Quote Originally Posted by TeraTyrantShadic View Post
I’d say at this point Aetherial Mimicry is the least of our concerns as it stands Blue Mage is still DPS, if it were to gain the abilities of a tank, they only raise their defense and boost certain skills, if healer the certain moves that are healer based will become stronger and if DPS Critical and Direct Hit rate increase. Currently Aetherial Mimicry is more of A Realm Reborn (ARR) pseudo tank stance with the ability to affect a Blue Mage’s capabilities in a fight. I can agree with the sentiment that Blue wasn’t designed to be a Tank, but a healer or DPS? Sure! I mean it isn’t far of a stretch when their FFXI counterpart can easily do tanking, support or damage dealers, so maybe in FFXIV they can be a DPS and a Healer rather than a tank. At this stage of time if Blue Mage is only to be able to que as a DPS role that is perfectly fine, it just means some Blue Mages have an easier time to learn spells only available in dungeons or Duty Finder.
No, I meant more in terms of the practical, back-end coding issue. For a four-man dungeon, for example, the Duty Finder is coded to find one tank, one healer, and two DPS. But the game always considers BLU a DPS, even if you mimic a tank or a healer. Therefore, with the current actual coding of the Duty Finder, it would only ever be possible for BLU to queue via DF as a DPS--the Duty Finder just isn't set up to recognize BLU as a tank or healer, no matter what skills you have set or what you have mimic'd. This means that if BLU was allowed to use DF, you'd only ever be able to go as a DPS, which does suck some of the fun out of the class--part of BLU's appeal is being able to do all three roles.

In order to fix this issue, Square would either have to completely recode how aetherial mimicry works so that the game would actually recognize a BLU in tank stance as a tank or in heal stance as a healer, or they'd have to complete rewrite the way the Duty Finder works to allow BLU to select a specific role (tank, healer, or DPS) before queuing. Either possibility seems highly unlikely to me at this point.

However, even if the coding can't be fixed, allowing BLU to DF-queue as a DPS with a DPS-specific set of skills should still happen. If you just block the instant-kill skills from BLU, it would function exactly the same as any other DPS in average DF stuff without needing any real tweaks. The only reason I can see for this not happening yet is that Square just doesn't have the resources to actually balance another DPS class right now.