Thank you SE for...

[Alexandre_Noireau]

And some dense people think that "designed for solo" means "solo exclusive content" just to be able to hate on SE with... a sentence in a powerpoint slide.
Impressive argumentation.

First, im not hating on SE, if they decide to implement a job like this, with these systems, and give it a greenlight and dedicate resources I AM PAYING for: The least they can take is fair criticism at their design choices. That you think these forums or this games are a safe-space where no words can be used that you don't like because they are "Hate". Thats on you entirely.

Second, yeah, of course is not "solo exclusive" nothing in an online game can be "solo exclusive"... God, this is basic.

What is being criticized is both: Their performance and their implementation.

It was clearly designed as a solo class - Yet requires (as in NOT OPTIONAL) partying, that is a terrible contradictory design policy. And as a "party class" it underperforms. Let alone the whole RNG progression, lackluster exclusive content (guildhests 2.0) and that it cannot play the rest of the game with the rest of the classes, making this whole idea of "exclusive jobs" a whole massive waste of resources - If i wanted to play a SOLO BLUE MAGE i would go and load up any single player FF and get it there, a very good solid designed and entertaining solo experience.

Now, try to argument how this "designed for solo but not solo exclusively, party progression required, yet terrible party performance, locked out from most of the game instances and progression." Is supposed to work out from a design perspective.

This job is so counterintuitive and against the core principles of an MMORPG, is like if someone took the 1.0 fatigue system and made it a job.

[Tempest222]

And some dense people think that "designed for solo" means "solo exclusive content" just to be able to hate on SE with... a sentence in a powerpoint slide.
Impressive argumentation.

But literally every other job is more solo friendly than blu so it makes zero sense why they’d even say it’s a solo job in the first place. Why even bring it up? It’s the least solo oriented job in the whole game. Having the gauntlet doesn’t make it solo content. Every job has a whole 70 levels worth of dungeons and trials as well as PoTD/HoH to flex their solo muscles if so desired. Every other job can also acquire spells through job quests that are 100% solo unlike blu. They could have made it so blu actually could build up its tool kit solo, but they didn’t.

They should have advertised this as very socially oriented party content because that’s what it is. That wouldn’t have made it less underpowered or more coherent, and it wouldn’t have made getting carried in old content for a 5% drop rate any more enjoyable, but it at least wouldn’t have been so blatantly misleading.

[Awful]

And some dense people think that "designed for solo" means "solo exclusive content" just to be able to hate on SE with... a sentence in a powerpoint slide.
Impressive argumentation.

And some dense people think that "By forming parties that are pre-formed" it can take part in any kind of meaningful content which means the only content that's "solo exclusive content" is the boring Carnivale or twiddling your thumbs (which is what all BLU can do in terms of endgame content) while your lvl 70 friends solo 50 Primal fights for you, a sentence that wasn't in the powerpoint slide but sold to us as a solo class.

Impressive argumentation.

[Fyce]

Ok, but I fail to see how this job is designed more for solo than any other class....aside from having solo content designed for it...which you could argue is just expanded content similar to job quests... I think other classes are better at soloing... like summoner.

This job can EXP solo better than any other job. This job has better tools to do undersized content in solo than any other job (at the same level), even SMN. This job as strictly solo content specially designed for it... that you put "aside" for some reasons, arguing that it's just glorified job quests.

If you don't see why it's true to say that this job can mostly be enjoyed solo, I really don't know what else to tell you.

It kind of does when "designed for solo" is coupled with "not suited for parties". Given these two statements together makes forcing BLUs into party content to be a curious decision at best, and a mistake born out of laziness to make proper content for the class at worst.

It is "designed for solo play", as most of the job can be enjoyed solo. It is also "not suited for parties" (implying "regular parties") as the balance of the job is completly off.
If it was supposed to be a solo job exclusively, they wouldn't mention party play in the following slides. Stop cherry picking stuff while ignoring everything else that was said.

Also, if this slide is such a problem, what you'll get is SE saying "sorry it wasn't clear enough, but we didn't mean that the job was exclusively solo". And that would achieves nothing, good job.

The least they can take is fair criticism at their design choices.

