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

[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?

[Zebraoracle]

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You're misconstruing what I'm saying and I don't know if it's purposeful or accidental, but I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt.

The meta thing is very relevant. You can't just say "there's no point to bringing it up" when the complaint that SE will just homogenize it is one of the biggest arguments your side of the debate uses, when in reality the playerbase (not all, but by far the majority) is literally already doing it themselves, just in a different way. Again, any moogle tomestone run on PF, you're expected to be able to do the ultravibrarion combo and the final sting combo.

Which FF are you pulling your BLU info from? Spells often work differently between games, and White Wind is no exception. It doesn't always equal current hp = healing, and in some games it even has an esuna effect. It therefore stands to reason that it can be changed as appropriate to fit into FF14. And let's not get into job integrity when we have white mages acting like elementalists, dark knights not using their hp to fuel their abilities, red mage using a bastardized mystic knight combat style in addition to adding holy and flare to their repertoire, dancer barely being a support, bard mixing previous bow job archetypes into its playstyle, sage being a completely new playstyle versus what previous sages were...

The whole point of Blue Magic is using monster abilities. That's it. And no, that's not what I mean. Maybe an example will explain it better.

Guild Wars 1. You pieced together a skill set from a pool of abilities. Based on what type of build you were going for, you would pull from one or two attributes of skills. Let's take ritualist because base class it's the most diverse in what roles it can perform.

Ritualists have four attributes - channeling magic, communing, restoration magic, and spawning, each with a multitude of skills to pick from.

You have healing ritualists, who would pull specifically from restoration magic, and maybe spawning and/or communing depending on how much non-healing support they wanted. Then you had nuker ritualists, who would focus mainly on channeling magic skills. Then there were spirit spammer ritualists, who would focus on communing skills. Even with only eight skill slots for your action bar, it was not limiting and had some of the most creative build diversity of any online game I've played.

The same general idea could be implemented for BLU. Expand the mimicry function - change it to mimicking a type or monster based on the role the BLU wants to perform. Give BLU different ways of doing things - a mimicry for caster dps, one for melee dps, one for DoT based dps, tanking, healing (maybe even different types of healing, who knows there are so many possibilities!). Let these mimicked roles power up certain spells and add MORE spells to the overall BLU list, so the BLU can have choices to round out their build after they have their core role abilities. As it stands now, BLU isn't all that creative. There are a few redundant spells, a few spells that never get used outside of very niche instances in the Carnivale and even then I'd still say there are some dead spells on the list.

I'm very much an advocate for getting rid of the 2 minute burst, but since that will likely never happen (we can discuss for days how questionable SE's decision making may or may not be lol) I'd rather have the job available in that form while still being able to do its side content/synced shenanigans for achievements and whatnot.