Blue Mage is a masterpiece of game design.

[Shurrikhan]

Difficult is understating it. Also, there is a difference between asking for something difficult, and asking for what most would consider a theoretically perfect solution out of subjective notions.
When Reveria said that their limit for "fun" was 10 kills of 7mn fights, that's roughly an hour of play. This can hardly qualify as a "grind" in the context of MMORPGs.

So, in short, they were asking for a grind that fit their lack of patience and tolerance for that kind of content, and labeled it (something that doesn't fit these requirements) as "bad design". That's not asking for "high quality", which is something I don't blame. That's asking for a magical unicorn made of diamonds.

Having high standards is fine, as long as they are realistic.

"That absolutely isn't the case here, and the gulf between the "fun" way and the "effective" way is so large it points to a massive shortcoming in the design," and "that's a good 6 hours of grind on 4 year old [8-man synced] content [to get a single ability]" are two very different issues. Nonetheless, in either case:

There is a vast difference between a perfect solution and being reasonably allowed to build an ability set around or with the inclusion of fun abilities (or, simply most abilities being fun), providing a whole and functioning kit, rather than solely the most muted and straightforward ones, where only a tiny minority of the overall kit is truly usable.

There is a vast difference between creating content that allows players to enjoyably revisit old content and 6 hours of grinding among an efficient team (which can be gathered almost solely in this context) to get a single skill.

[Zephera]

I don't really like that BLU is so weak it has to be carried through party content by stronger jobs to even have a chance to learn it's skills, doesn't help that the drop rate on said skills is often miserable, took me 2 hours to get Glower.

[xbahax92]

The solution can be so easy, yet people come here to offend & defend the current state of limited jobs.
The side content that BLU offers is totally fine, gathering your own skills is a unique feature. The masked carnivale is another challenge, which sounds refreshing and fun.
But why stop there? Every other job has quests tied with skills. Why not do the same for BLU and hand out skills that are needed for duty finder content?
Simply said, get your self-destruct skills (fun skills) from the outside world, while learning DPS based abilities from job quest that are required to enter the duty finder.
Why does it have to be only one-sided content while it could be both sided. Why gate the one or the other, but not benefit all?
Stop being stubborn.

[ChocoFeru]

I don't really like that BLU is so weak it has to be carried through party content by stronger jobs to even have a chance to learn it's skills, doesn't help that the drop rate on said skills is often miserable, took me 2 hours to get Glower.

You can do the content with a full party of BLU if you got the overworld/easy dungeons skills. Can tank properly, heal a lot and do tons of damage, so technically you can beat Shiva EX with a full party of BLU.

I got glower at the second try. RNG god wasn't in your side :/ (a friend got it at the 8th try)

[Zephera]

You can do the content with a full party of BLU if you got the overworld/easy dungeons skills. Can tank properly, heal a lot and do tons of damage, so technically you can beat Shiva EX with a full party of BLU.

I got glower at the second try. RNG god wasn't in your side :/ (a friend got it at the 8th try)

Yeah, dungeon trash is really easy with BLU thanks to all it's AoE, but I did 3 runs today of Satasha Hard with a full BLU party for Ink Jet and the 2nd boss and the Kraken were agonizingly slow, mostly because they're immune to missile and tail screw. In the time it takes for a team of BLU's to run around and kill all the kraken arm adds to stop a wipe from happening against the kraken, he'll have a new set of arms up to take down. If the drop chance on the skill was guaranteed for how long that took, I would have been much happier as the first run was fun but the rest turned into a real slog, after just 3 runs of it my team was exhausted.

EDIT: It probably would have been a lot easier if someone swapped to a lvl 70 class, but none of us wanted to bite the bullet and take the chance that other people in the party might ditch the moment they got the skill leaving the charitable person hanging with nothing to show for it themselves.

[Deceptus]

Can tank properly, heal a lot and do tons of

Tried an all BLU Ifrit Ex and the "Tank" BLU got absolutely slaughtered.

[Reveria]

When Reveria said that their limit for "fun" was 10 kills of 7mn fights, that's roughly an hour of play. This can hardly qualify as a "grind" in the context of MMORPGs.

So, in short, they were asking for a grind that fit their lack of patience and tolerance for that kind of content, and labeled it (something that doesn't fit these requirements) as "bad design".

No, it's bad design - at best. At worst, it's a massive disrespect of the player's time.

I may have said I'd be fed up with an hour of Primal kills, but really it was an arbitrary number, maybe I'd last two hours. Regardless, that's irrelevant because context is important, and you completely missed the context of my argument. It seems you may be focusing on your preconceived notion that I am just a whiny, impatient MMO player rather than what I'm really trying to say. I'm going to try to elaborate a bit further about the various poor design decisions behind Blue Mage since maybe I wasn't clear - because it's not just poor spell learning rates. But we'll start with that.

By the time my group got our Shocking Strike from Ramuh last night, we had easily exceeded 75 kills, but we'll cut it off there because I wasn't keeping strict track of the kill count for my own sanity. Average kill time was probably just shy of 2 minutes, so in theory we spent about 150 minutes. I agree that's probably not super horrible! But like I said, context is very important here, so let's apply it: that means the learn rate for primal spells is very low, as we're experiencing similar problems with Shiva and Leviathan.