Yes, and saying "this powerpoint slide was wrong", is not "fair criticism" of the job, and will achieve nothing. Asking for the job to be more "solo friendly" simply because a powerpoint slide mentionned solo play is ridiculous. That's what I'm saying.

And since you label myself as a white knight, when I'm actually not defending SE at all -I'm doing the opposite, in fact, but people are too stubborn to see it-, allows me to label you as a hater without much consideration either.

And some dense people think that "By forming parties that are pre-formed" it can take part in any kind of meaningful content which means the only content that's "solo exclusive content" is the boring Carnivale or twiddling your thumbs (which is what all BLU can do in terms of endgame content) while your lvl 70 friends solo 50 Primal fights for you, a sentence that wasn't in the powerpoint slide but sold to us as a solo class.

Impressive argumentation.

Oh no, a powerpoint slide was sold to you and didn't convey the actual design of the job correctly?!?!? That's terrible!!1!! Quick, SE, say you are sorry for making that slide!

[Alexandre_Noireau]

"sorry it wasn't clear enough, but we didn't mean that the job was exclusively solo".

Sorry it wasn't clear enough, but we didn't mean that the job was exclusive solo, you will NEED to play it with parties, and the class will be absolute awful on those enviroments, and their progression is infested with RNG that obviously the whole community loves and always have a crave for more, and then after you get through the awful skill progression RNG based system, you can finally play it solo in this amazing instance that is like guildhests but are called "Carnival", which are totally NOT guildhests, just like eureka notorious monsters are totally not FATEs.

Believe me, the slide is the least of the problems here.

[Fyce]

Believe me, the slide is the least of the problems here.

Given how much people cry about a powerpoint slide, I'm afraid it's to be a big issue for quite a lot of people.

Also, I didn't not argue against one single thing of what you said just above. So I'm not going to answer it as it has nothing to do with my point (which is why I didn't include it in my quote). I'm not discussing the actual design of the job. I'm saying that people crying over a slide are doing themselves a disservice.
If only people would understand my point, it'd be quite welcome after 4 or 5 pages of me repeating myself and people continuing to answer me about stuff I never talked about.

[ReiMakoto]

This job can EXP solo better than any other job. This job has better tools to do undersized content in solo than any other job (at the same level), even SMN. This job as strictly solo content specially designed for it... that you put "aside" for some reasons, arguing that it's just glorified job quests.

If you don't see why it's true to say that this job can mostly be enjoyed solo, I really don't know what else to tell you.
It is "designed for solo play", as most of the job can be enjoyed solo. It is also "not suited for parties" (implying "regular parties") as the balance of the job is completly off.
If it was supposed to be a solo job exclusively, they wouldn't mention party play in the following slides. Stop cherry picking stuff while ignoring everything else that was said.

Also, if this slide is such a problem, what you'll get is SE saying "sorry it wasn't clear enough, but we didn't mean that the job was exclusively solo". And that would achieves nothing, good job.

Can you tell me what part of its kit makes its balance way off, because to me it looks like a fairly balanced support dps, with low personal dps made up for by the high power buff of peculiar light, with the self destructing skills being probably the only point of contention, which really arn't worth it most of the time anyway. And before you argue white wind, even in its current state I personally don't see it as unbalanced, as its a dps loss to use and is only effective when you have health and you can't spam it lest you run out of mana.

[Alexandre_Noireau]

Given how much people cry about a powerpoint slide, I'm afraid it's to be a big issue for quite a lot of people.

Also, I didn't not argue against one single thing of what you said just above. So I'm not going to answer it as it has nothing to do with my point (which is why I didn't include it in my quote). I'm not discussing the actual design of the job. I'm saying that people crying over a slide are doing themselves a disservice.

You are the only one bringing that slide over and over when all this time i've been redirecting the argumentation to the class implementation.
I'd say you are the one losing it over the slide, that, or you are using the slide as a straw man.

I'll say it now, the slide is meaningless, move on to the job implementation.

[Fyce]

You are the only one bringing that slide over and over when all this time i've been redirecting the argumentation to the class implementation.
I'd say you are the one losing it over the slide, that, or you are using the slide as a straw man.

