How Blue Mage Could Exist in FFXIV

[Kazrah]

I expect Blue Mage to be a, well.. Mage...

Here's the weird thing about Blue Mage: other than Stragos in VI being sorta considered one, Blue Mages typically never fit that stereotypical "mage" archetype, always having what spells they learned accompanying whatever martial ability they had.

One idea I had been tossing around when I made my original concept was to have something along the lines of Dark Simulacrum from the Death Knight class in World of Warcraft, where it was just an applied debuff that made the next spell cast by the target to be available for the caster to use once for themselves. The biggest issue was in trying to figure out how many limits there would be to the ability in regard to what spells could be utilized by the caster, as you wouldn't want a player to inherit a one-shot mechanic from a boss or something, yet you don't want the cooldown so watered down that there's no real point putting it on your bars. Blizzard I think saw this dilemma too, which is why they removed Dark Simulacrum from Death Knights and later remade it as a pvp-only cooldown for one specialization.

Ultimately, Blue Mage wouldn't be able to feel like one in XIV outside of cutscenes because the game simply doesn't function like that. Same goes with other mechanics brought up, like the "counter tank" that would fall far too weak when assuming an OT role or the "learning shield", which would openly promote bad gameplay. Even just pulling enemy effects from fights for player use beyond whatever the content you'd be doing already provides would require far too many resources since the server would have to remember every single one of those for everyone playing the job.

I feel like Blue Mage and Summoner are jobs that are just beyond the scope of this development team...

This I do agree with (mostly), which is why I'm more convinced that we won't see Blue Mage as a job so much as a job that will integrate some of the aspects of Blue Mage cherry-picked for a job more suitable to this game. They more or less did this with Astrologian inheriting a number of aspects from the traditional Time Mage, so I'd expect this would be as good as it gets.

As for Summoner, I'm not sure it's beyond the scope of the devs so much as just being in a dire need of an overhaul that the team likely doesn't have time or enough resources for.