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.

Quote Originally Posted by Videra View Post
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.