The Limitation Dilemma: Why Final Fantasy 14's Limited Job was a Mistake

[Fawkes]

??? 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.

I didn't say it was bad.

My point was that the FFXI dev team didn't focus on making every job able to do everything that every competing job can do the way XIV does. They aren't worried about a job being at the exact same level of strength and utility as every other job. They didn't care if everyone always has to have a specific job for certain content or literally never bring it to anything.

I mean, unless it was egregious. Like adding the nuke wall to stop people from just bringing BLM-only to everything.

[Zebraoracle]

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THANK YOU, someone gets it. There are so many solutions to BLU and people have this adamant, downright arrogant idea that this is how it HAS to be. Maybe It's because BLU has always been one of my favorite jobs in the series that I'm so vehemently against limited jobs, but this arrogant insistence that this is how things have to be and there's no solution whatsoever is so offensive and so freaking shortsighted and ridiculous.

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If that's what you took from that person's post, boy howdy do I worry for your reading comprehension. Your arrogant attitude towards this subject is all too common in these discussions and it freaking drives me up the wall. It's so frustrating how you people won't even consider anything outside of your own opinion. "I got what I wanted, so screw everyone else who was looking forward to this job!" Never mind there can easily be compromise between the two camps...

You make this claim that it would "break everything" at 90. Please back this statement up - how exactly would it "break everything"?

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Come on dude, I know you're smarter than that. Go do any BLU content in PF - if you're not running the meta build for the content, you're kicked or downright not allowed in the party. Literally everyone runs the same exact thing. I agree the design idea should be celebrated, if it were a normal job that can do relevant content. I also think Square should do away with the stupid two minute burst meta and allow jobs to not be so homogenized, but maybe I'm crazy.

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What party synergy though? Like legit, please explain. Because I've done plenty of BLU content and I don't see any glaring examples of synergy you wouldn't find in normal parties. The only BLU tossing out heals is the healing aspected one. The only BLU tanking is the tanking aspected one. All of them are tossing out DPS, of course, and most of those DPS abilities are used by the entire party.

[Zebraoracle]

Also, if BLU is so loved... why is it dead outside of moogle tomestone farming and the once every, what, three year BLU update?

Aether PF - Currently 219 listings
Number of BLU content listings - 1, a spell group for one of the Alex fights. Actually, as I typed this, a second one went up, a dungeon for, you guessed it, learning a BLU spell. Nothing for actually doing content as a BLU. Everything is "I need this spell so I don't have to touch this meme again until the next tomestone farming event".

How y'all think this is acceptable is beyond me. How is being relevant like once or twice a year for a couple weeks indicative of good content?

[Atelier-Bagur]

THANK YOU, someone gets it. There are so many solutions to BLU and people have this adamant, downright arrogant idea that this is how it HAS to be. Maybe It's because BLU has always been one of my favorite jobs in the series that I'm so vehemently against limited jobs, but this arrogant insistence that this is how things have to be and there's no solution whatsoever is so offensive and so freaking shortsighted and ridiculous.



If that's what you took from that person's post, boy howdy do I worry for your reading comprehension. Your arrogant attitude towards this subject is all too common in these discussions and it freaking drives me up the wall. It's so frustrating how you people won't even consider anything outside of your own opinion. "I got what I wanted, so screw everyone else who was looking forward to this job!" Never mind there can easily be compromise between the two camps...

You make this claim that it would "break everything" at 90. Please back this statement up - how exactly would it "break everything"?



Come on dude, I know you're smarter than that. Go do any BLU content in PF - if you're not running the meta build for the content, you're kicked or downright not allowed in the party. Literally everyone runs the same exact thing. I agree the design idea should be celebrated, if it were a normal job that can do relevant content. I also think Square should do away with the stupid two minute burst meta and allow jobs to not be so homogenized, but maybe I'm crazy.




What party synergy though? Like legit, please explain. Because I've done plenty of BLU content and I don't see any glaring examples of synergy you wouldn't find in normal parties. The only BLU tossing out heals is the healing aspected one. The only BLU tanking is the tanking aspected one. All of them are tossing out DPS, of course, and most of those DPS abilities are used by the entire party.

