Quote Originally Posted by Kemiko View Post
I brought that up as that's commonly used as the reasoning for BLU being Limited when that's never something I felt in any previous Final Fantasy game for a Blue Mage. They're never felt any more or less powerful than any other job I could play as. The most absurdly powerful of them I feel didn't even use the name Blue Mage, they used the name Mime in Final Fantasy Tactics - the whole game of skills was available to them and they still fell behind to something like Calculator.

If we can take something like Black Mage and stick them to only 3 elements when historically Black Mages had way more spells - and more powerful spells - at their disposal but no one is looking at Black Mage and claiming it needs to be made Limited to be as OP as it was in other games, I think Blue Mage can easily still retain its identify of 'monster magic/enemy skills' while still being balanced.
When I think of blue mage I think of ff9's blue mage with the lvl 5 death spell. That's my limited exposure to the job from other FF games. Additionally it seems to me that non-trash enemies in RPGs usually get access to abilities that are more powerful in a vacuum to balance out NPC enemies being inherently more exploitable. Therefore I expect any PC that uses enemy abilities to also be more powerful. Single player RPGs also dont really have to follow a rigid balance. I am very interested however how the job balance in ff11 looks like.

I definitely do understand though when you argue using monster magic by itself is already blue mage identity.