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

[Atelier-Bagur]

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.

You do realize you can save hotbar builds with your blue mage right? Really what they need is giving more set slots for those builds.

Also while I get your 2nd point. What's stopping you from forming the specific party on PF yourself? I do that all the time and usually I can get a like minded group going most of the time.

[IkaraGreydancer]

The moment they make all jobs like BLU is the moment folks here will complain again about jobs not being balanced like they did years ago. Well veer right back to the days where certain classes are shunned in the raid scene because other classes are more desirable. We've been through this before..the sheer amount of balance talk and complaining is why classes are the way they are now I don't think folks get this.

[dspguy]

I understand the gripe, but I don't see how Blue Mage could exist otherwise. The game simply doesn't support a job that can tank, heal and DPS. And it is the only job where there is content that actually requires you to utilize specific elemental weaknesses. Anyone else think it made no sense the first time you fought Ifrit and your BLM was spamming Fire on it? How was that ok? At least BLU puts us in a position where we have to think about what we are going to cast on a specific enemy.

If people want BLU to be able to do current content, then they'd have to accept the cookie cutter nature of jobs. BLU would have been be declared a tank, healer or DPS. And then they'd either give them the same toolset every tank has, or a series of GCD and oGCD heals if they are a healer or a gimmick gauge for a DPS. Frankly, that sounds a lot more boring than what BLU currently is.

[TheDecay]

The moment they make all jobs like BLU is the moment folks here will complain again about jobs not being balanced like they did years ago. Well veer right back to the days where certain classes are shunned in the raid scene because other classes are more desirable. We've been through this before..the sheer amount of balance talk and complaining is why classes are the way they are now I don't think folks get this.

It's not either/or if they actually invest in expanding the balancing team beyond 3 people, all of whom are also on other teams.

[Atelier-Bagur]

It's not either/or if they actually invest in expanding the balancing team beyond 3 people, all of whom are also on other teams.

Is it actually just three people or are you just messing with us because this sounds like an assumption

[Winterfang]

The moment they make all jobs like BLU is the moment folks here will complain again about jobs not being balanced like they did years ago. Well veer right back to the days where certain classes are shunned in the raid scene because other classes are more desirable. We've been through this before..the sheer amount of balance talk and complaining is why classes are the way they are now I don't think folks get this.

Then we can point them to this expansion's incredibly boring and homogenized job design and tell them to shove it. Bonus Points, even in this expansion, people still complained about Job Balance

[NekoMataMata]

IMO, the biggest issue I have with BLU is just the simple fact they insisted and even sold it on the premise that BLU would be a solo job. So far, some of the biggest pieces of content with solo content, e.g., Palace of the Dead and Eureka don't even allow Blue Mage to interact with it, which frankly is abysmal.

A class who's one of the biggest selling points upon release and for a long time was the given fact they saw it as a solo job. - The only solo element of this class is Carnival, and frankly nobody cares for those rewards because absolutely everything you get from the Carnival in terms of currency is something you can get far more efficiently doing other pieces of content.

Blue Mage has got to be the most underwhelming content they've ever released due to half-baked decision making. Probably the worst decision they have ever made.

I actually have to agree with this. They weren't completely honest about what BLU is.

It's not a solo job by far. Even leveling it up isn't solo most of the time, because it's 100% meta for people to find partners to kill overworld mobs for them with other higher leveled jobs while they tag everything with BLU rather than grinding.

The masked carnival itself is actually a bit useless. It's fun, you need it for the BLU quests and the weekly goals are nice for quick and easy rewards. That's about it though.

BLUs main uses have almost always been tomestone farms or just farming things in general.

[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.

[Zebraoracle]

Posting on mobile is pain...

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That Yoshi quote isn't the weapon you think it is. People absolutely should have their abilities before going into content. If I get a player in 40+ content without a job stone, I'm kicking them. If I get a player in high level content that skipped their job quests and didn't pick up their abilities, something the game doesn't force you to do btw, I'm kicking then. If BLU were bumped up to a regular job, it absolutely should have some kind of limit to prevent it from queuing into content without an appropriate number of spells for the level of content. My above solution would actually help - if a BLU wanted to focus on being a healer, they only need to get X number of Blue Magic spells tied to the healing mimicry. In extremes and savage, everyone is expected to have all of their abilities so... what's the problem, exactly? BLU might take longer to get abilities for than other jobs? Oh no the horror, the people that care about the job will still do it. Having a job that gains abilities a different way than other jobs isn't somehow making said job incapable of doing content... it just requires a bit more effort.

Back in ShB I accidentally skipped the 70 job quest on GNB and didn't have a vital ability while I leveled to 80. It wasn't until I was doing content as GNB at 80 that I realized. I absolutely shouldn't have been able to do that, and I feel bad for the people I griefed.

[Zebraoracle]

It's not either/or if they actually invest in expanding the balancing team beyond 3 people, all of whom are also on other teams.

Why on earth people are taking this adamant stance that this is an either or situation is beyond me...