Do you think BLU will ever change?

[Raikai]

No one's worried that it would trivialize the other jobs. It would just trivialize the content, especially with basic instinct. The whole point of DD is an old school challenge. Having BLU in there would be too easy and trivialize the achievement gains. (This is why they're not gaining access to other content like ultimates and Eureka). Look at proper BLU achievements and you'll see they require overcoming actual challenges. BLU specific DD would involve a revamp to place the proper mobs in, so you're sure to get the right spells.

As for the patch cycle, the main jobs and story and all take priority. It would be nice if they were a little more substantial and offered some more variety in weapon glams. That would be the 2nd item on my list.

Not if BLU had a separate scoreboard and achievement, like I wrote in my post.

People trying to solo Deep Dungeons are already a very small fraction of the playerbase and would probably still do even with Blue Mage having an "easier time" (that is if they didn't change anything about the job in there to begin with). I mean, there are already huge discrepancies between RDM and other jobs in PotD, and that doesn't keep people from trying less efficient jobs.

[Deveryn]

Not if BLU had a separate scoreboard and achievement, like I wrote in my post.

People trying to solo Deep Dungeons are already a very small fraction of the playerbase and would probably still do even with Blue Mage having an "easier time" (that is if they didn't change anything about the job in there to begin with). I mean, there are already huge discrepancies between RDM and other jobs in PotD, and that doesn't keep people from trying less efficient jobs.

Even with its own scoreboard, it would be very trivial. Anyone can pick up BLU and go melt a dungeon.

BLU already has more engaging and challenging content. We should get more of that, not more things to faceroll.

[SendohJin]

And MSQ, And Treasure Hunts

BLU in MSQ has to be Trust only, but then the BLU won't be able to do the 8 man trials, since they don't seem to be making all of those Trusts fights.

[Deveryn]

BLU in MSQ has to be Trust only, but then the BLU won't be able to do the 8 man trials, since they don't seem to be making all of those Trusts fights.

I believe a long term goal is all story trials. They already did the 89 trial. It's not the cleanest run, but everyone tends to go where they should.

[Shougun]

I think the original, stated goal, of the limited blue was good- though I was, with no hiding it, felt their implementation of stated goals was very poor on release (verging on hyper conservative, and weirdly so given the whole point of why it was limited). That goal being it's limited for the ability to be wild and imbalanced, which allows them to capture the fun of the job. Now I'm adding an emphasis they didn't have but I feel should be a guiding light to the job, and that is the fun part.

For example a self stun in a party based game, say like old FF games where you control multiple characters, is fine- but in a game where you play one character only, say... FFXIV, a self stun is an awful idea. So.. the two major self stuns the job has (one a hard stun, the other.. a nearly hard stun).. I think were HUGE design mistakes in the sense of 'fun'. Maybe they were attempting to capture some classic idea, but huge fun killers (even if the effect is powerful when used right). At no point should you be trying to sell playing the game as 'not playing the game' lol . .

They made many changes since release though and I feel they've improved a lot of elements. I'd be lying if I wouldn't imagine my self significantly enjoying a 'normal' blue mage (and have in the past suggested 'advanced job' concept that is essentially a job that has both limited and normal components), but given the vision of 'entirely built for fun and imbalance' I'm okay with that idea. Particularly as was very obvious in practice (was not a suggested thing that 'might' happen, it totally absolutely did happen) with the flash in the pan like design, so I'm glad they massively empowered the solo aspect which was quite weak initially.

My personal wishes in the Thal pond then might be:

-DD, Eureka(s), and perhaps optionally ultimates (though I don't think any ability should be based off the ultimate if that's the case, unless the intention is for the job to absolutely make a mockery of ultimate). DD for example have a blu only leaderboard, and perhaps blu specific achievement (instead of necromancer).