Now with that mind, let's go back to my 7 minute level sync kills, and assume our luck was the same. Imagine spending 8.75 hours for a SINGLE ability. There are six primal skills to collect. 52.5 hours if your luck is consistently that bad, and assuming you can kill them that fast, and never wipe. Oh, and I don't really think it's feasible (not the same as possible) to 8 BLU these fights. So you probably have to do it twice if all eight of your friends want it. So make that 105 hours. If you consider our Ramuh luck an outlier (it probably is, in fairness), that's still a lot of time spent on just these six skills, and we haven't even touched dungeons or the other trials.

That's absolutely unreasonable, and if anyone can tell me they think BLU (or ANY job, for that matter) is fun enough to sustain that much grinding of the same 6 fights, I applaud them and bravo, I'm glad the FFXIV was able to fill that niche, sorry to bother you. Let's not forget that these fights are 4+ years old at this point, and many players probably already grinded at 50 cap back then for weapons and mounts, which means they've already sunk probably an equal amount of time into them if they had bad luck.

Ok, so it's in theory absurdly grindy if you want to respect the content. Why is that bad design? The main reason is what I said earlier: they designed the learn rates knowing people would want to speed clear the content, meaning they did not care if you want to actually play Blue Mage. If you want to actually play BLU, you are potentially signing up for multiple days (actual quantifiable days, not just a few hours a day for a week or whatever) of your life to complete the kit. That is insulting to the player's time, and disconnected from the what the progression of the job could be instead. Why not give a boost to learn rate for BLUs who decide to challenge themselves and do the content level synced with their friends, or even bigger a boost for minimum item level? If either of those were the case, the best way to learn the strongest spells very well might be actually having fun, playing Blue Mage, but the devs said "nah screw it, they'll just get their friends to carry them" and those interested in doing it the other way have to really want to risk a lot of time and patience. Blue Mage should have an active role in it's own progression, but due to the difficulty of doing it on your own, it sits in the back and memes while your friends do it for you.

This leads into another poor design decision: spell distribution. There are too few spells available to the strictly solo player. I don't think I have to explain this, but just in case, BLU was touted as a "unique solo experience." When only 15 or 16 of the 49 spells available to you are easily soloable, I think that the design has failed on arrival. On top of this, because so many spells are also locked behind capping, you barely feel any sense of progression as you level. Then, on top of THAT there's almost no sense of progression Because you level SO insanely fast. It's so abbreviated I have to wonder why it didn't just start at 50. In one sense this could be a blessing considering how painful some of the spell acquisition can be, but if they had slowed the leveling process somewhat, and spread the spells out over more enemies in the open world, the leveling process could have been more fun for longer. Instead, you get a superficial and abbreviated leveling process, 30 minutes of spell scavenger hunt, and then hours and hours of either attempting to get spells with a group or getting carried through content barely participating.

Speaking of the solo experience...Blue Mage just isn't strong enough on its own to be that unique solo experience. You can level to 50 on your own sure. You can get some spells on your own, sure. But the only true solo aspect of BLU is the Carnivale - which by the way, seems like it will be a fun puzzle especially if you go in blind. Learning a good 75% of your kit requires some form of outside help, and most of it at 50 so you won't have most of your kit. We were told BLU would be insanely imbalanced and could never be a real job because of that, but I'm not seeing it. You have Missile, Tail Screw, Doom, and White Wind as the really stand out "busted" skills, with Diamondback as an honorable mention for some interesting tanking solutions. Of those, Doom is sort of a victory lap spell you really probably don't get until you've got most everything else anyways, so it doesn't help you much progressing as a Blue Mage. Missile and Tail Screw (and Doom obviously but again, it's likely one of the last skills you get) do work on some enemies, but their single target nature and hit rate would make it pretty difficult to make a lot of progress truly alone in level appropriate content, and let's not forget all the bosses that are immune. And really is it actually that impressive to solo a dungeon if the devs just willingly have handed you an instant KO spell or three? The novelty is there but it's short lived.

Blue Mage really needed to break the game in it's own context, but it doesn't. I'm sure we'll see some fun things come out as more people finish the unlock process, but that's the problem. You can't leverage any of the potentially strong stuff while leveling, while learning spells, while playing on your own. The solo experience just doesn't exist and that's deplorable considering BLU paid for its existence because of those claims. Blue Mage could have been really fun solo experience from start to finish but all the systems undermine the concept (yes, even the Carnivale because good luck doing everything there without having most of your spells, and therefore hinges on your group participation), and therefore is bad design. My presumed impatience has nothing to do with it. Whether or not you like or don't like to group has nothing to do with it. Objectively speaking, the design of the class is at odds with how it was advertised and expected to be used.

[Reveria]

help I'm bad at forums accidental quad post

[Reveria]

help I'm bad at forums accidental quad post

[Reveria]

help I'm bad at forums accidental quad post