Blue Mage: Are you kidding me!?

[KageTokage]

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.

The primal skills actually say the cooldown sharing is between Feather Rain/Eruption, Mountain Buster/Shock Strike, and Glass Dance/Veil of the Whorl, which are 30, 60, and 90 second cooldowns respectively. Everything else says "Does not share a recast time with other blue magic skills".

I'm inclined to believe that means you'll be able to pick between those ones, since BLU's rotation would be extremely stale otherwise.

[redcurrant18]

words

Uh please go look on reddit or Gamerscape and calm down a bit so you can see that Blue Mage does have skills that combo and a rotation of damage over time, debuffs, and buffs. Job quests and job quests requirements, as in actual spells you have to go learn to be a functional Blue Mage, have also been released. Water Cannon, Blood Drain, 1000 needles, etc these are all skills you need to progress.

[Deceptus]

I'm just going to blanket say that if you're disappointed with something in this game, just go make your own game. .

Such a terrible argument. You know very well no one here can make a game and thus can't counter that argument. What we can do however, is critique a product we're paying for. As long as said critique is respectful and relevant.

Another issue I have is the damage spread. Of the 49 spells, 23 are Aoe, 3 are DoT's, Four are Single Target, and 18 are support.

Of those Four single target, two have a low success chance (Missle / Tail Screw) one Kills you (Final Sting)

The Three Dots are mostly X Spike type dots which probably can't be stacked.

Clearly the ideal way to level is to get a high level Paladin gathering 20 mobs with flash (doing no damage so you get full credit) and aoeing them all down with the multitude of AoE BLU brings.

[ReiMakoto]

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.

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.

As Kabooa said, a rotation is something that maximises damage output using the skills that you have, blue mage has skills and cooldowns, thus an optimal "Rotation" of these skills and cooldowns exists, hence Blue Mage has a rotation. Your Sardine -> Self Destruct isn't a rotation, becauses its not optimal, and it doesn't rotate, its casting one skill then dying. Literally as long as you have a set of skills and a way to put them together, there will exist an optimal rotation, same applies to any other class, and it applies to BLU as well.

[KageTokage]

Honestly, I think it would be a reasonable compromise to just force people to have a special dungeon/raid skill set-up for duty finder that you automatically equip that has all of the abilities that could be considered mandatory for optimal performance (Which are basically all the ones I mentioned in their opener/rotation plus the powerful utility moves like White Wind) with the remaining slots able to be allocated to skills of your choice. That would still leave space for quite a few other moves.

Depending on the instance's level, the use of certain skills could be prohibited to ensure BLU properly scales down to a power level comparable to that of normal classes. It wouldn't actually be that hard to balance because BLU's strength only gets a significant boost when it gets access to key abilities like Off-guard, the primal abilities, Moon Flute, etc, so they could just gradually unlock those for higher level dungeons. A large amount of their abilities are actually fluff due to only varying in their AoE shape or element, which is only especially relevant to the Masked Carnivale.

If you don't have the right skills, then you simply wouldn't be able to queue in duty finder. On a related note, I'm of the belief you shouldn't be allowed to queue as normal classes unless your job quests have been cleared up to the most recent ones as well.

[redcurrant18]

On a related note, I'm of the belief you shouldn't be allowed to queue as normal classes unless your job quests have been cleared up to the most recent ones as well.

1000% agree. If there are level 41 Gladiators running around making my life impossible in the Stone Vigil - why can't a Blue Mage come inside?

[zylo1010]

Whose ready for Blu burn parties.... This guy is

[Kalise]

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.

You still keep missing the point of my arguments though, which is just showing your lack of comprehension, or outright narcissism where anything other that you being correct is impossible.

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...

Are you honestly that dense? Like really?

It's plainly obvious on how they would do it. Job Quests, you know, the things you get at level 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, 52, 54, 56, 58, 60, 63, 65, 68 and 70. The ones that happen to coincide with also "Normal" jobs often learning skills around those levels.

Yeah, those. Those are the levels you would get a Job Quest which would "Guide" you to one of the "Core" skills.

"How many skills would you have at level 15 when queuing up for Sastasha" - I already mentioned that IF they wanted to, they could prevent DF usage while leveling up to a certain level so that you WOULDN'T be able to queue up for Sastasha at level 15. To not only emphasise using the unique Overworld leveling that BLU is using, but also as a method to try and get BLU's to learn a few more skills by the time they start accessing group content.

How to handle level sync? EXACTLY THE BLOODY SAME AS THEY WILL IN THE CURRENT BLU. Each of their skills has a level requirement. So when they level sync, they only get access to the ones that have a level requirement equal or below that of the level they're sync'd to.

This just means, you frontload the absolutely critical skills for stuff like, dealing damage. So that if someone ends up in Sastasha using the DF roulette options, that they will have, for example, a single target nuke to spam (Like every other class that has basically 1-2 ST skills to spam at that level)

Honestly, it seems that you're thinking that because BLU has a lot of skills they can learn that they need to use ALL OF THEM CONSTANTLY in order to do anything. However, that's not going to be the case, people will figure out pretty quickly what an efficient single target/AoE rotation would be and that will be their core skills and everything else would be fluff.

