So, what is the hold up on Beastmaster?

[Videra]

I'm not debating the state of it at launch. It sounded horrible, but it's not the case now. It's fun and different. Jamming it in with everything else would dilute it severely. Next time, maybe dispute something I actually spoke about and spare me the same old shit I've heard before.

Suck my nuts. I have played BLU, I have had fun with BLU as it currently is, but I will never stop hoping to be able to actually main it in the content that matters. No, it wouldn't dilute what we have.

[Aluja89]

Suck my nuts. I have played BLU, I have had fun with BLU as it currently is, but I will never stop hoping to be able to actually main it in the content that matters. No, it wouldn't dilute what we have.

It's funny, because the content we have now is already diluted decade old rehash.

[Sirren]

Blue Mage should’ve been a normal job - concessions have been made for each job like DRK, RDM, and SMN without making them limited like BLU was. Keeping the job in its current state comes across as little more than a show of stubbornness.

Adding a limited Beastmaster would be…an extension of that and other attitudes that have reared their heads since this game’s short term success following the fall of WoW. Some of us tire being subject to the whims of a certain individual, especially when certain classes are treated special while Blue Mage is left to flounder the way it has since it was added, while others have been ruined at multiple intervals.

I totally agree with this! No More Limited Jobs Please!!!

[Deveryn]

You say you enjoy it, yet you still hold on to that trauma from 4 years ago. Get a grip.

I'm not gonna suck anything. Your tears of what isn't and what won't be are sufficient.

[Midareyukki]

You say you enjoy it, yet you still hold on to that trauma from 4 years ago. Get a grip.

I'm not gonna suck anything. Your tears of what isn't and what won't be are sufficient.

As someone who actually liked stuff like Dirge of Cerberus, I can tell you right now, you can get enjoyment out of something bad and still say "It's bad nonetheless and I'd prefer/enjoy it more if it were done properly".

Example: "Ok some songs in the 3rd Birthday were a bop and I guess the gameplay was cute for a baseline thing, but the game itself is actual garbage and Square should be ashamed of what it did to Parasite Eve" --> Totally valid opinion.

[Packetdancer]

The big issue with BLU as a full job is cultural, not technical.

You could do things like say "Okay, these spells now have levels associated with them." No using, say, Both Ends below level 70 (so you can't just queue into levelling roulette, get Sastasha, and steamroller it using 14 different AoEs).

But given this community, if you could take BLU into normal roulettes, how do you think people would react if a BLU came in who didn't have spells equipped that they 'should' at a given level? Because I strongly suspect it would be a topic that became as constant and heated a discussion as "DPS pulling mobs for tanks / you pull you tank", and the use of Rescue by healers.

So, okay, you do away with learning spells; you just get them unlocked at appropriate levels, as with other jobs. Now BLU can be a normal caster, it just has a 'theme' to the spells.

But keep in mind, there's an active conversation going on /r/ffxivdiscussion over on Reddit right now about "what is an acceptable variance of DPS between jobs within a role when you take a 95% parse?" A lot of people are saying 2-3% at most, which I think is ridiculous because that's within the range of crit variance in this game as it stands. (Which is a whole other issue, but not one to unpack in this thread.)

People -- multiple people -- are actually claiming in that discussion that bringing MCH into savage is not just non-optimal but in the first week or two of savage is actively griefing. And they are seemingly dead serious about this position.

So, okay. Clearly, there's going to be Big Feelings Time about any job being in real endgame content that doesn't fit into the same little boxes as all the other jobs in endgame content.

You strip out stuff like Aetherial Mimicry and rebalance all of BLU's potencies to be in line with either BLM (and rip out all of BLU's utility stuff) or in line with, say, RDM (and leave at least some of the utility stuff, like Angel Snack, in). Yay! Now you've made a job that's called Blue Mage, but which is a pure DPS caster and works like all the other full caster jobs. No more learning spells, no more Blue Magic spellbook, potencies balanced properly, etc.

Obviously, you do away with the absurd XP bonus that BLU gets for overworld mobs, because if it can be used for normal duties and MSQ it should level akin to other jobs.

Let's even say that you keep old BLU around; there's just two 'hotbar sets', much like normal jobs and PvP. You can go into a lobby for the Masked Carnivale and work with your BLU-specific hotbars there, and those only work in the Masked Carnivale and in BLU-specific duties/challenges.

But we have demonstrated that this community demands that every job have all the things. Now BLU is a full job and can come into normal content... how long do you think it would be before someone starts saying it's unfair that BLU have a bunch of BLU-specific achievements and weekly challenges? Before someone wants, say, a GNB-specific Masked Carnivale equivalent, where you have to do a series of complicated duels? Before someone wants a WHM-specific weekly challenge log, for parties of WHMs to tackle specific content?

And given the SQEX approach to "the players are angry that X has a thing Y doesn't" is to just take that thing away in the name of everything having the same number of toys...

When people say that making BLU a full job would kill what we enjoy about BLU, we don't mean it from a technical standpoint; we generally mean it from a cultural one, based on literally all past and current evidence about how we-as-a-playerbase react to things.

There's not a lot of room in modern MMOs for variety as it is, given the tendency for players to focus on optimization. And even within that scale, FFXIV skews to the extreme end in terms of how badly our playerbase reacts to any difference in job viability/balance/potency; we claim we want more variety in how jobs play, but our actions as a playerbase demonstrate the opposite.

