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

[Deceptus]

"BLU could never be a normal Job! It's SO overpowered!"

??? No, it's not. It's utterly mundane and full of bizarre and annoying limitations.

This weird idea that BLU is abnormally powerful is bordering on actual dictionary-definition gaslighting. You could just unsync the content with any normal Job and be dramatically more "overpowered".

Tanking with BLU is literally underpowered, and approximately as fun as driving bamboo under your fingernails.

"But I can KO trash mobs super fast!" Uhhhh you could also just Unsync it and do the same thing, without a 2-minute cooldown.

BLU is "overpowered" when you arbitrarily decide to break your own kneecaps by entering content Synced. And why do you do that? Because BLU tells you to. "I'm overpowered when I'm underpowered because I decided to be" — amazing.

And what "overpowered" things that BLU can actually do to "break" fights are balanced out by the fact that BLU is so underwhelming that it literally has to do those "overpowered" things just to clear content at all.

"BLU has so many cool options! No other Job could ever be like this!"

Yeah I guess if you're just messing around "freestyling" and shooting your friends with Malediction of Water, sure.

If you're actually seriously trying to get things done as BLU, then you just cram all your bloated, generic Primal/Namazu burst damage actions into your overflowing bar slots until you end up with the same boring 2-minute burst cycle as everyone else — except your filler in-between is even more mind-numbing, and sometimes you have to hold burst, because your burst is full of weird and fragile gimmicks that make SB Machinist seem user-friendly.

Then you swap out your 2 or 3 remaining slots for some mundane bonuses or "utility" that would probably just be Role Actions on a normal Job.

Wow, amazing, no other Job could ever be like every other Job, except with extra, convoluted, fake-decision steps along the way.

100% accurate IMHO and this is mostly my take on it as well.

It's not as overpowered as others think because of how badly it is designed and most of it's strongest "gimmick" attacks don't work on bosses (where the harder BLU content is)

Who needs a dedicated tank, or healer when we can have a job that can do most of everything?

We already have that job, it's called a Warrior.

[ForsakenRoe]

Just thought I'd whack this together before shopping, to put the 'but the BLU identity' thing to bed



One of these things is not like the others... And no, I'm not talking about how you eat enemies in FF9

[Ardeth]

I hate that Bluemage at the end of the day is a way to cheese event tombstones and not just a job. And I'm tired of pretending it's not.

[ForteNightshade]

Perhaps, they should stop using "balance" as an excuse and hire/train more personnel and put them on the balancing team instead of siphoning the budget into Forspoken 365.

Could they do balance and creativity better? Absolutely. It's fair undeniable that Endwalker went for simplicity out of ease not necessity. With that being said, you will always have to sacrifice some measure of uniqueness for balance—especially as the number of jobs bloat. This is why a lot of people, myself included, point to Stormblood as a sort of compromise. It's far from perfect but the most jobs stood out a lot better back then compared to now.

On the subject of Blue Mage though. It's yet another half baked idea they didn't properly develop that has so much wasted potential. Not to mention, it's release was comically underwhelming. The supposedly "overpowered" job couldn't even beat a synced Black Mage, and was downright awful as a tank or healer. Ten months they left it to rot before finally addressing these glaring issues and actually making it pretty decent. Alas, not only had the damage long been done, they did very little to "win back the crowd" so to speak—with piecemeal updates and constantly kneecapping Blue Mage on content it should be able to do (Deep Dungeon, Eureka). I genuinely thought they were just going to quietly retire it but we'll see if they get anything more than a title on Tuesday.

[fulminating]

I just fundamentally don’t have the trust in these devs to not completely wreck it. No matter how bad you think it is, you can still look at smn/sch/whm/ast/sge/brd/drk and sincerely say it could be far worse.

[TheDecay]

Could they do balance and creativity better? Absolutely. It's fair undeniable that Endwalker went for simplicity out of ease not necessity. With that being said, you will always have to sacrifice some measure of uniqueness for balance—especially as the number of jobs bloat. This is why a lot of people, myself included, point to Stormblood as a sort of compromise. It's far from perfect but the most jobs stood out a lot better back then compared to now.

Stormblood is peak class design for both balance and creativity, but consider why we're even talking about "compromise"?