I'll say it now, the slide is meaningless, move on to the job implementation.

I bring it on because people mention it all the time to somehow use it as a reason why would SE change the job. Did you not understand why the very first sentence of my initial post was "Gosh, this argument again..."?
And my whole point is, again for the bazillion time, no, SE will not change the job because a bunch of people misinterpreted a badly made powerpoint slide. So people should stop using that dumb argument. That's all I'm saying. Any other topic is irrelevant to what I say.

Can you tell me what part of its kit makes its balance way off, because to me it looks like a fairly balanced support dps, with low personal dps made up for by the high power buff of peculiar light, with the self destructing skills being probably the only point of contention, which really arn't worth it most of the time anyway. And before you argue white wind, even in its current state I personally don't see it as unbalanced, as its a dps loss to use and is only effective when you have health and you can't spam it lest you run out of mana.

It's funny how you have to dismiss exactly everything that makes BLU a problem in order to ask me that question. I hope you can forgive me because I'm going to ignore your argumentation method of trying to strip me from anything I could use before I even gave you my answer.

- You can kill yourself doing extremely high damage. Why do you automatically assume that it's not "worth it most of the time"? This would have been abused in any AoE situation and used all the time during long downtime periods when the BLU can recover from its weakness. It would be used to cheese any kind of DPS check and even bypass some phases all the time. FFXIV's battle content is definitly not made to support this kind of on-demand skills.
- You have a personal tank LB3 (even better than a tank LB3). Any kind of mechanic coming? Who cares! Just use one GDC! Problem solved! Tank tethers? Pffft, joke! Shared tank buster? Just let me join the fun! Not imbalanced at all.
- You can heal yourself and other people to full in a blink. I don't really care if you don't think that White Wind isn't an issue. A DPS job being able to bypass a raid damage mechanic with Diamondback and then heal everyone to full in one skill is broken. It is. It objectively is.
- You can insta-kill almost any trash mob and even some bosses. Yeah, sure, they could make everything immune, or drastically change the skills. But the point is: these skills are currently broken. If anyone argue that the skills have to be changed would just prove my point.
- You are able to withstand a lot of damage from any mechanic thanks to Mighty Guard. Similar to Diamondback, but with more flexibility at the cost of less protection. It still allows healers to shield the BLU in order for him to be able to easily White Wind the mechanic.
- You can give anyone in the group 100% HP and MP at the cost of some DPS. A healer died and is in need of MP? No problem! Better have a dead DPS than a healer. It's probably less broken than the rest, but having a single target full HP&MP is still not really something you see every day on a Caster DPS.
- You have extremely potent group buff. Yes, Peculiar Light is completly overpowered. AoE +30% magic damage for 10s on a 60s cooldown is ridiculously high for group DPS. And you seem to say that it's only to make up for BLU's low DPS? I think you don't really understand how much of a gain that is. You'd see BLM/SMN/RDM/BLU comp all day just because of that. Besides, BLU's DPS isn't as low as you seem to imply.
- You can have an on-demand -10% damage. Yeah, that's huge. Even if Bad Breath is a DPS loss because of its low damage DoT, it still does damage ontop of the damage reduction, so it's really worth it.

[Alexandre_Noireau]

That's all I'm saying. Any other topic is irrelevant to what I say.

Ok then.
There must be another ppt slide in the internet that might need your defense. Go, ppt slide knight. Do not let any ppt slide to be wrongfully misterpreted.

-----

So yeah, i'm still waiting on someone to explain me how this design fits in the game structure, as it stands, is just a convoluted mess of an implementation. Who gave the greenlight to this. Who sat in a board, and agreed, that this job was the proper implementation of a class in this game. This sounds a lot like Pagos. "We knew it was not what was demanded, but we were too far in development to apply any feedback."

This is why the game so badly needs test servers. And testers not contracted by Square-Enix, that give them information that is not necessarily what they want to hear, which i believe is happening in their inside testing. Someone is obviously greenlighting stuff that is either unfinished, not properly tested and has not be checked against playerbase feedback, which they also do not seem to have any main "information" compilation methods, aside simple numbers of players doing X. That's not good enough of a measure. That something is popular, doesn't mean is good.