-Revamp the earlier spells, as many are instantly pointless upon acquisition, and then many more are quickly made pointless, I get some might have this fate but it's massively common in those early spells and leaves you with a lot of press one button to win vibes. For example I leveled blue mage mostly on 1k needle (did not do any of the job change gimmicks or powerleveling, but because of that and when I did it when the job was fresh the job was fairly weak too).

-While revamping for fun, consider also making the acquisition path a little bit more crafted, for example players who don't know to get the mimicry and a healing spell will have a massive difference than those who did. Now perhaps there is some charm in that being a power couple (which I HIGHLY encourage SE to make more of and to the point there are many situations where you have to choose between multiple builds), but like early on until you get that specific combo your sustain is purely built into white wind and I think the gameplay quality due to that is quite low. There might not be an explicit path to leveling blue mage, but by revamping some of the spells for better short and long term value.. with in some situations an explicit vision on better quality early game gameplay.. I think that'd be wise. Cause again, my early game gameplay of the job was pretty bad.. and I don't think that is a feature of blue mage or something anyone should be aspiring for when making blue mage. "That's the charm Shougun, it's trash until it's not". Like.. what the chocobo? Why, I've seen some people essential say that, to which I still say .. WHY? Why would you intentionally make something not so good when you could do something as radical as make it good? lol. I would note that if you were power leveled, or even with friends, the situation wasn't as long and you probably were given spells that improved this a lot early on- so I'm more speaking to those players who had to take care of themselves (like I did). I helped a few others get those really cool spells early on, and all I heard was how much fun the job was- instead of the experience I had banging my face against the wall trying to get the right order of bad spells till I could work up to the point I got the actual interesting spells.

-Hopefully consider some more combo-ing systems / interactivity. Like more generic buffs, or future proof ideas. For example Ultra Vibration had two buffs it worked for which allows it to be valuable in unsuspecting situations in the future, but was immediately valuable and immediately made OTHER spells more valuable that you might not have had, also noting that it was balanced for FUN too. As you couldn't just spam the ability, but it 'just worked'. Rather than say 1k needle (low quality gameplay), or even worse doom (even lower quality, because nothing is more fun than watching 'miss' 'miss' 'miss' 'miss' 'miss' 'miss' 'miss' 'mi--- WHY AM I WASTING MY TIME). Generic buffs would be for example how the dropsy has interaction with some electricity spells.

Beyond some comments on the early spells occasionally dying out of the gate, or quickly, or some of the less fun to use (but powerful) spells, I'd also add that while passive spells can be fun that hopefully they gain an active type concept. Like Toad Oil can be quite useful, and the fire effect for self-destruct obviously, but I feel perhaps by having the skill equipped you gain the passive effect of higher evasion and rather there is a cooldown based (with or without charges depending on function) bonus. Like perhaps Toad Oil increases evasion by x% by default, but you gain 1 charge every 30 seconds that increases the duration of your next spell by x% and fire potency by y%. Or like a small % passive bonus, but when you cast it you gain a very large % evasion bonus for the next X seconds and every enemy nearby gets coated in oil that increases the duration of debuffs and potency of fire spells. May consider this for basic and mimicry as well, like on a 120 second cooldown your next spell will have all mimicry effects active (not the passives per say, just the spell interactions). Or whatever idea to give it purpose outside of being a passive (though it's not end of the world, you've a lot of slots left still if one skill is being held by a passive- could always make an alternate to mimicry like a 20 second cooldown mimicry that gives you a 5 second buff to all mimicry types and the next spell cast has all types available but is obviously only active for short periods of time). Personally I think passives should generally have an active when being designed (so they are not dead slots), or spells that are basically passive (toad oil) should be addressed into that situation rather than don't forget to recast it every two minutes (passive + active I think would make it more interesting than, nearly passive that it is). If using the blue mage FFXI, diablo 3 affix, witcher 3 mutagen, etc, type idea.. that'd be one way to address it too as a dedicated passive section (just make sure your blue mage kits that get saved also can store them lol).

Or like movement spells with cast times.... feels super clunky. Or mimicry being a bit obtuse lol (rotating effects would be more friendly).

