No discussion on fixing Blu?????

[Kalise]

So you're saying to make it a full time job takes more effort and resources than to make it a Limited job, with content they have to build around that one job, that only that one job, have it be clearable, have to make sure it has a endgame for it, not a side attraction at best, dead content at worst.

Tell me, what's going to be more work in the long run, having to keep giving BLU more and more solo content or to make it a full time job?

Well... Technically, there would be significant work in making it a full job, as it would have to be balanced alongside other jobs to make sure that it didn't do too much/too little DPS and didn't have any skills that were unusually powerful (Such as Peculiar Light being a far higher magical resistance down than any other ability, such as Contagion)

Though... Continually making new Masked Carnivale content would take up a lot of time, especially when they have to figure out what 1 skill you NEED in order to complete that particular round (Gosh... Carnivale has such a horrible implementation...) even if they could kind of just re-use existing enemies and just tune their damage/health and fit them in there...

Also, if they decide to make up any more BS rules for their weekly quests (Some of them are so dumb and completely contradict the entire ideology behind the Carnivale, which is to adapt your skill set to exploit enemy weaknesses, but then half the rules are "Only use X element abilities" or "Don't use more than 10 unique spells" so you're forced to just spam whatever it lets you use irregardless of weaknesses/resistances...)

But yeah... Making BLU a full time job is a frontloading of a TON of work, between creating new weapons from 1-70 (Soon 80), balance changes, progression changes (I.e. The fact that the optimal DPS rotation includes abilities from level 50 dungeons and EX Trials) as well as streamlining things so that you won't get people queuing up for dungeons with garbage spells equipped but instead get more easily directed towards a functional skill set (Both in terms of going and learning the skills and actually having a skill set up equipped that uses those reasonable skills)

But in the long run, it likely would end up having the less work required to expand on things, since it would largely do the same things that everyone else does, just with a bit more investment into spells to go and learn.

[Kabooa]

Well... Technically, there would be significant work in making it a full job.

Blu's almost already balanced around doing comparable damage to other jobs.

Unusually powerful skills are a number tweak to just being good.

Weapons 1 - 70 can literally be Black Mage / White Mage staves cut in half (Like how Dark Knight Weapons are just "Paladin But Bigger", how Ninjas got Paladins old dagger models, and Paladins just got various texture shifted Mid 30s weapons to fill the 1-30).

Whalaqee totems provide the best way to ensure functional kits and serve as "Duty Unlock" milestones. To unlock the 'best' Blue Mage AoE spell, you need any 4 spells from Glower, Aqua Breath, Flame Thrower, Plainscracker, Drill Cannon, etc. To participate in X duty, you need A, B, C Whalaqee totems.

[Shurrikhan]

So you're saying to make it a full time job takes more effort and resources than to make it a Limited job, with content they have to build around that one job, that only that one job, have it be clearable, have to make sure it has a endgame for it, not a side attraction at best, dead content at worst.

Tell me, what's going to be more work in the long run, having to keep giving BLU more and more solo content or to make it a full time job?

Let's break this into constituent parts.

1. So you're saying to make it a full time job takes more effort and resources than to make it a Limited job,

This is true. When left a Limited Job, virtually all real tuning to make the kit compelling in a real, internally balanced sense, can be disregarded. That's a surprisingly huge portion of the work. Totally worthwhile, but also very costly.

2. with content they have to build around that one job,

Masked Carnival still almost certainly took considerably less time to build than a real, cohesive BLU kit, even if it had been limited to 24-27 actions from the start. At 49+ abilities to choose from, undoubtedly so. (Ideally, I'd like nearer 100, to really fill out the learning mechanic.)

3. have to make sure it has a endgame for it, not a side attraction at best, dead content at worst.

Well, so far we're seeing none of its endgame payout, so while the assumption is reasonable generally, whatever happens will probably be development-inexpensive. Now, why they didn't just go for making the job wholly compelling as a job (learning mechanic still readily includable therein) in the first place, given that eventually unique upkeep cost for the job... I do not know.