Limited jobs are a chance to still have that variety, to do weird and different and strange and sometimes even just plain broken things, and have it be okay. So, like, personally? I would love to see more limited jobs. More jobs that do weird stuff that wouldn't play well with others in a modern MMO (with all those smoothed-down edges and padded walls) but which can still be a lot of fun.

Hence why I'd rather see BST as a limited job than a full one. Because if it's a full one, it's probably going to end up being SMN with a different set of animations; we as a playerbase have demonstrated that's about all we'll tolerate. If it's a limited one, there's some potential for really neat, interesting stuff that wouldn't play well in the rest of the game.

One can only hope. It's so sad BLU had to be an initially lazy, irrelevant after two weeks mini-game instead of an actual, fully fledged job.

Apropos of nothing, I really do think it's unfair to call the BLU we have 'lazy'. BLU as it stands almost certainly took far more work than any other job we have in the game, from writing the entire system to learn spells in combat by observing them, to writing (as it presently stands) 31 fights -- some of them multi-stage -- specific to the job...

"Lazy" would've been making a caster that was basically "black mage, but all the spells you learn as you level are just reused from enemies we have", with no BLU-specific content at all.

You can be unhappy with BLU, it might not be what you wanted, but calling what we have lazy just seems kind of inaccurate.

[Midareyukki]

snip

Honestly I think the problem is more how people choose to tackle Blue Mage.

The dev team insists that the reason it wouldn't work is because spells are OP and, like you said and many people agree, if you focus on the Learn mechanic, you're no different than the people in HSW who didn't have stuff like Provoke or Awareness in their cross-class kit. The game works off of an established "minimum". And BLU spells being tied to the Learn mechanic are a bare minimum.

However, so too were other spells and abilities from other jobs who were translated just fine into FF14. We're not Dualcasting Flares here, but Dualcast exists regardless. We're not summoning actual gods here. Learn is literally the FF5 mechanic, which sure some other games who ALLOW for it share... but not all of them, and you have plenty of other ways to do this.

So why the insistence that the game cannot translate BLU into its system? Why insist on "skills are broken" or "Learn is the way to go" when there's no need for that?
DRK iconically sacrifices its own HP to deal damage, not MP. Yet the devs worked around it, didn't they? So why freak out that Self-Destruct would insta-kill you? It doesn't have to. Nor does it have to be in the list anyway.
And you got Blue Magic from eating enemies in FF9, you got it from eating bolts and nuts like Quistis, you got it by making Kimahri poke a specific guy. Why insisting that you MUST tie it to the FF5 Learn mechanic? When in other games, it's just a gimmick that ultimately is no different than having to purchase spells from shops or waiting for a spell to be dropped like in 11?

It's a bit unfair to say "Oh we can't have BLU in the game without changing" when really you could just learn spells like everyone else does: job quests. Hell, we do dungeons and fight non-optional duties in the game, what's to say the warrior of light doesn't have the creativity to learn otherwise as he goes along? We don't even need to do Coils to learn how to summon Big Daddy and Moltres. So why limit BLU to that?

I will concede that Limited Jobs, when done right, might be cool and useful. But using this as an excuse for why iconic jobs cannot be translated into the game is, to my eyes, a bit unfair. If we're going to have Limited Jobs, then they shouldn't need justification.

Edit: to me, BLU is about using your enemy's skills, not Learning as a mechanic. Every class learns in one way or another, BLU being quirky is just fluff to the lore. It can be done in cutscenes, it's fine. That's what I think BLU is: the ability to use skills, not the Learn mechanic itself.

[MagiusNecros]

I can't wait for the new BLU update late Endwalker where BLU's will get even stronger and the other jobs get weaker.

Learning skills is half the job. The other half is using the monster skills to great effectiveness.

And personally I'd like to see BLU in DD, Eureka, Bozja and the ability to have achievements that upgrade your skills and traits.

Until then BLU is a excellent ARR Primal killer, GC Seal farmer(Sirensong Sea) and Gil money maker. So much so that the weekly target rewards are pitiful.

Not to mention irregular mogtomes. Woah.

[Moomba33]

Edit: to me, BLU is about using your enemy's skills, not Learning as a mechanic. Every class learns in one way or another, BLU being quirky is just fluff to the lore. It can be done in cutscenes, it's fine. That's what I think BLU is: the ability to use skills, not the Learn mechanic itself.

Same here. Learning blu spells works differently across the series. Quistis in VIII for example learns them by using items. You can get a lot of the items from Triple Triad so you can in fact get many blu spells without fighting the relevant monsters at all. Gun Mage in X-2 had blu spells learned from monsters but also Fiend Hunter skills learned with AP like how every other job in the game learned abilities.

My ideal Blue Mage would be a mix of skills you get from leveling and monster skills from job quests. If SE is worried about players missing skills they can require job quests to be completed to queue for higher level content.

Edit: To this day it breaks my heart that I can't play my favourite job in the series in the MSQ and normal dailies and weeklies. Please no more limited jobs. A mini game that gets updated every two years is awful compared to playing your favourite class everywhere in game.

[MagiusNecros]

I just make my own dailies honestly. BLU is so useful for filling Wondrous Tails, can do treasure maps solo(even the dungeons), occasional easy weekly targets, GC farm, etc.

And you can change things up quite a bit unlike the duty finder stuff the actual Limited jobs have to do.