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

[Powercow]

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.

I mean, I'm kicking the WHM who doesn't have Assize because he couldn't be bothered to do his quests. If it's a normal dungeon, who gives a crap every dungeon can be solo'd by a warrior these days. But for high-end content? Yeah bring food, have materia in your gear, and have your spells and abilities from your quests. The only difference is BLU has to spend a bit more time getting the spells -- and hey, they could always just bar BLU from content if they haven't gotten the "core" skills. Barring BLU from content is already the design philosophy of the game anyway.

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.

The nice thing is, you can switch jobs. If hunting down monsters to learn their skills is so unappealing that a player won't do it, well, maybe BLU isn't the job for them. It'd be like someone playing BRD but hating that whole "song" thing so they just ignore them.

The job already takes more time to get into a playable state than any other job, the only difference is you get to do less content.

As for some other concerns about how the job wouldn't feel right without its OP stuff, like White Wind healing based off the user's HP or death spells or bad breath not working on bosses.

1) White Wind healing the party based off a percentage of HP actually sounds kinda decent and not OP. In different FF games it worked a little differently, sometimes it just healed for your current HP, sometimes it healed a portion of it, sometimes it's based off your max HP, in one case it healed how much HP you were missing. And given that Medica II or Cure III can pretty much top off the entire party anyway I just don't see this as that big of an issue, especially since HP constantly trickles up since stamina is tied to item level, just like spell power.
2) None of that stuff works on bosses anyway, even in most older FF games. Very few bosses are vulnerable to the Death spell (aside from like, "Hey this guard captain and his 2 cronies are a 'boss' because the music is playing but really they're just a random encounter with one guy being green instead of brown."). Heck quite a few bosses -- noteworthy, sometimes difficult, real bosses with real mechanics and sometimes real story relevance, can be one-shot with Life or Raise or a Phoenix Down or whatever. And nobody's saying "ugh, white mage sucks, it's not a real white mage, I can't use Raise to insta-kill this clearly undead boss." (Well, some people do, but everyone else just kind of accepts that one-shotting a boss in an MMO might be a little much.)