Particularly if they can increase the non-explicit ones, like how dropsy has /some/ interactions. Considering making some debuffs immune proof or having failsafe mechanics, to further improve some of the interactions. Beyond that though I feel they could have a lot of fun with a sort of Diablo 3 Horadric cube, Hades boon, FFXI spell slot combo, witcher 3 mutagen (Blood and wine) type systems. Such an idea could be represented in staffs too (or slots, like FFXI / mutagens), a new thing to collect (or like diablo you can collect the effect and the glamour, if fighting ramuh got you a cool ramuh primal staff but then also unlocked a new slot-able passive).. but I feel that could have huge impact on how you build the job which could be quite fun. Like if you equipped a passive that causes your X element spells a chance to randomly cast mini-judgement strikes (on an enemy with enmity) with a 1 - 5 second cooldown that lightning magic causing the cooldown to decrease. Besides the obvious of wanting triggering spells and cooldown reduction spells, you'd also consider situations like what if dropsy automatically changed as a game mechanic when hit by lightning element attacks? So now the blue mage dropsy has in built mechanic that all lightning based attacks might deal extra potency, meanwhile some specific lightning magic might have further interaction.

While you might get a repeat cast spell (like if that ShB boss or Hades with his dual cast becomes blue magic), but because you're doing all this you also think of other related passives (like if you had multiple slots like multiple boons in hades, or passives in FFXI), and spells that interact with what's been built. Say Levithan Whorl applies dropsy on all nearby enemies, reapplying it if it was removed. The whole tingle / fork interaction obviously being valued automatically. Etc etc. You suddenly go down a potentially very deep hole of customization to ideas, yet that would only be one path- and each time you get a new spell or passive you'd start the whole chain reaction over again. So many things you might do, like there might be a vampire passive that massively reduces healing except from physical and siphon (with siphon attacks being enhanced, so like using the bat fang has an enhanced effect of 50% more hp for X time- meanwhile there also might be spells that consume hp or are based on your total hp).

A constant domino effect would be a dream situation imo. Since the job is not meant to be balanced, while still hard and complicated, I feel would make making all the dominos a little bit easier. With the main pillar of balance in a limited job's vision being fun, and then slightly the other concerns (btw 1 hit killing everything isn't what I mean, just that if a player comes up with a genius combo... that should hopefully be a good thing which shows the system's strength). Especially because fun > balance (and balance only followed lightly to prevent bad ideas like "doom 100% kill rate, no cooldown"), as you could introduce insanely game changing situations because perhaps a new spell or passive causes all debuffs to propagate to nearby enemies (2x effective in dungeons), then another causes your spells to grow debuffs, and another.. and another.. Again, akin to how you might envsion Diablo 3 legendary affix / horadric cube, or the FFXI blue mage passive system, or the Hades boons, etc.

Obviously a complicated desire, but I feel it would be fun to have insanely varied gameplay opportunities that change drastically as you collect spells.

-Consider some sort of arena content that is more designed for open ended combat challenges, I think some of the carnival fights are neat but quite a few are gimmick focused. I'd hope there was content that was more designed about just having a fun fight. Like how you might approach Diablo 3 with vastly different builds, game doesn't go "sorry you didn't bring a teleporting wizard- get out" but the carnival might.. and personally I don't love that.

-If possible remove / speed up some of the loading in the carnival with better check points for the longer ones. I had a few very annoying situations where I struggled though them because I clearly didn't have the preferred kit, and then a small mistake turned into quite a bit of time wasted entirely, or alternatively not even a small mistake I just didn't read the guide before doing the content and literally 'impossible to complete without x spell' which is even more annoying. Not that all of them have this issue!

One thought might be is having the arena be more free form kit building, with perhaps sometimes challenges that the game will help you build around. Like if there is a fire restriction then the game will help isolate the spells for you.