I feel like people are just going through the motions in this game without paying attention to whats happening sometimes. A blue mage's party has a bit more advantage than the limitations of a 4-Man or 8-Man group consisted of dedicated roles. Any one player has the potential answer to everything. Everyone can apply dots, everyone can apply vulnerability debuffs, everyone can party wide buff damage, everyone can rez, everyone can insta-heal the team to full etc and you can see this being the case when doing old bosses were because of a party mostly consistent of blues, the party's effectiveness is a lot more efficient than a regular party. Im obviously referring to synced content but its even more broken during unsynced especially when running dungeons were you can melt trash mobs even more easily.

Also I mostly create my own Blue Mage PFs for either Blue Mage log or dungeon runs so I dont pull any of that elitism and even when I do join other groups, I have yet to encounter it so I cant respond to that statement of yours sadly.

[Zebraoracle]

I feel like people are just going through the motions in this game without paying attention to whats happening sometimes. A blue mage's party has a bit more advantage than the limitations of a 4-Man or 8-Man group consisted of dedicated roles. Any one player has the potential answer to everything. Everyone can apply dots, everyone can apply vulnerability debuffs, everyone can party wide buff damage, everyone can rez, everyone can insta-heal the team to full etc and you can see this being the case when doing old bosses were because of a party mostly consistent of blues, the party's effectiveness is a lot more efficient than a regular party. Im obviously referring to synced content but its even more broken during unsynced especially when running dungeons were you can melt trash mobs even more easily.

Also I mostly create my own Blue Mage PFs for either Blue Mage log or dungeon runs so I dont pull any of that elitism and even when I do join other groups, I have yet to encounter it so I cant respond to that statement of yours sadly.

So a few things here

1. Sounds like everyone runs the same meta builds to me! The community has already homogenized the job lol
2. Square can literally change things to make them balanced within the context of 14 while still keeping their flavors. White Wind? Doesn't have to be "heals hp equal to the caster's hp", it can easily be "heals this base potency increasing as the caster's hp increases". Slap an appropriate MP cost on it and White Wind is now solved.
3. Square can limit certain abilities based on which mimicry the BLU is using. The easiest solution to "everyone can do everything".

I feel like people are just seeing what we have and are sticking their feet in the mud and refusing to budge instead of seeing BLU for the potential it truly has. We could have an amazing and creative job if Square actually took the time and care to implement it.

[Atelier-Bagur]

So a few things here

1. Sounds like everyone runs the same meta builds to me! The community has already homogenized the job lol
2. Square can literally change things to make them balanced within the context of 14 while still keeping their flavors. White Wind? Doesn't have to be "heals hp equal to the caster's hp", it can easily be "heals this base potency increasing as the caster's hp increases". Slap an appropriate MP cost on it and White Wind is now solved.
3. Square can limit certain abilities based on which mimicry the BLU is using. The easiest solution to "everyone can do everything".

I feel like people are just seeing what we have and are sticking their feet in the mud and refusing to budge instead of seeing BLU for the potential it truly has. We could have an amazing and creative job if Square actually took the time and care to implement it.

Gonna counter some of these points.

1. Metas will always exist. There's no point into bringing this into the conversation as its just an inevitable outcome with games. You ignore that not everyone follows this meta, especially with blue mages.
2. You fail to realize that blue magic is a thing in previous FF games and its spells and effects were done to be as closely translated into FFXIV as possible. This is the sole reason why its limited with current content only, so that veterans and players can have keep the integrity of the unbalance of the class. You cant have a White Wind that doesnt heal based on your HP's values, because every other FF game that has that spell thats what the intended effect is supposed to be. Dumbing the blue magic spells down kills the whole point and appeal of blue mage and funny enough the fact that you're trying to do this, is the same level of thinking for why we have the 2-minute meta homogenization existing in the first place. Congratulations Zebraoracle, if I didnt know you any better, you're rocking the same boring wavelength as the actual dev combat team.
3. Again, you are failing to realize the whole point of Blue Mage. Blue Magic itself isnt supposed to be balanced nor limiting. You're saying that in order to make Blue Mage not limited...is to actually cut the meat and potatoes on why the job is fun to play. Nobody is going to want to play a neutered class. We have seen countless examples of the audience complaining about their jobs further being streamlined to fit into the "meta" agenda, therefore making it worse.

Blue's potential is already here in this game. The points you are proposing here are EXACTLY the opposite of giving the job its creativity. It baffles my mind how you're not even hearing yourself telling me that in order for Blue Mage to be amazing and creative...it needs to be further limited?

[Jojoya]

Adding new content isn't a mistake, it's a risk. It's hard to predict how players will react in advance of the content release.

