How Blue Mage Could Exist in FFXIV

[Radacci]

I don't see why. If BLU has as many monster skills as BLM has spells, why would it be pointless?

you mean tiers of fire, blizzard, thunder? so blu gets 10 needles, 100 needles, 1000 needles, and 10000 needles? or make that a combo.

[N8Dawgg]

I had never thought about Blue Mage being a tank until reading this.

I don't remember if in FF5 Blue Mage learns Scan or not, but maybe that could be how it learn attacks to use, Scan would give you access to a random ability an enemy uses, every 30 seconds or so. As for slightly stronger attacks, there could be 2 mitigation tools you use that could share a cooldown, one for a high potency single target ability, and the other for an obvious AOE situation.

A knee jerk reaction says Blue Mage would be most viable as a tank to me. Or if it would be a dps, maybe mark the tank and it learns what the tank is hit with?

It does seem very complex to implement correctly, but there may be much more disappoint to how its implemented than praise for being done at all (if it ever does get implemented,) so I do not think they will implement it.

Theorycrafting is fun

[Mapleine]

The big problem with BLU in FFXIV is that the game just doesn't support the huge number of abilities a BLU would be expected to learn. Even if every ability is learned from a monster, it would pale in comparison to the total from FFXI (which everyone seems to use as the gospel of blue mages). More succinctly, given the way things have been going, blue mages would gain abilities from a whopping five (5) monsters per expansion, at maximum.

Don't base it on XI, base it on a modernized V.

Blue Mage would have the luxury of being made in a 5.0 climate which Summoner, which was rushed into a WoW Warlock-styled joke for launch, will never have.

V is the gospel of the job system, not XI, which is an EQ-styled game that can't relate to anything these days.

I'm more concerned on what classic job will be co-opted into a tank no one wants to play, next. I'm so sick of the tank conundrum in MMOs I could puke.

[ADVSS]

Don't base it on XI, base it on a modernized V.

Blue Mage would have the luxury of being made in a 5.0 climate which Summoner, which was rushed into a WoW Warlock-styled joke for launch, will never have.

V is the gospel of the job system, not XI, which is an EQ-styled game that can't relate to anything these days.

I'm more concerned on what classic job will be co-opted into a tank no one wants to play, next. I'm so sick of the tank conundrum in MMOs I could puke.

I wouldnt mind, as long as they figure out what they want tanks to do, seems like they slipped up yet again this go around. Maybe by 6.0 ...

[Kazrah]

I wouldnt mind, as long as they figure out what they want tanks to do, seems like they slipped up yet again this go around. Maybe by 6.0 ...

5.0 will likely bring the next new tank. Likely not because of the "we need more tanks" argument, but rather because of the current lack of variety of both tanks and healers compared to melee and ranged dps. After two years, hopefully they'll figure it out.

I do agree though that FFXI isn't a good model to follow not just for BLU, but for any future job. RDM and SAM I think showed that you don't need to follow FFXI to have good, playable jobs.

[MagiusNecros]

If the monster abilities don't work exactly the same as when an enemy uses them then Blue Mage as a whole is pointless IMO.

[Dualgunner]

Talraen summed up my thoughts on Blue Mage quite well

[RyuSaarva]

try to find a rare enemy that has a low chance to appear during certain weather and time and spend a few months to get 1 skill.

[Kazrah]

try to find a rare enemy that has a low chance to appear during certain weather and time and spend a few months to get 1 skill.

This was another reason why I opted out of the traditional Blue Mage concept. Farming that much for some sort of rare gear or a relic is understandable, but no one should have to do that much farming for an actual key element of the job. All the more reason why I'm glad this game isn't XI.

[Reynhart]

It wouldn't be that difficult to give job quests that revolves around learning skills from special monsters. You fight the monster one on one, and your mission is to get hit by a specific attack (Only in FFXI whas the actual learning randomly activated) and then kill him. Of course, you wouldn't have "secret" or "well-hiddend" skills, but I really doubt anyone would like being able to miss something. It would also be funny that some quests make you go into a dungeon to be hit by a boss attack

FFXI had indeed a really high number of Blue Magics (and most of them were useless)...but also had 111 spells for WHM, yet XIV had no problem creating a perfectly functionnal WHM with around 30 skills...for the record, there was 30 Blue Spells in V, 24 in VI, VII and IX and 16 in X-2.