Then there is more of the carnival stuff where you need certain spells for certain content, and they just.. give you / select that stuff for you. Like doing the move this thing around content without sticky tongue would be mostly a big waste of your time. . Why even let me do that. "it's old school hardcore bro".. or something.. just.. sounds.. in a polite way.. a dodo move. I play the good ol git gud souls games, and while they do sometimes have some sort of obtuse mechanics, it's nothing like that. That isn't old school cool, it's just frustrating (when it's designed that way, imo).

tl;dr- kweh.

[Renathras]

I feel like there's really no reason for BLU to not have the current level cap and be able to enter any content unsynced. They can ban it from current tier Savage/Ultimates I guess if they REALLY want to, but considering the way the game can be played mostly single-player now if one wants to AND that one does have to go a bit out of the way for BLU (and it can be explained that it is NOT able to do normal ques and the like), I don't see why this restriction still exists.

Give it Mimicry as a Totem at 10/15 spells or something and we're good.

Though my one big complaint about BLU - ironically - is that for a "solo" Job...you have to do a lot of GROUP content to flesh it all out...

[Deveryn]

It's easier for everyone if BLU stays a tier behind. Why go through the trouble of banning BLU from savage (and EX) when they could just keep it a tier behind? Gearing up is easiest when they're a tier behind. Anyone that wants to play it next cap raise is already prepared.

The restrictions exist because they've taken the time to work on ~20 other jobs and something as OP as BLU needs to stay limited, otherwise you just have most everyone running around as BLU (which is actually quite the nightmare many don't really know what they're doing). There's tuning that needs to happen before the cap gets raised.

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

Do you think BLU will ever change?

God I hope not.
The second they turn it into a normal class is the second the job will stop being fun.
Sure because of its current design it is very niche and has limited content, but I like that limited content, and I hope to see more of it.

All of that said...hmmm...I can actually get behind your 4 bullet points below.
Maybe if they did that as well we would have more spells since they could cater them. Just at the same time I just feel in my gut even if they did do this, it would just ruin the class...because the severe imbalance of it is what I like...but yeah because of that its playable content is stunted because of the Balance.

I want more Bluemage, and I want to play Bluemage in more stuff....but I think in order to do that they kinda have to nerf Bluemage. :/

[Jeeqbit]

-Revamp the earlier spells, as many are instantly pointless upon acquisition, and then many more are quickly made pointless

Think of them like the Stone. Stone upgrades to Glare. You will probably use those spells early on because they come from ARR content, but eventually you will get better ones from expansions.

-While revamping for fun, consider also making the acquisition path a little bit more crafted

That would make learning spells less fun and learning spells is part of the fun of BLU. I already don't like the quests asking us to get Mind Blast and other spells. I don't like that a quest gives us Water Cannon because I would be happy to accept the challenging of auto-attacking for it. I don't like that totems give us spells. You spent ages working your way up instead of being powerleveled and so did I, but I enjoyed that and wouldn't want to change it.

-If possible remove / speed up some of the loading in the carnival with better check points for the longer ones. I had a few very annoying situations where I struggled though them because I clearly didn't have the preferred kit

I liked the challenge of some of them and wouldn't want checkpoints to make it easier. The difficulty of a few of them is as satisfying as clearing a savage fight. There was one where I didn't have any physical spells except Flying Sardine so I spent a lot of time defeating it with a 10 potency attack and Phantom Flurry.

[Shougun]

Think of them like the Stone. Stone upgrades to Glare. You will probably use those spells early on because they come from ARR content, but eventually you will get better ones from expansions.

Hard disagree..

Earning, some of them, was pointless, so I wouldn't think of them like stones but rather little bouts of disappointment interspersed with low quality gameplay that could have greatly been improved by having interesting spells to earn early on. I would have MUCH rather earned something useful, and over that I would have much rather earned an opportunity to build something interesting. I don't, personally, see the value in collecting a bunch of things of no value. This isn't like glamour which I may come back around to, it's just a little color'd box in my catalog that I'll never touch.. sometimes ever beyond seeing what it looks like. It was disappointing and imo a lost opportunity. If Blue Mage was a normal job, then sure- I'd think of that, but it's not.

