I Thought BLU Was Made For Solo Players

[Atelier-Bagur]

I find it funny at this point. WoW, the hardcore raid-only MMO, is now giving you the ability to get endgame raid-level gear from just casually playing the game and plans to expand this to even more solo content with Delves in the next expansion.
While XIV has suddenly become the "raid or bust" MMO when it comes to gearing your character.

We have the tomestone armor and weapons but they suffer from strict weekly lockouts due to the low tomecap and with the weapons themselves having you to wait 4 to 7 months (during current patch) to get a single one in a game that encourages you to play multiple jobs is such an out of touch design choice. Yeah I get it, its mostly there to keep retention but seriously we couldnt have other avenues that help bypass that limit just even a little bit? The current tomecap and weekly lockout wouldnt be insulting if it wasnt the ONLY way to get that gear.

Game needs to spread its loot structure to other forms of content and not just Savage raids.

[Jargal]

Where have they claimed BLU to be a full solo content? As far as I'm aware there was no such claims nowhere in the game or outside (correct me if I'm wrong and provide evidence of this claim). Also, Blue Mage raiding is imo one of the best contents in the game! If anything I wanted Ultimates to be doable as blues also.

Also, this is an MMO, I really don't understand how people want or expect everything to be soloable in a MMORPG, Final Fantasy franchise has other 14 fully single player games, go play those if you don't want to play a multiplayer cooperative game.

EDIT: Not just expecting every content to be solo, but to also say "can't believe they are rewarding people for learning and clearing hard content as a Blue Mage" is such a delusional take for me

[Deccado]

I find it funny at this point. WoW, the hardcore raid-only MMO, is now giving you the ability to get endgame raid-level gear from just casually playing the game and plans to expand this to even more solo content with Delves in the next expansion.
While XIV has suddenly become the "raid or bust" MMO when it comes to gearing your character.

Though it was never really a raid focused end game compared to other games, they did something similar in SWTOR some years back; you could get the BIS gear by raiding as you normally would, or through a semi-random grind that included pretty much any content you wanted to play.

As you can imagine, some were very vocal that you cant do that in an an MMO for myriad reasons, but at the end of the day, the raiders continued to raid and got the shiny new gear first, and anyone else who was interested in it just ground away and got it further down the line. It actually worked out pretty well IMO, unlike... well, a lot of the other things they did.

[Jargal]

We have the tomestone armor and weapons but they suffer from strict weekly lockouts due to the low tomecap and with the weapons themselves having you to wait 4 to 7 months (during current patch) to get a single one in a game that encourages you to play multiple jobs is such an out of touch design choice. Yeah I get it, its mostly there to keep retention but seriously we couldnt have other avenues that help bypass that limit just even a little bit? The current tomecap and weekly lockout wouldnt be insulting if it wasnt the ONLY way to get that gear.

Game needs to spread its loot structure to other forms of content and not just Savage raids.

Although I agree that the tome cap limit is very low and doesn't accompany well the structure of gearing BiS with savage.

Out of legit curiosity, why does it matter to get fast high IL if virtually there's no use for it unless you actually do high-end content (ultimate and criterion savage)? It's not like having high IL is a must to complete all the available endgame content outside of ultimates (you can complete savage with a crafted pentamelded set anyways).

[Canadane]

You don't need a static, I used Party Finder for the majority of my BLU raid clears.
I love BLU and I like the concept of limited jobs. It makes older savage fights a LOT more enjoyable. I hope you find the enjoyment in it as well.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Although I agree that the tome cap limit is very low and doesn't accompany well the structure of gearing BiS with savage.

Out of legit curiosity, why does it matter to get fast high IL if virtually there's no use for it unless you actually do high-end content (ultimate and criterion savage)? It's not like having high IL is a must to complete all the available endgame content outside of ultimates (you can complete savage with a crafted pentamelded set anyways).

Ive actually stated this counter argument and I feel it still holds true; however the nature of MMOs is always to get the best gear (people will always want to be more efficient) and the slow progression of obtaining these items goes against the core principle of FFXIV's All-in-One system.

I dont think asking for extra avenues to get savage level gear is bad. People are still going to have that retention to get BiS in this game but the process of doing that shouldnt be this extremely bad. Realistically you should be able to at least get 3 pieces of BiS gear weekly to fit the 3 roles; Tank, Healer, DPS and this can be done by spreading the content via raids, quests or heck even expert level crafts like in WoW.

