Blue Mage Spell/Skills Feedback (Limited Job Focus)

[Shougun]

I've only gotten maybe half the spells of BLU so far, but I'm pretty disappointed with what I have.

Just a few spells I have issues with and I feel I can sufficiently comment on.

Blood Drain should restore HP. I've yet to have a situation where I need MP on BLU, maybe when I get more level 50 spells, but for an early level spell the MP gain is useless. And as a solo job BLU really needs some sort of self-heal. BLU in XI got Pollen at level 1 to help them survive, but we have no equivalent. Before White Wind I've found drain to be one of most useful spells for BLU.

Bristle is just dark arts. And it feels just as bad. I find myself not using it as much because I hate the constantly spamming of the ability between every spell. They should just make it into a buff that lasts longer or make it stronger but have a cool down. As it is its basically everything I hate with DRK dark arts spam on BLU.

They also should have added better single target damaging spells for the leveling experience if they didn't want people to just cheese it to 50. As it stands I couldn't imagine actually slow grinding to 50 with nothing more than water cannon or 1000 needles for soloing down mobs health.

Yeah blood drain is probably with loom in terms of the most unhelpful (loom can be nice in the carnival but beyond that is a very ... eh spell). My suggestion was to give it (blood drain) a cast speed buff when over 50% mp, just to speed up blue mage (and would definitely make it a useful spell lol, lower than 50% was a much larger return on mp). HP definitely makes conceptual sense but with some other changes I made in the list I actually thought a few more ways to get mp back might be helpful (a few changes I added are mana strong drains). I'm not against the hp idea just didn't touch upon it in the list because of other things that were suggested :3

Agreed bristle is not exciting. My suggestion was bristle has a cooldown but applies a boost to the next set of potency based spells (and is instant cast buff). Such that you weave it in once every now and then and due to how it works it'll encourage you to build a sort of free flowing rotation. Currently due to the cast time and % boost it's actually not worth casting on many spells, there are some notable exceptions though (like song of torment).

I actually grinded to 50, it wasn't that bad lol. 1k needled with some random people in northern thanalan . Although that brings me back to the "I wish the powerhouse feeling of 1k was better balanced across all abilities, it's nice feeling, but it'll die and I want to see more ability variance at the same time of it not "dying"".