Blue Mage is a masterpiece of game design.

[Shurrikhan]

Blue Mage is not a proper job, it's time people accept it. If BLU was a proper job, it wouldn't "learn" its spell, so there would be no point of even calling it a Blue Mage.

Sorry, but no...you can't claim that something "falls flat" because there is another solution and when shown that this solution is too harsh on BLU, go back to the first solution that was already rejected because it would also require BLU more work than any other job...

Being a "proper job" does not necessitate purely level- and job-quest-based skill acquisition, nor does purely level- and job-quest-based skill acquisition necessarily mean something will be a proper job. A "proper job" is simply any job that can participate to roughly the same extent in the content all other allegedly proper jobs can.

Any why shouldn't, in the interest of making something "new", "unique", or "original" -- a highly ambitious selling point -- more time be required than making a job which we cannot rightly say those things about. Taking more development time to do more is not a flaw. It's simply desperately needed design variance. It's largely what breaks the treadmill that's continuously smoothed XIV design roadmaps down to a dull but unvaried sheen. Its cost efficiency should be judged in its own right, not just against previous design tasks. Taking the same amount of time to create something with new aims but incomplete or painfully lacking polish may well be less efficient than either taking more time to truly finish it and let it interact with everything else or simply producing something complete but less unique in its aim. There are no guarantees and while the "tried and true" has dug its rut to deeper costs with each reuse, incomplete or unpolished XIV side-projects do not fair any better.

[xbahax92]

Blue Mage is not a proper job, it's time people accept it. If BLU was a proper job, it wouldn't "learn" its spell, so there would be no point of even calling it a Blue Mage.

I prefer calling it a minigame. Cause thats all you do, collect Triple Triad cards to enter the Tournament, get minions to enter the LoV Challenges, get skills to enter the Masked Carnivale.
If they wanted to give us a new sort of collectathon, they could've simply done this without sacrificing blue mage.

Beside we all know that BLU in FFXIV is not true to its job anymore, I mean you learn skills from achievements.
And while I do not say thats a bad thing, because lets think about the blue mages in the other Final Fantasy titles.
SE has changed blue mage already so many times, it is already a unique Job/Limit Break/Overdrive per Final Fantasy game. Why cant the blue mage be unique in FFXIV? Is FFXIV not its own game in the Final Fantasy series?

[Reynhart]

Ummm... why could you not learn spells and still be a proper job? They could have easily given you a quest every 5 levels where your job trainer says "hey I've descovered a new mob for you to try and learn it's move.

Because that's not "hunting for spells", it's "mandatory acquisition of skills in a specific order".
First, you wouldn't have to seek where to learn the spell (Which is saddly, what everyone is doing because they rushed to see the datamine instead of discovering by themselves)
Second, you wouldn't have to think of a way to learn some abilities sooner than what's expected, to give an edge.
Third, you wouldn't have to strategically chose your spells to deal with a specific situation (Well, apparently, this one is not done very well, but still, that's the intent)

So, basically, you'd work the same as every other, with the additionnal burden of having RNG to determine if your quest is successful. And if you remove RNG, it's even less hunting for spells...

If they wanted to give us a new sort of collectathon, they could've simply done this without sacrificing blue mage.

Well, from what they said, without that collectathon aspect, we simply wouldn't have Blue Mage...at all. So they didn't sacrifice anything.

[seraseth]

My personal opinion on BLU so far

In the beginning: It was an absolute blast!! I had so much fun running around with other random blu's, trying to take on mobs 5-7 levels higher than us to learn cool spells, ping ponging the mob back and forth between us trying to stay alive long enough to learn something. Playing around with the new skills as I got them, the obligatory blow yourself up while giggling maniacally. I was lucky enough to get on before the griefers, so everyone there was having fun, and cheering each other one when they'd learn a spell.

I got my 1000 needles by level 20, and amused myself for a very long time by sneaking up behind mobs and one shotting them with 1000 needles. Eventually I started sleeping them first, to save the aggravation of them walking just out of range by the end of my 6s cast :/

By this point a friend of mine was on, so I ran around with them, helping them get all the spells I had gotten so far, then at lvl 32ish we duo'd tam tara for the spell we needed for our quest (we could likely have done it earlier, but we were too amused by 1000 needles to stop killing stuff :P)

Middle: By the time a 3rd and 4th friend joined us, the thrill of 1000 needles had worn off and we were feeling kinda 'meh' on blu's dmg. The two of us had been grinding our way through coerthas up to level 38 or so, and although we could kill stuff 5-6 levels above us, doing nothing but sleep and thousand needle spam got a bit boring. So we decided we'd just burn together to 50, and get all those dungeon/trial spells together so we could get a better idea of how blu played. We'd cycle in and out, most of us on blu running around sleeping everything with one person on their 70 bard sniping stuff.

End: We started getting some of the other abilities, glower, drill cannon, rams voice/dragons voice, etc and tried various combo's of spells and such, but found the dmg was pretty wussy no matter what we did. That became rather disheartening. You could run in and ram's voice (and hope the ice proc'd) then run out to dragon voice(because it has the same donut shape as the mob casting it, so cant be in close range) and hope that you were A) in the proper range to hit them all, and B) the ice hadn't worn off yet. Or, you could just stand there and spam glower or plainscracker depending on the layout of the mobs and do more dmg faster.

The combo's could be kind of fun when they worked, but they were so underwhelming it felt useless to bother doing it other than to amuse yourself for a few mins, and that amusement faded fast. Particularly when combined with lousy learn rates, when you just want to get in and out quickly. If something is going to take multiple steps and the right timing/procs to set up, it should be worth the effort. The only combo that felt powerful was the guard off+bristle+peculiar light+final sting combo, but of course with that you don't really get to enjoy your efforts

I have not tried the carnival yet, because I was originally planning to get most of the spells first, but considering the horrible rates on primals, that's out for me. I don't do low drop chance grinds. I've never gone after a single dog, or bird, and only got the ponies when some ppl in my fc were 3manning them. I intend to at least try the carnival today, but from what I've heard so far it sounds kinda underwhelming too.