In the case of Blue Mage and limited jobs, they discovered the player base was very divided on what they wanted out of it.

Some were happy with it as a limited job, some weren't.

Some were happy with it as a solo job, others wanted it to be viable for group play.

Some wanted it to be customizable, some wanted it to have set actions earned just by leveling like other jobs.

The mistake was trying to please everyone and what they wanted from it instead of expanding on what their original vision was for limited jobs to make it its own unique content. Instead of being satisfying content for those who wanted limited jobs that bend the rules and are exceedingly overpowered for soloing content, it's turned into a mess that satisfies no one because no one is truly getting what they want.

Also, if BLU is so loved... why is it dead outside of moogle tomestone farming and the once every, what, three year BLU update?

Because it's stopped filling the niche that players wanted for solo side content and has been turned into group raiding content for those who like to raid - and those players already have raid content that is more meaningful to them.

[Winterfang]

FFS, just make 2 different Job Stones for it and both groups can have what they want without any convoluted system that the devs are clearly too lazy to actually implement, giving way to additional Jobs that can have Limited Versions like BST without cosigning them unto a near dead state more than 90% of the time because they can't participate in content

[MikkoAkure]

THANK YOU, someone gets it. There are so many solutions to BLU and people have this adamant, downright arrogant idea that this is how it HAS to be. Maybe It's because BLU has always been one of my favorite jobs in the series that I'm so vehemently against limited jobs, but this arrogant insistence that this is how things have to be and there's no solution whatsoever is so offensive and so freaking shortsighted and ridiculous.

We were already told why BLU is the way it is and why limited jobs exist. The devs either could have made it like all the other jobs, which in FFXIV's streamlined gameplay means unlocking abilities at certain levels with a small handful gated by quests, or they could allow it to have its monster-learning identity but separate it into its own content. It's not to do with balance. Things being unbalanced was a consequence of it not being integrated with the other jobs so it didn't need to worry about balance. It wasn't separated because the devs were too lazy to balance it with the other jobs.

The process of developing one of these jobs doesn’t start with us asking ourselves what will be the next limited job. We are, however, mindful of two things: ensuring both that the job or job type we implement will be enjoyed by the players, and that it will make for an interesting and fun experience. During this process, if we come to a potential job that we feel may not necessarily fit well within standard party gameplay, we will then consider whether or not we make it a limited job.

With Blue Mage, for example, we run in to the issue where learning monster actions is the main pillar of the job, but we can potentially see a huge disparity in power between Blue Mages depending on the blue magic they have learned—even if their job level is the same. In other words, too large of a disparity in the number of blue magic abilities learned would create issues if Blue Mages were able to queue normally for duties.

The issue with BLU is that you can't have it both ways. Either you learn abilities like everyone else and get to play with everyone else and sacrifice part of the historical identity of the job. Or allow it, but experiment with new, separate content. Whether that new content was successful is obviously controversial but the same could've been said if they didn't have monster learning. Though I guess in that case, we probably wouldn't still be talking about it now.

If they did both things together and BLU was a regular job that had to learn its jobs from monsters, you'd have people being kicked for missing certain spells or not having meta builds just as you described is happening right now in PF.

??? 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.

It worked in FFXI because that was a different game.

Whenever we compare FFXI with FFXIV, I believe it’s important to have a knowledge of the history of the MMORPG genre. FFXI is a part of the first generation of MMORPGs, and the game itself is structured heavily on a “time to win” model. There is the assumption that players will spend huge amounts of time in-game, and therefore the game world provides the freedom to adventure without guiding the player through it.
[...]
The base of FFXIV is built upon providing a high-quality experience for players, even if they are only playing in shorter sessions. On top of that base, we create content that provides the opportunity for those who wish to spend more time playing, but never making this a mandatory experience. This is the difference in gameplay experience when comparing FFXI and FFXIV.

I grew up heavily immersed in first generation MMORPGs myself, so I would like to have the opportunity to create a game that fits that mold, but I’m certain it would be tough to sell in this day and age…

Having BLU players spend more time than everyone else to experience the same content as everyone else or be kicked from parties is against the model of the game, for better or worse.

[Alexandre_Noireau]

The only way BLU will unbecome a mistaken decision is with another Limited Job.
With as much content, it's own set of trials and tribulations diferent from BLU.

A Beast Master with a tactical RPG elements and deep pet (unit) managment. A Corsair with ship-based combat and customization with focus on exploration.

But as long as the BLU stands alone, it will always feel incomplete.