Maybe you get a situation in the carnival where they force value awkwardly like "you know that spell that is no good, well it's still pretty bad and wont make an interesting build choice-- but we're going to make it useful because the spells that are actually interesting wont work here". Beyond making them more interesting for the fun in the moment they have the ability to make them fun for building, I strongly believe this should constantly be a lens the vast majority of spells are viewed through. To which spells that fail that lens were not at purpose to fail, they just happened to because there isn't something that makes it go brrr yet. Purposefully making a 'collect' job's items to collect as bad (which there are many in the first release of spells), or slightly better (but still not good) purposefully making them temporary value items, is not the best idea (read, not good idea) imo.

This issue happens far less often, if at all, with post 50 spells (and once you're at that point you're beelining to the spells that are actually good, depending on your ability (w/ friends or if you're lucky in PF, this issue can be sped up a lot but the fact there are a lot of useless spells I think is still a major negative and the job shouldn't be designed around those two last points anyways (PF / friends getting you good stuff)-- should be good because it's good not because you were handed fun stuff by a friend or were lucky in PF)).

That would make learning spells less fun and learning spells is part of the fun of BLU. I already don't like the quests asking us to get Mind Blast and other spells. I don't like that a quest gives us Water Cannon because I would be happy to accept the challenging of auto-attacking for it. I don't like that totems give us spells. You spent ages working your way up instead of being powerleveled and so did I, but I enjoyed that and wouldn't want to change it.

I think you misunderstood me, or.. that unfortunately reads like drinking the Hi-Cordial type situation. I don't mean totems or automatically learned if that's what I looked like- I do think if the job is to be limited might as well have monsters teach you stuff, even rather replace totems with hand crafted fights that have the spell within it. I meant review the skills that naturally occur and might stereotypically be learned by a player, while you can't completely control the narrative create a better sense of structure and flow than the existing one. Although making 1 or 2 more skills totem would probably have profound implications to the job- like aetherial mimicry (though again I'd prefer fights, like you can fight for ram / dragon in the carnival.. that's a lot better than straight totem). Or the NPC might have recommendations "what should I learn next" and there is like 5 or so skills that the npc could give you tips on "In Limsa there is a great coeurl 'yada yada yada'".

Essentially what I read, if we were on the same page, is: "I don't want good quality selection nor direction of skills early on". Like if you're solo you have a bad quality, very bad, imo, selection if you're off on your own. I had an exceptionally negative view of the job as I was progressing until I got to it much later. To which I would not agree that it is smart to purposefully not design quality paths. I understand they might think the job is /not/ worth the resources to do high quality quality control... but otherwise I'm not going to be like "yes, you should intentionally not care how players progress through your open ended content and if they report an actively boring / frustrating / unfun experience then 'that's by design!'" as I think that's simply bad to even suggest is a good consideration. Even devs who have open ended games, like Bethesda, still intentionally craft paths and flows. They're not like "yeh yo, whatever".

Noting again once you get past a certain threshold, which changes drastically depending on if you've help, read a guide, or are part of the release wave (after a blue mage update PF is quite active)- if you get a friend to help you get the more interesting spells, like an oGCD early on, mimic, and healing, then you will have a substantially different experience to which I had which was guide + self 95% of the way (and I have and will say, was a negative experience until I hit the threshold- one which I think is entirely regretful and preventable and should be adjusted). I've helped others have a much better foundation of more interesting skills early on, so it wasn't "white wind, meet 1k needle, meet might guard", and the response to blue mage seems to change drastically when such actions happen (either powerleveling together, or getting help, or being lucky with PF- the acceleration through the bad, or just skipping right past the bad, but WHY IS THERE BAD? Knock that off right away, straight to gaol >.<; ). Adding to which /normal/ jobs had more interesting gameplay far earlier than blue for far longer, unless you were lucky and did it when it was hot or had some friends guide you through it (my level 25 job making my level 25 blue mage look like it's eating crayons, in gameplay quality terms, of course with 1k needles it's extremely powerful).

