Count me as another voice in the "I never want to see another Limited Job again" pile.

Complete waste of time, and complete waste of an iconic FF-series Job — creating gimmicky walled-gardens for 10 minutes of mild amusement per 2 years, before getting shelved to collect dust again until the next Moogle Tome farm.

"But Masked Carnivale is amazing solo content!"
Masked Carnivale is basically garbage. The puzzles are fixed, the rewards are mundane, the environment is bland and static, and the content itself is barely engaging.

It's slightly better than what a 12-year-old could create using RPG Maker MZ, including the gratingly-repetitive soundtrack. It's like an encyclopedic example of budget content designed to pad out patch cycles using minimal/recycled resources.

Once you figure out an encounter's gimmick and grab whatever carrot-on-a-stick it had, then that encounter is basically drained of value, because they have almost nothing going on except their puzzle-pattern.

"Oh but the strategy!" Yes, it's just incredible. Sometimes you have to take Exuviation. Other times, you have to take Eerie Soundwave! Ahh, my spine is tingling from this riveting tactical gameplay.
"BLU could never be a normal Job! It's SO overpowered!"
??? No, it's not. It's utterly mundane and full of bizarre and annoying limitations.

This weird idea that BLU is abnormally powerful is bordering on actual dictionary-definition gaslighting. You could just unsync the content with any normal Job and be dramatically more "overpowered".

Tanking with BLU is literally underpowered, and approximately as fun as driving bamboo under your fingernails.

"But I can KO trash mobs super fast!" Uhhhh you could also just Unsync it and do the same thing, without a 2-minute cooldown.

BLU is "overpowered" when you arbitrarily decide to break your own kneecaps by entering content Synced. And why do you do that? Because BLU tells you to. "I'm overpowered when I'm underpowered because I decided to be" — amazing.

And what "overpowered" things that BLU can actually do to "break" fights are balanced out by the fact that BLU is so underwhelming that it literally has to do those "overpowered" things just to clear content at all.
"BLU has so many cool options! No other Job could ever be like this!"
Yeah I guess if you're just messing around "freestyling" and shooting your friends with Malediction of Water, sure.

If you're actually seriously trying to get things done as BLU, then you just cram all your bloated, generic Primal/Namazu burst damage actions into your overflowing bar slots until you end up with the same boring 2-minute burst cycle as everyone else — except your filler in-between is even more mind-numbing, and sometimes you have to hold burst, because your burst is full of weird and fragile gimmicks that make SB Machinist seem user-friendly.

Then you swap out your 2 or 3 remaining slots for some mundane bonuses or "utility" that would probably just be Role Actions on a normal Job.

Wow, amazing, no other Job could ever be like every other Job, except with extra, convoluted, fake-decision steps along the way.
Quote Originally Posted by Fawkes View Post
FFXI never had quite the same obsession with balancing jobs. So they didn't mind if certain jobs fill a certain niche, or have no niche at all.
??? BLU was and is great in FFXI. It had and has no problems fitting into a party, and one of its strengths is the ability to fit into niches based on adjusting its kit.

It's not some weird phantom "non-Job", it's more like a chameleon that naturally leans towards being a Melee DPS, but can shift around based on what it's learned and what gear it has.