Tell me, what's going to be more work in the long run, having to keep giving BLU more and more solo content or to make it a full time job?

For me, definitely the latter. But I wouldn't sacrifice the learning mechanic to do so; there's no need to. It need only arrive at endgame with a competitive kit, not necessarily acquire it with the same ease as everyone else.

[Awha]

On mobile. Yeah it would require extra resources since they probably have already been working on the next set of carnival challenges and what spells we will get with the level increase. From a player perspective it is easy to speculate on how easy or how much work would be required but end of the day we do not know how they have allocated resources. A change would be nice but I do think it is unreasonable to expect any meaningful change before 5.5 at the very least. I also do not think we have the info required to say if the content is dead or not. Another factor is if they were to make changes shouldn't they make sure it has everything that people enjoy with the current implementation. If they said DRK rework would take 6 months. Then an overhaul how to BLU works and was designed while keeping what people currently enjoy about the content intacted probably would take a year. As I said I would love to have the best of both worlds, and I wish they did just that from the start but as players we can only speculate as to why they did not or if they even tried.

[GenericMagus]

[QUOTE=Shurrikhan;4880488]snip/QUOTE]

As a reply to each point you made, starying from the top.

1. No, even as a Limited job, BLU is still being balanced at a relative level to other DPS at the same level. You say it's left to be unbalanced, anything outside of trash and most bosses including dungeon bosses are immune to cc, making it impossible for BLU to use some of its powerful combos (i.e. Rams Voice into Dragons Voice) while also being immune to the truly broken stuff like Missile, Tail Screw and Doom. That's not disregarding balance, that is balance so BLU wouldn't upset the balance of other jobs.

At full kit, BLU lacks a lot less VIT than the other jobs due to no stats on the weapon, meaning that content that it has to participate in such as Primals to gets its skills become harder for it, while with all its skills their DPS is around average. Perculiar Light is basically a TA on steroids... for Magic damage. NIN, whose DPS is often low pDPS, has TA and is sort after for it, often contributing to rDPS that way. Why wouldn't BLU be allowed to use that skill in an unlimited fashion?

Do you know what we have? Mostly Glower spam, standard oGCDs and DoT upkeep, basically working like every other DPS but feeling barebones.

2. Then that's just laziness on SE parts if you're justifying that, and why BLU should be unlimited because SE will have to keep going back to add more and more and more in order to keep BLU relevant. Not to mention the elemental system feels tacked on and more useless and unneccesary than in Eureka.

3. Because Yoshi-P has a vision he cannot deviate from and his team lacks the imagination to expand and create their own BLU and has to essentially get cheat sheets from FFXI, poorly written and troll written by FFXI.

4. Having the learning system and being limited are not mutually exclusive things. You still have the perks of a learning system while enjoying the benefits of a full time job. The Limited system is Limited by itself, as its "breaking of the trinity" has been disproven by its application.

If SE made BLU a full time job, they wouldn't have to keep worrying about needings skills to pad out the skill list where a lot of spells are carbon copies or have extremely niche uses in a game where cc is becoming less and less useful, needing to constantly update BLU and have to find ways to make it last longer, more Masked Carnival updates, more unique encounters, design, challenges, more fights geared for Limited BLU, more exclusive content to be given to BLU so more resources etc. All of this, for work to get it to unlimited yet far easier sailing than to make constant stream of updates in a cycle to get BLU to not be on constant life support?

[Shurrikhan]

1. No, even as a Limited job, BLU is still being balanced at a relative level to other DPS at the same level. You say it's left to be unbalanced, anything outside of trash and most bosses including dungeon bosses are immune to cc, making it impossible for BLU to use some of its powerful combos (i.e. Rams Voice into Dragons Voice) while also being immune to the truly broken stuff like Missile, Tail Screw and Doom. That's not disregarding balance, that is balance so BLU wouldn't upset the balance of other jobs.