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.

Otherwise known as "I need to make up some more BS, but I'm too dense to make a coherent and actually relevant argument that doesn't just plainly ignore any form of common sense and any answers previously given to me"

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.

You've failed to provide any significant "Flaw" in utilizing job quests to guide people to go learn skills that people would use and see as necessities to play the class.

"Do it properly"? What? Do you want me to literally write out every single line of every single class quest? Is that what I need to do in order to "Properly" show that they can use class quests in order to get people trying to learn and more quickly learning skills that would be seen as necessities by players?

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.

Oh, so instead of providing feedback, I should just accept it and move on.

Because that's how the world works. Never provide any feedback to anything. Just accept everything that gets thrown out and move on.

No, I'm providing my feedback, about how I disagree that Blue Mage needs to be treated to this degree of limitation. How I feel that, not only Blue Mage (Also, subsequent "Limited Jobs"), but also the game as a whole, would benefit from not restricting the job(s) so heavily.

I personally feel, that adding in, new jobs full that have different functionalities, such as BLU's need to learn spells and their focus on Overworld leveling, would only serve to improve the game as a whole. By increasing the accessibility of the jobs in question so that people who focus on a specific type of content aren't unable to play them (I.e. In BLU's case, they can't be played by people who focus on Raids, using DF, doing Exploratory Missions like Eureka or MSQ. At least not in their primary content), but also increasing the number of new players who might find a job they like to play, or like the fact that SE is actually capable of introducing something different into the game proper.

Forcing a Blue Mage to get "core skills" doesn't mean that they will put them (let alone use them) in their skillsets.

Just like how I find bad players on other classes who don't use their skills right?

Better ban SAM/NIN/BLM/RDM/BRD/DRG/PAL/DRK/WAR from group content, in case they don't use their skills!!!!

"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.

How do you completely remove the problem of normal classes not completing their job quests and having all of their skill?

How do you completely remove the problem of normal classes having players who don't USE their acquired skills?

Where's the "No problems at all" in terms of THE JOBS WE ALREADY HAVE? Where I've mentioned, I see people play them poorly? Even though they literally get given 90% of their skills just from leveling up?

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.

Because balancing things is not possible right?

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

"Half the Blue Mage toolkit" is hyperbole.

As mentioned by other users, there's really only like 4 skills out of the 49 currently revealed that have any real problem capacity...

Last I checked, 4 was not 50% of 49.

[ReiMakoto]

Made something for the "BLU doesn't have a rotation" crowd:
https://imgur.com/a/aM0qhyM

There are likely some errors in here (I think thousand needles could be a GCD later in the opener, but I CBA to check), also could change based on mana costs when they come out, but the general structure is there

Edit: I can't count, there are 24 skills on here where i say theres 23 at the bottom

[Auryan]

-snip-

Oh come now, he wasn't suggesting that you aren't allowed to voice your opinion and provide feedback. Don't be so melodramatic. And a problem that a lot of people have with the job quests is that they don't like doing them, even if they get abilities as rewards. And here you have the awesome idea of tying all of BLU skills to things that most people don't like doing. What can possibly go wrong with that?

The problem with core abilities is that you end up making these abilities mandatory. If I'm understanding the devs' idea of BLU is that it works a lot like XI's version where you have a large amount of spells that you decide to add to your build and run with. Like XI's, there are must spells and optional spells, fluff spells as you so eloquently put it, and that it's up to the players to decide what is essential or not. And that's the key difference, the players get to make that choice. To make matters more interesting, a lot of people don't spend their hours crunching for the most DPS-efficient rotation or read guides for the "optimal" build. For most people they will just learn the spells from the book, add them to their build and have fun with it. The problem is that fun doesn't always mean you become a reliable party member, but you will be damn entertaining.

No other job works like this and your examples of banning terrible people sucking at their jobs is a false equivalence. A bad BLM who doesn't know how to keep Enochian up or just spams Blizzard isn't the same as a BLU who doesn't know the "optimal" rotation and build and just has a bunch of utility spells and not at all a reliable DPS.

The difference of reading and using these skills are big. It's one thing to deem something problematic on paper, but to see how it plays out is another. I'm certain that if keeping the BLU spells as is and removing all limitations will present a lot of unforeseeable problems. There are a lot of people who delight in theorycrafting ways to cheat and cheese content, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the rest and future BLU spells.

Balancing is possible, but always comes at a cost. I would love if it we can keep this crazy and funny BLU and put it in max lvl 8/24 mans, but I know that it just would cause problems and I accept that. I am willing to wait to play it and see if I find it fun. If not I'll do like I did with other things I didn't like, such as RDM, LoV and Diadem: ignore it. I think that's a viable option.