Why we have to rethink the way we allow Limited jobs

[SpiralMask]

SE basically shot themselves in the foot by releasing it at all. With the way this game functions they were never able to satisfy everyone with this job in the first place, they should've just kept BLU out of the game entirely.



I like to think that is intentional. People kept pestering SE for Blue Mage without ever thinking about what a nightmare it is to make that thing work in the first place without completely breaking the game. So SE just went "You want it? Here you go, it's terrible, you're welcome...now shut up and never ask again."

my nitpick with that is that "what a nightmare it is to make that thing work in the first place without completely breaking the game" is entirely on the devs/design team to decide. they could just as easily have taken the class in a different direction regarding available skills, skill balancing, playstyle, etc without breaking from the blue mage brand (because every final fantasy and FF-adjacent changes up how BLU worked in some way or another), and could just as easily have been pared down to something actually fitting and functional within the system and lore (an eorzean blue mage, rather than the OG blue mage reference/callback design they went with).

it was (and is) a nightmare to balance specifically because they chose a direction of blue mage from all the possibilities available that "required" hard-to-balance skills like death/missile/etc, rather than... literally anything else.

and so we get nine flavors of 200 potency cone with an element that doesnt actually matter, debuffs that largely don't work (and those that do just make outsiders hate the class for ruining "their" fates/overworld content) or work for a short duration and then are a wasted slot on your hotbar, and vestigial non-dps options (you're better off aoe overhealing with white wind to generate aggro while in tank stance than the actual aggro spells if you can spare the mana, the healer 'kit' is the barest bones possible with 1 conditional shield, 1 heal, 1 aoe heal+esuna that is admittedly good, an expensive conditional aoe heal, and a revive on an intense cooldown)

BLU and the treatment of healers (a whole separate discussion) have almost single-handedly embittered me to the game as a whole, despite how much I like the setting and lore.