I mentioned nothing about its balance relative to other jobs. I specifically referred to its internal balance, e.g. the value of its own skills relative to each other. There is little rhyme or reason to its arsenal outside of a few small "combos" of debuff application and spending, which likewise does not work on bosses. A skill will works, has a chance to work (which diminishes its relative value the longer combat continues, but stages only between "spam", "fill with", and "avoid" as enemy HP decreases, rather than any more significant weaving), or does not work whatsoever -- leading skills to either be categorically (not even elementally, mind you, as that applies only to Masked Carnival) overwhelmed by others to the point that only a fourth of the kit is ever optimally usable within a given fight. That is an internally imbalanced and incomplete design.

For the rest, you only further prove my point that creating a cohesive and internally balanced BLU kit would take considerable development time. For status effect skills to work, categorically speaking, across all encounters, status effects would have to move to granular systems much like damage. Pure balance would require drain resource. Optimizable balance would require enemy "resistance"-calculating stats against which the status effect's potency*caster SP (i.e. "debuff damage") can act.

Learning and an oversized arsenal cannot be sacrificed while remaining BLU.
Status effect skills cannot be sacrificed while remaining BLU.
But internal balance cannot be sacrificed if a job is to have a compelling kit.

There is no paradox here. There is no dead-end or fundamental conflict. It just requires certain undermechanical revisions, which would work to every job's benefit regardless, and development work.

As for the rest... actually read my post this time. In most of your replies you've done little more than restate my point, but angrily and with some very strange asides.

[Kalise]

Blu's almost already balanced around doing comparable damage to other jobs.

At level 50. With around ilevel 120-130 gear.

Without a weapon that functions normally.

How BLU's damage scales beyond 50 and how it would adjust to suddenly having a weapon with stats, are things we cannot currently know, but are things that would have to be monitored and adjusted by the balance team.

Unusually powerful skills are a number tweak to just being good.

It's not just powerful skills that would need tweaking, but how they interact with level syncs as a whole. Given that all of their skills are available at level 1 and thus are kept when sync'd down.

Which is in of itself, imbalance between it and other classes that have more limited kits when sync'd.

Weapons 1 - 70 can literally be Black Mage / White Mage staves cut in half

They still have to make them and add them to all the relevant loot tables and vendors.

Whalaqee totems provide the best way to ensure functional kits and serve as "Duty Unlock" milestones. To unlock the 'best' Blue Mage AoE spell, you need any 4 spells from Glower, Aqua Breath, Flame Thrower, Plainscracker, Drill Cannon, etc. To participate in X duty, you need A, B, C Whalaqee totems.

Whalaqee Totems also directly conflict with the ideology of BLU which is to go and learn skills from enemies and to have a flexible skillset that you can adjust.

Having BiS skills, from totems no less, would completely go against BLU and just go back to "Why is this class even BLU?"

Not to mention, that even in your suggested "To unlock the 'best' Blue Mage AoE spell" doesn't account for the fact that one of the primary issues with BLU is that Song of Torment, Eruption, Static Strike and Glass Dance are all vital for their DPS rotation. Those would need to be accessible or a viable substitute or a BLU player will be gimped.

Also, what would you consider to be the "Best Blue Mage AoE spell"? Would it just be Glower 2.0 and be just a 140 potency spell you spam forever? Or would it be a BLU special and have some form of combo to it like The Ram's Voice > The Dragon's Voice?

BLU would need some fleshing out in a way that leads itself to having a "Standard" skillset with ample variation so that the essence of the class is not lost.

This would take a fair bit of work, in addition to then showing people the way for these things. Like, in your suggestion, how would you tell people they need 4 of those 5+ spells to get the Whalaqee Totem? How would you notify people that they need that Totem and potentially other ones in order to access Duties? How would you show people that the skill they get from the Totem is actually the best skill and they should have it in their skill set when they queue up for a Duty?