[Jargal]

Ive actually stated this counter argument and I feel it still holds true; however the nature of MMOs is always to get the best gear (people will always want to be more efficient) and the slow progression of obtaining these items goes against the core principle of FFXIV's All-in-One system.

I dont think asking for extra avenues to get savage level gear is bad. People are still going to have that retention to get BiS in this game but the process of doing that shouldnt be this extremely bad. Realistically you should be able to at least get 3 pieces of BiS gear weekly to fit the 3 roles; Tank, Healer, DPS and this can be done by spreading the content via raids, quests or heck even expert level crafts like in WoW.

Yeah I can see that, a sense of character progression alone can be a motivator, but I can argue the same over getting BiS on savages and I just don't know how you would go about it without pissing off the balance of effort x reward, because in the end, doing savage only allows players to get better IL faster, since on odd patches, they add the possibility for anyone to upgrade their tome gears by exchanging alliance and nuts for the upgrades, if only the tome cap limit was higher everyone would get a high IL gear in a considerable speed.

Edit: after some thought I believe the best course of action on this would be making savage gear being the only kind of set that has visual effects (remove them from the normal set), to compensate, make it so the normal set could be dyable, and the savage set could be dyable + you can dye/chage color of the effects emanating from the set, that in a sense would be the fair way to reward a player that goes through a harder piece of content and not feel robbed of going the hard way for gearing up.

[Gralna]

The reason why BLU is limited is because they saw the need to make "game-breaking" skills which don't work in 95% of content, yet standard BLU damage rotation is pretty much just another Caster with some slight nuances - basically the devs forced a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That's one example given and most easily quoted, the other is that to make it a full job, they'd have to get rid of the blue mage book and the method of learning spells, and turn BLU into just another caster that learns from leveling and doing job quests. We wouldn't get learning parties for spells, or have people trying figure out what spells to equip for running content. People are already upset when we see someone go into CT or a post level 30 dungeon as their base class, how would people react if we started getting blue mages in content that only knew water cannon.

Tbh, really enjoy the current iteration of BLU, especially the part where a lot of it isn't "solved" yet. There is a lot of room to play with what spells to equip and strategies to try for soloing dungeons, trials, maps... maps are some of my favorite content to do as a blue mage, especially when I make it all the way to end of the dungeons.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

That's one example given and most easily quoted, the other is that to make it a full job, they'd have to get rid of the blue mage book and the method of learning spells, and turn BLU into just another caster that learns from leveling and doing job quests. We wouldn't get learning parties for spells, or have people trying figure out what spells to equip for running content. People are already upset when we see someone go into CT or a post level 30 dungeon as their base class, how would people react if we started getting blue mages in content that only knew water cannon.

Tbh, really enjoy the current iteration of BLU, especially the part where a lot of it isn't "solved" yet. There is a lot of room to play with what spells to equip and strategies to try for soloing dungeons, trials, maps... maps are some of my favorite content to do as a blue mage, especially when I make it all the way to end of the dungeons.

A paragraph further I requested a second differently named Soul Crystal named "Memoires of the Blue Mage". A healthy medium that would give us a standard kit for BLU so it and Limited BLU can coexist on different planes of existence - one for the traditional BLU fans of spell learning and one for those like me who simply want another caster with a gameplay twist they can use in *all* content.

[Absurdity]

Yeah I can see that, a sense of character progression alone can be a motivator, but I can argue the same over getting BiS on savages and I just don't know how you would go about it without pissing off the balance of effort x reward, because in the end, doing savage only allows players to get better IL faster, since on odd patches, they add the possibility for anyone to upgrade their tome gears by exchanging alliance and nuts for the upgrades, if only the tome cap limit was higher everyone would get a high IL gear in a considerable speed.

Edit: after some thought I believe the best course of action on this would be making savage gear being the only kind of set that has visual effects (remove them from the normal set), to compensate, make it so the normal set could be dyable, and the savage set could be dyable + you can dye/chage color of the effects emanating from the set, that in a sense would be the fair way to reward a player that goes through a harder piece of content and not feel robbed of going the hard way for gearing up.

As you said, savage could have the benefit of being the only dyeable version.
Ideally I would keep the savage set as it is, maybe with some additional flashy effects if people are into that, and add an additional new set to the overworld/casual/side activities. Same ilvl, maybe even the same stats, but not as "prestigious-looking".