Conclusions:

At first blu was everything I hoped it would be, I was running around the world, chasing down mobs for skills, working with strangers I ran into, pushing my luck trying to get things way above me. It was fantastic. At that point, I fully agreed with the OP, this was as much fun as I'd had in ages in an MMO. But with maybe 10-12 easy overworld skills to get, I ran out quickly. Once the fun novelty part wore off (and I stopped giggling every time I 1000 needled some unsuspecting mob's butt) blu started to feel kinda meh. I had a bunch of skills, but most of them didn't do much other than provide entertainment, which is fun, but it does wear off kinda quickly (possibly less quickly in my case cause I'm easy to amuse like that :P)

A bit of background: I love the world/aesthetics/lore of ff14, but there's extremely limited solo content. I enjoy doing dungeons now and then with my friends, but I really dislike doing random df pugs. Unfortunately between time zones/schedule etc, about 80-90% of my play time, I'm on alone. Since I'm not really into crafting, my solo activities consist of 20-30 mins of beast tribes dailies, sending out my retainers and a mini cactpot. Once I'm done with the msq (which I absolutely love, to the point I've played several alts through HW) there's not really much to keep me playing.

So when I first heard about blu I was thrilled, it's the reason I came back when I hadn't played since a mth or so after expansion started. Finally some solo content for me to enjoy! Something other than grind dungeons! I was honestly expecting it to be a bit overpowered, with it being limited from playing with others, I was hoping 3-4 blu could take on ex primals like some 60 or 70 solo's could. But even if it wasn't too powerful, I could still be happy spending weeks roaming the overworld, hunting down spells by myself.

When I saw the spell list and how little of it was open world, I was disappointed. I had gotten the bulk of the open world ones and gotten to level 32 solo within a few hours. But I still had hopes that with some bigger spells, a small group of blu friends could have a great time plowing through dungeons, causing all sorts of havoc. Then was disappointed again when I felt about as powerful as a 2.0 cnj without cleric stance on spamming stone 1.

I know I haven't tried carnival yet, but I really don't have any hopes that that will magically turn the job around for me.

When I read about blu, I felt a bit bad for those who wanted to play it in current content like a normal job, but mostly I was just happy for finally, some other type of content, something that I can really enjoy! But now I just feel doubly bad for those that wanted a real job, because what we got didn't make me happy either. Well, except for those first few magical hours.

[Burningskull]

Because that's not "hunting for spells", it's "mandatory acquisition of skills in a specific order".
First, you wouldn't have to seek where to learn the spell (Which is saddly, what everyone is doing because they rushed to see the datamine instead of discovering by themselves)
Second, you wouldn't have to think of a way to learn some abilities sooner than what's expected, to give an edge.
Third, you wouldn't have to strategically chose your spells to deal with a specific situation (Well, apparently, this one is not done very well, but still, that's the intent)

So, basically, you'd work the same as every other, with the additionnal burden of having RNG to determine if your quest is successful. And if you remove RNG, it's even less hunting for spells...

Also I'm dying for some sort of... order for my spells. So far all I got is Bristle > Off-Guard > Song of Torment then is spam Glower or Ram's Voice, maybe popping peculiar light before I spam my 2 primal abilities since Ifrit and Garuda , Shiva and Levi, share a cooldown so I only get 2 primal abilities. There's no reason to use any of my other spells. No reason to use Plaincraker, no reason to use flamethrower, no reason to use Ram's Voice cause I can do more damage and keep the enemy in place by just spaming Rame's voice.
Well, from what they said, without that collectathon aspect, we simply wouldn't have Blue Mage...at all. So they didn't sacrifice anything.

Of course everyone went and looked up where to get spells. No one, unless you're insane, want's to just look in the book, see this spell is gotten from West Thanalan, and goes to West Thanalan and kills one of every mob hoping it's the right one for their spell. Especially when you have to see the mob use the ability. You would be sitting there waiting for every mob to cast every one of their spells then killing it to see if it was the mob that dropped your spell. On top of that the fact that spell acquisition is random you wouldn't even know if the mob you were fighting was the wrong mob or you were just unlucky. They might as well have put every location you can learn the spell from in the Book and what mob dropped it to save people the 10 min it took to look it up online.

[diruulth]

Wrong. It's useless and limited jobs are a really lazy idea. What you currently have would be great side content, but only if they made it an actual job.

[ApolloGenX]

Yeah, not a job...a mini-game that you need others to help with...the novelty wore off fast.

[seraseth]

Of course everyone went and looked up where to get spells. No one, unless you're insane, want's to just look in the book, see this spell is gotten from West Thanalan, and goes to West Thanalan and kills one of every mob hoping it's the right one for their spell.

If they had at least given us the name of the spell, then we could have played the memory game of 'where have I seen that before', but just a zone name is pretty much useless.

[BillyKaplan]

If they had at least given us the name of the spell, then we could have played the memory game of 'where have I seen that before', but just a zone name is pretty much useless.

Especially when you consider the fact spells can be gotten from more than the one place, so giving us the one location per spell does little but limit players' options (by creating the false assumption it has to be gotten from there), and thus create bottlenecks.

[ApolloGenX]

Especially when you consider the fact spells can be gotten from more than the one place, so giving us the one location per spell does little but limit players' options (by creating the false assumption it has to be gotten from there), and thus create bottlenecks.

The real bottleneck hits at level 50....you'll be grinding that forever... (Too soon?)