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

[kaynide]

Isn't blue mage a normal job in 11 though?

The problem with 14’s design is they decided every job should be equally viable in all content. In 11 it is entirely possible to get into situations certain jobs are just not designed for, and there is a lot more personal responsibility in getting gear/spells/etc.

In 11, a blue acquiring certain spells is not much different than a samurai grinding a monster to get a specific katana, or a white mage trekking out in no man’s land to get a teleport spell.

Unfortunately, in 14 a level 90 Paladin needs to be functionally identical to every other 90 tank.

Lack of job individualism, lack of horizontal progression and lack of the devs being able to allow certain jobs to be better than others in certain circumstances are IMO this game’s biggest faults.

In other words: what is the point of allowing one character to play all jobs if mastering those jobs doesn’t bring any tangible benefits or otherwise make certain situations easier to do? If you have 90 Paladin, there is no point to having 90 dark knight.

On topic of Blue, they really should go with the intention of allowing blue to run amok in older expedition content like Bozja and Eureka. Why they decided to lock spells behind dungeons was an incredibly dumb decision.

[Hasrat]

Why they decided to lock spells behind dungeons was an incredibly dumb decision.

Putting spells in dungeons is kinda trivial at this point with Basic Instinct. Think the only level 70 dungeon spell I opted to group for was Cold Fog, and that just for the boss being too tedious and troublesome, but not impossible to solo.

Agreed on expedition content, tho. Not being allowed in Eureka was the biggest disappointment. I don't even need the whole "elemental" thing to be relevant. Just wanted to have some extra fun.

[kaynide]

Putting spells in dungeons is kinda trivial at this point with Basic Instinct. Think the only level 70 dungeon spell I opted to group for was Cold Fog, and that just for the boss being too tedious and troublesome, but not impossible to solo.

Agreed on expedition content, tho. Not being allowed in Eureka was the biggest disappointment. I don't even need the whole "elemental" thing to be relevant. Just wanted to have some extra fun.

It’s less about a spell being in a dungeon, and more like, you have to do the entire dungeon + final boss and maybe they’ll give you the spell, or not. Or you can organize a group to do it “at level”, on what should have been a solo job.

Specifically that stupid lighthouse.

[TheDecay]

So many terrible takes with people hating on Blue. I hope they eventually realize this backwater thinking of theirs where the game shouldnt be encouraged to do unique things is exactly why jobs have become so boring.

Go ahead and cry all you want about them dedicating some resources on a piece of content that people like. At least the job itself is a lot more diverse and fun than the "regular" jobs we currently have. This design should be celebrated, not scorned.

OK, then why can't they use their design philosophy for BLU for regular jobs? Literally no one disagrees with what you're saying. The contention is why such a fun class is locked behind "limited".

The usual spiel is "balance, balance, balance".

Then hire more balancing staff.

[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.)

[Winterfang]

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.

I'm going to slightly veer off track the main topic with a personal experience because it's really not emphasized enough that the content people would be afraid to queue into with a BLU without a full kit is so utterly devoid of teeth that going into a End Game EW dungeon, getting a cure spam healer who's allergic to Holy and couldn't cast Esuna to save their own life 3 times because they got hit by Doom Status all while a RPR seems to not notice the big circle on the floor and we still got through it just fine.

Annoyingly longer than it needed to be sure, but we didn't wipe and not a threat of a kick by anyone. I think folks are really exaggerating how many people will go all kick happy just because a BLU might not have BiS spells for queueable content because, for the worse IMO, the devs are afraid of not throwing a Soft ball in queueable content
Anything bigger that's going to need static or a premade team on PF like EX or Savage, then yeah, doing some research isn't asking for a lot, especially since it's rather the norm for this genre.

[Bekuta]

Blue Mage is a class that's levelled in such an interesting way, so it sucks that there's not much use for it outside of FATEs and unsynced content. I'd love for it to be reworked in a way so that it could be played in regular content, but hopefully not at the cost of the levelling being streamlined like every other class.

[Coatl]

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.

???

So you want SE to double down on their mistake? I mean that is likely but that's not what we should be aiming for.

[Rufalus]

In a way it's one of my favorite things in the game but the execution is overly complicated. You don't have enough spell slots. It takes too long to build and update multiple different sets and hotbars for different situations and then you have to remember how all of those work in case a group makes you switch role.

The worst thing is the extreme FOMO; you do certain content at patch release or you never do it. I will never find a 24 BLU group for the alliance raids that I missed logging. That has to be the earliest priority since the people who care about the log are never going to repeat it after their run. Not letting us undersize the blu log is some BS.

[Atelier-Bagur]

OK, then why can't they use their design philosophy for BLU for regular jobs? Literally no one disagrees with what you're saying. The contention is why such a fun class is locked behind "limited".

The usual spiel is "balance, balance, balance".

Then hire more balancing staff.

You should know that Im in the same mindset that the regular jobs should be just as fun as Blue. It's not that they need to hire more people to balance but it's the dev team sticking to a broken philosophy of the meta, rather than designing a job for its uniqueness and fun factor.