I liked the challenge of some of them and wouldn't want checkpoints to make it easier. The difficulty of a few of them is as satisfying as clearing a savage fight. There was one where I didn't have any physical spells except Flying Sardine so I spent a lot of time defeating it with a 10 potency attack and Phantom Flurry.

Fair enough. Like some people like the no death challenge in a souls game, and I think "wow what a waste of my time, but I'm glad you had fun". Akin to how I'd NEVER play a hardcore mode (the one where you have permadeath). There are not tons of carnivals with that issue but there are certainly more than a few where doing them is extremely prohibitive unless you have the one spell the thing was made around. There were multiple times where I felt the content didn't respect my time, and didn't make it fun while doing it. So I, personally, feel the content needs adjusting as there were active moments of frustration. To which I solved by feeling compelled to read a guide for the whole content and knowing exactly what is expected of me... ruining some of the experience.

Minus quests which souls games are bad at... lol (at the bare minimum they should have an old school journal that helps you recall important events, even if it doesn't have magic gps like modern games), but to the point... on the combat side, those games generally do respect your time even if they're 'hard'. So don't read it as 'i dont want it hard', read it as I don't think they are not designed in the best way even if they wanted to be hard.

If they want to show off the cool gimmick of a spell I think perhaps that spell should be required to enter, as the alternative is like your story except in your story I didn't have fun. I did a similar thing in a few situations and I had like a 25 minute fight and died, and then did it again, and then felt like "wow, that wasn't very well designed.. because I feel like I just got mugged". Naturally though some people do like doing things in an unorthodox way, but that is generally not the accidental route. For example some people will beat a souls game with just a rusty sword, or something goofy like that. Sounds awful to me, but it's their fun so.. why not? We all like stuff a bit different. However, very obviously the game is not designed in such a way that you're going to be doing that unless you WANTED to be doing that.

In the carnival you could absolutely walk into a room with a rusty knife and not even know it. Which is why I think there should be an arena where that's not the design (just neat fights, perhaps stealing and revamping previous content- like blue mage primal fights), and the carnival is fine to remain as a showcase for gimmicks mostly, with some fights sprinkled in, but as I said perhaps consider adding requirements / suggested spells, or pre-built kits, or checkpoints to the longer ones (like 1 revive at a checkpoint for content with more than two checkpoints).

Say to go back to hard but not cruel example with Souls (games famous for being tough but fair), even in particular where the game is trying to teach you sometimes you'll die or to come back to content there are very clear, and sometimes clever ways, in which they do that (unlike the carnival in which you can totally just flop about). Like when you have the broken sword in DS2 even if you did 'flying sardine' the content (at the start of the game against the prison boss)- it would take you less time but also specifically designed that there are other solutions and the length of 'dying' is pretty low if you didn't know what to do.. so you're not 30 minutes into praying to be like 'oh... I was going to die'.

Time to death really helps in that situation, like how the landscape is purposefully designed to draw your eyes in Elden Ring while the time to death of the tree sentinel is quite aggressive early on, with a few other factors, it encourages you to come back to him and there is an obvious feedback that you just need more damage and protection (not some mystery spell like the carnival). Essentially I'm saying the game famous for being hard is less cruel with your time than some of the carnival content, because that's good design. The carnival thing has some fun moments and especially if you come to the content with the correct spells- my experience with the content increased a lot by simply feeling forced to read a guide, otherwise it has a lot of disrespectful moments (particularly for the ones where it's obvious you need 'that one spell' as there are no other alternatives that would suffice)- and that imo is a bad thing in general to have.

