah, easier said than done.

That's about it. That's the "Unique" and "Limited" stuff from BLU. Outside of these specific things, they're literally just a normal job.

They are absolutly not a normal job. The bloody thing doesn't even have a rotation or the same damage formula as other jobs.

But it clearly does have a rotation if you've seen its abilities, where are people getting absence of a rotation from, the very nature of having abilities means that something will have a rotation unless literally all the abilities are no better than each other.

No it doesn't. There are a few skills that interact with each others, but that's not what a rotation is. At least not in FFXIV.

Some don't realize that rotations aren't binary. A rotation is simply what maximizes certain output, the manner in which it happens differs.

Competing resource systems, priority ability systems, raw 123 systems, cost/benefit systems, all of them are considered 'rotations' without being A -> B -> C -> D -> A

So, if I only put two skills in my set, say, Flying Sardine and Self Destruct, you'd still consider me having a "rotation" like the ones my teammates who play regular jobs have to do?
I don't think we have the same defition of a "rotation" as defined by the combat mechanics of this game.

[Ceallach]

I'm just going to blanket say that if you're disappointed with something in this game, just go make your own game. Show SE how it's done. They're just doing their best to please their players, and I'm really sick and freaking tired of all the complaining.