The future of Eorzea Blue Mages in FFXIV

[Andrien]

perhaps in an expansion pack in the future.

In Final Fantasy VII, the only way you can learn blue magic is with the Enemy Skill Materia. So for example in FFXIV, the Blue Mage job crystal can act like that. It doesn't have to work like in FFXI but it can be similar by equipping the spell into the action bar.

Also in FFXI you can learn over 200 spells, but that doesn't mean you can equip all 200+ Most of them was useless and you have a limit on how many spells you can junction into your spell list. So, the same can be applied here.

[Cidel]

perhaps in an expansion pack in the future.

In Final Fantasy VII, the only way you can learn blue magic is with the Enemy Skill Materia. So for example in FFXIV, the Blue Mage job crystal can act like that. It doesn't have to work like in FFXI but it can be similar by equipping the spell into the action bar.

Also in FFXI you can learn over 200 spells, but that doesn't mean you can equip all 200+ Most of them was useless and you have a limit on how many spells you can junction into your spell list. So, the same can be applied here.

That's the thing, I would love to see Blue Mage return in XIV, but not as a carbon copy of how it was implemented in XI (poorly). In XI, it's true that seemingly 80% of the spells were either useless or became useless as you leveled- something XIV has so far tried to shy away from (seems to work imo). Additionally, thanks to spell setting combos giving traits, you ended up frequently setting spells you didn't even use just for miniscule things like auto-refresh. Even the abilities that were notorious on monsters (1000 needles, bad breath) seemed to be near useless in players' hands without a specialty set-up for it. And lets not forget when some spells eat up like a quarter of MP bars. The sheer amount of spells for Blue Mage in FFXI was just ridiculous given how "cookie-cutter" the player base acted with it. Even one of the developers commented on how unnecessarily complicated they think they made Blue Mage in XI.

You would need to have a blue mage job setup to have NPC mobs that can use mobs skills like the elbow toss, and I beleive Eye of the Beholder would be an OP blue mage skill if you could bind the mob and run away or 100 ton swing/swipe for close range.

Which skill do u beleive a blue mage should have and which would be considered OP?

If the developers truly decided to bring in Blue Mage to Eorzea, I would hope they have enough common sense to not select abilities from monsters that could potentially become "OP." FFXI was hit or miss with this issue. For the most part I don't think FFXI gave Blue Mages any notoriously OP spells, but I think the players found some unlikely spells and made them OP (Headbutt comes to mind). Most of the "OP-ness" that was affiliated with BLU really emerged in PvP. In PvE, anything that could remotely be OP was so ineffective or low accuracy that there was almost no reason to use those spells.