Perhaps someone likes that.. and certainly hyper designing gameplay for a 'side content' might not be the most affordable idea, but I don't think someone is going to convince me that some of the things that are present in blue mage are examples of 'that's how you should do it' but rather examples of what happens when you don't do it the well crafted way. Which goes to the spells too. Many moments where I felt like 'cool I got that spell I'll never use because it's obviously just bad, even though I'm the proper level for it and this is 'current' content'. Many spells are not stepping stones but just ticks in a box. As I said it might happen here and there but given the job is limited I see no 'good' reason why you would purposefully do that. Rather than celebrate the idea that there are builds and options you could be giving players.

This job doesn't need stepping stones, it needs interesting choices that can make profound impacts to your build outs (which there are some spells that do this, just not very many and I feel that is a major misstep, and one of my frequent sources of disappointment early on with the job as my kit barely changed because I had found and was using the best stuff and nothing else was vaguely as interesting or vaguely as useful-- spell after spell of throwing it into the bag and knowing I wont use it again unless a carnival content is explicitly designed around it). Now the spells do get better later (in later patches), like much of the last set of spells added to the game were far more interesting, even if they were available early on.

So anyway:
1) Not going to agree that a limited job needs much in the way of stone -> glare -> glare II -> glare III. Especially a collecting job like blue mage. I strongly believe most of the spells should rather be interesting cards in your deck, rather than filler noise. If this job was normal then I would agree. This is doubly my opinion since you can build your kit, rather than trait upgrade like a normal job- this intrinsically suggests you should be in the building mindset, and going out of your way to support "dragon +1" "dragon +2" as a common occurrence is a f2p card game like vibe to me (this issue improves later, but I felt was way too frequent and many lost opportunities early on). Therefore the kit concept should be emphasized rather than "yeah that card is just a garbage version of that other card, like.. worse in every way, in fact it was so bad that when you got it you shouldn't have used it when you got it". I think for myself it was something like water cannon -> bomb toss -> 1k needle until I was mass farming and dragon / ram -> choco meteor / ram voice for a long time as they were clearly far and away the best for someone who was managing things alone.

It was very low quality gameplay, and even when I tried out other builds it was still low quality (meaning it's not like there were other interesting creations to be had that were a bit less powerful, there were significantly less powerful options that had equal levels of build quality- which early on is low). Once I was able to get mimicry (thanks to basic instinct), the gameplay started to improve a lot, but I would rate pre-all of that as poor. Like quite poor, and disappointing as someone who was a major blue supporter before they released the job. For people I've helped get those game changing spells early on, their experience tends to be WAY faster and they get the interesting spells right away- so the experience is much better. But coming from someone who did it all by themselves, until much later it's a 1/5 experience and actively frustrated me that something I had wanted so badly felt so.. bad. I think they made huge changes since release that have helped (like basic instinct, and obviously the double potency buff close to release, and the better quality spells), but I believe a lot of the issues are still there until you can peel back the fog (or have friends rip it back, which is nice and I recommend people do that if they've the option).

2) I think you're thinking I'm saying make things automatic, or remove the learning component. I'm not, I'm saying ensure the kit is more interesting earlier even though players may break away from some logical paths. I grabbed every spell as they came up in difficulty (that you could get solo), and the VAST majority of them until much later in levels were utterly useless on acquisition. It was a very disappointing feeling as my kit hardly changed and I felt relatively unexcited to get new spells. Both in the present tense, like "that adds no value to me now" and in the future tense "that will add no value to me in the future".

3) Each person can enjoy a challenge differently, and I suppose flying sardine for 10 minutes is interesting to some people- but to me it felt disrespectful to my time and often the challenge was "why didn't I read the guide before bothering with this content" rather than say the first time you do a boss in a hard game (say souls type), and usually you feel like any death was warranted and fair. Though on the topic of souls games, you need a guide for quests or you will totally have your time disrespected lol. But I don't praise games in black or white, generally great games but they've something to do about making quests less ...... where to hither now... Hello.... ? I have similar feelings to the Kugane tower given there is a lot invisible wall nonsense, so failing that content often feels unfair or cheapened as the feedback is broken (given the collisions are off).