[Kabooa]

, how would you tell people they need 4 of those 5+ spells to get the Whalaqee Totem? How would you notify people that they need that Totem and potentially other ones in order to access Duties? How would you show people that the skill they get from the Totem is actually the best skill and they should have it in their skill set when they queue up for a Duty?

If you want details from a 5 minute blurb, fine, but you can easily answer all of these questions yourself.

Putting Blue Mage on the same formula as literally every other job simplifies any concern about their scaling. It's literally just potency / second since the end result weapon damage and main stat will be the same.

You limit Blue Mage's Load Out slots by level. That keeps lower level from being dumb.

Oh no, database entry. The most time consuming part of game development :P

The root of Blue Magic making its way to us as players was anthropological. It was through studying the way a people lived that the two figures in question learned and thus moved to make use of it. In this regard, the level 1-50 of Blue Mage (The "Backbone" levels of basically every job in terms of base mechanics), having the Whalaqee totems be the capstone of the learning building block is fine.

How would you tell people to get those skills to unlock the totem?
Job quest, that isn't level locked. "Lore dump here, but I won't share this with you until you show me you're dedicated to your studies. Go and learn spells that [put your descriptor here]."

How to notify them they need this?
Job quest. Also by locking off load out slots in the blue magic spell book. Also by just clearly putting a text in the duty finder, along the lines of "You do not qualify because: You must progress your Blue Mage Job quests."

How 'best' skill
The load out slot you unlock enhances whatever ability you put in that matches the type it was unlocked for.

[GenericMagus]

snip

And creating more of BLU only centred stuff is only going to add to the extra developmental resources that's going to far exceed what just being a regular job will be. I'm not asking for all status effects to only be usable with BLU on every boss to be vulnerable to it (pretty much every other job already has access to it on oGCD anyway) but then that's a revision they have to make, but knowing how long FFXIV has been going on for I doubt they'll overhaul the Battle system any time soon, making those combos practically useless in any fight.

You're asking why they can't make the job compelling yet completely missing its flawed design. It's trying to work as a solo job, in a MMO where you party up for content, to do solo things, with a kit that's a mish-mash of 100-130 potency spells, a lot of which are copies of each other, status effects that have select applications in each fight (just like every other job). What part of the kit is compelling? Missile? White Wind? Doom? Most of its truly broken kit is unusable when it matters, even in Masked Carnival and White Wind is a niche Heal AoE, with a severe mana drain.
You want 100+ spells, yet most of them are gonna be carbon-copy spells with potency and an elemental property attached to it, maybe a different way to apply a status effects and maybe a few broken spells here and there that bosses will be immune too. That's quantity over quality and you know it. That is not compelling, that's just an overabundance of copy-paste that's more for flavour than actual depth.

As I said before, you can have the current planned BLU kit while still being able to have the ability to be unlimited. The very implementation of BLU is a paradox, it has no place anywhere. It is literally a street/circus performer. There is no other way to play BLU because the very way it is designed has no feasible or practical way of playing it.

You say it "takes dev resources" yet so does everything in this game. Creating a new race for example takes way more effort than a job and resources for far less of a gameplay impact

You're contradicting yourself with what you want and the current application of BLU and that the Limited job system does not work, with the claim SE should have it stay limited out of laziness.

Btw, Dark Knight is not a DPS, has no HP spend or degrade over time, and uses Mana and is a tank in FFXIV. Is that keeping to what a DRK is meant to be? Summoner only has 3 egis to choose from (realistically 2) and gets to summon out only Bahamut, it's mostly a DoT mage with tacked on pet mechanics and a semi-summon function, yet does not summon any other classical summons, has no big diverse summon attacks and constantly being locked to 3 egis for the past 5 years. Is that keeping true to the SMN identity?

[GenericMagus]

snip.

I was gonna say this but also in FF8 you learn Blue Magic from *gasp* items. I support you with Whalaqee totems as they still make sense considering previous installments of BLU.