The playerbase doesn't even dare to imagine something better than Stormblood these days.

I'm sorry but the developers are gaslighting us into thinking that this is an issue of trade-offs, when it's an issue of them treating this game like dirt.

If I force a family into poverty so they can only afford one piece of bread, they have to balance that piece of bread between the child and the mother, so there's a trade-off, and now everyone's debating about who should get the bread: the child or the mother, when it was I who forced them into poverty in the first place.

[Renathras]

...

This is my point, though. FFXIV's combat system is stupidly rigid. It doesn't allow for (or incorporate) stuff like that. So if one Job - but only one - gets that special treatment of "difference", then it becomes unbalanced. It's either overpowered and meta and everyone demands one, or it's underpowered and anti-meta and gets blacklisted.

I didn't prove your point - I pointed out how BLU wouldn't need a WHM or Bene for it. With a PLD and RDM, it would allow for 0 Healer clears. Something I know you oppose.

Recall that the 0 Healer clear of TOP only relied on a single brief time period of pulling off insanity where they cast the Raise on the SMN or RDM (I forget which), then had a PLD Cover the other while it cast a Raise, then power raising everyone else after that. This was roughly 30 seconds of the fight, not the entire thing. P3S actually had more healing requirements, but again, that specific mechanic required _A_ Healer Job for either LB or for AST to use Macrocosmos. It's why the encounter couldn't be 0 Healer cleared. But with this setup, you'd be able to 0 Healer clear it with a BLU. PLD or WAR (or both) and RDM or DNC (or both) could pump healing into it, then White Wind, then GG.

Angel Whisper CAN'T have a unique property. That's the point. Not and fit into the general meta. In practice, it would either be the same and thus not matter, the distinction wouldn't be relevant and wouldn't matter, or it wouldn't be worth it in the first place.

Consider SMN vs RDM. SMN can only instant cast one Raise per minute, RDM can do several (provided it doesn't OOM, roughly 4-5?). In practice, if your team isn't dying left and right, they're identical. Maybe a rare Healer death gets addressed and that's it. When it matters and you need a bunch of Riases, SMN's is vastly inferior, as would be BLU's. And due to this specific distinction...RDM's damage is lower than all other Casters and almost all other DPSers to the point it's the first Job swapped out once a party is no longer on Prog. BLU would probably end up like a worse SMN in this case with your version. And, again, I'll point out the 0 Healer TOP clear was due to a SMN and RDM tandem Raising at a specific, key moment in the encounter. Something, again, that you oppose being doable in the game...

Why do people keep laboring under the illusion that if BLU or jobs as complex as BLU aren't limited and are endgame-ready, the devs will not prune or balance its skills so that it's not overpowered...?

What are you talking about?

This is literally the argument people are making - that part of what makes BLU fun is that it's not at all balanced, so to make it work with the other 19, it would have to be balanced, and that likely means not overpowered and not fun. People have fun on BLU gathering up massive trash packs, freezing them, then shattering them, for example.

EDIT:

This is why a lot of people, myself included, point to Stormblood as a sort of compromise. It's far from perfect but the most jobs stood out a lot better back then compared to now.

I've come to MOSTLY agree with this.

There are some pretty important caveats. For example, ShB and especially EW WHM is way better than the garbage SB one. SB was the single worst expansion for WHM.

So a hybrid approach would be in order, I think. One that restores a lot of Jobs to SB state, but not all of them, noting some are better in EW than they were in SB. Further, there are some entirely new Jobs, so obviously they wouldn't be changed. Even further still, there are some changed Jobs that are basically entirely new Jobs - MNK to a point, MCH, and SMN - where both versions could and probably should exist. So in that sense, we'd want to add them as new Jobs so that both could exist simultaneously.

[Raikai]

I hate that Bluemage at the end of the day is a way to cheese event tombstones and not just a job. And I'm tired of pretending it's not.

But for how long did you pretend, though?

[Nestama]

I'm gonna go with Stockholme Syndrome.

Or people actually like it. Shocking, I know.

[Atelier-Bagur]

We already have that job, it's called a Warrior.

Oh heck yeah, but do we really need to break the system even more?