Feedback: Please consider making BLU an actual job

[ReiMakoto]

So, you're asking to cut down Blue Mage to, what, 20 or so buttons to push at level 80, and a strict leveling order to get them, complete with a new series of job quests? And, I assume you want them to be viable in PvP, and balanced for the Duty Finder?

Sounds fair.

More or less, yes. The learning mechanic could stay for the "strict leveling order" skills. In an ideal world wed have limited BLU for the side content and duty BLU for endgame with both sharing the same base. Optimal BLU at level 50 only uses less that 15 skills anyway. That would be better than what we have at any rate, dunno what you mean by sounds fair but im assuming its a snide remark

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

you just give BLU mage a set of abilities to learn from the overworld/ dungeons/ trials that are the "balanced" or "Duty", which all have appropriate levels for syncing and have you learn them the same way as we currently do just with no rng. Ta Dah, Blue Mage is still Blue Mage and you have a class.

I like the idea of RNG going away thats for sure, but then What Spells would you give up & add? Alot of skills would be fun to keep, but would be VERY situational, that would then require a ton more balancing to make alot of the skills viable in game. I think Yoshi also expressed concern with the possibility of someone getting kicked because the Bluemage doesn't have X skill. And you kno wthere will be some people who will be lazy and say "Eh I dont need that skill" and they get kicked for not having it

[Rasikko]

BLU is dead, people. There's been no updates to it since the time that it came out(as far as I remember). I'm sorry you don't wanna hear that but it's time to come to terms with the truth.

[Durthane]

BLU is dead, people. There's been no updates to it since the time that it came out(as far as I remember). I'm sorry you don't wanna hear that but it's time to come to terms with the truth.

Anyone ever tell you that you tell a depressing story? Really, nothing gets changed how we want unless folks speak up. Pouring your cynicism on the discussion accomplishes nothing.

On topic, YES PLEASE. I want my Blu mage back, and my Bst while we're at it. Neither are likely since they would require effort and some creativity, but I can hope.

Blu from FFXI worked fine, though more effort would need to be put towards balance considering the roller coaster it was. I know they don't want to risk Blu entering dungeons with a bad skill set but you can make a baseline skill set through job quests even if Blu requires more than others, then have flavor abilities through learning them in the wild.

[Gwaeron]

I think they should keep BLU as a special case, but make it an "advanced job" instead of a limited job.
Require that certain extra conditions are met before allowing advanced jobs to enter duty finder. Must've learned X spells, must set spells to Y amount of slots.
Market advanced jobs as jobs that require some extra effort to play, for dedicated players. They'd barely even need to change BLU's mechanics apart from that, it's not like it's overpowered anyway.

[odym82]

My usually unpopular idea is work it as a Healer. It already gets a bunch of heals and shields and some minor dps. Plus I honestly think some of the self-sacrificing heals and skills could be a cool mechanic to be used in clutch situations
But yeah they’d definitely need to take away the boss abilities BLU gets cuz why do we get those anyway?

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

BLU is dead, people. There's been no updates to it since the time that it came out(as far as I remember). I'm sorry you don't wanna hear that but it's time to come to terms with the truth.

Guess you didn't hear its getting a level raise in 5.1

[Reinha]

There is no reason it couldn't get a Duty Set of spells which has to be selected in order to enter DF without a premade. BLU already has a feature which allows them to swap entire spell sets.

[SenorPatty]

What I'm more curious is SE's insistence that it must hold the gimmick job aesthetic via the amount of spells it can learn and fear that it might be pressured into forcefully learn some skills to be viable.

As if SE didn't force both of those things onto the playerbase already. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news SE but all the years of putting BLU in all those games, your playerbase managed to trim all the useless ones all the time and kept the good ones. The only reason we went out of our way to collect those spells is for the completion, not to toy around using a less powerful version of mighty guard against some endgame maps/bosses for the lulz. That's number one. Number two, if you want to avoid the "forced learning" aspect, it's simple: you resolve issue number one by trimming the excess and making the useful skills learned in the same way a regular job is.

This might be the first time I found myself actually wishing SE had never developed BLU. I would've taken pokemon style BST mini game over this. At least it would've made more sense.

[Duelle]

Before the current iteration of the job came out, I suggested tiering blue magic into "lesser" spells learned from common mobs (with a system that required the player to kill specific mobs to learn their respective abilities) and "greater" spells that come from iconic FF monsters (Bad Breath, Grand Delta, etc) that have to be learned during the job quests (each quest that rewards a monster ability would involve said iconic monster). Systems would be designed around those two tiers of magic. Back then and today I still think that would have been a good compromise between learning spells on the field and the structure of classes in this game.

I was thus surprised to see that SE put the gimmick above everything else and implement BLU as a side activity. Given the current design, the best one can hope for is to decide on a set of spells that are allowed in duties, and disable everything else while in dungeons/raids. The problems with that, however, are that this is not easily justified with lore (something SE seems to really care about), and the job is still devoid of gameplay systems beyond spamming one spell.