Quote Originally Posted by kikix12 View Post
*Snip*
It's worth pointing out that pretty much ALL of your observations about BLU depend on design decisions that do not actually need to be made.

All of BLU's abilities are Blue Magic? They don't have to be. Give them utility abilities as well, like an ability that ensures the next Blue Magic spell cast is a guaranteed critical/direct hit, or an Incite ability which forces the target (unless it's immune) to immediately use a special ability (this is useful both for learning Blue Magic, and in general by forcing a critter to waste time charging up a predictable and avoidable aoe rather than auto-attacking). There are all sorts of BLU-appropriate abilities folks could come up with, with a little imagination. Actual Blue Magic should be limited to ten to fifteen spells, with another two or three being added every time the level cap increases. There's no need to have scores of spells with only a certain number equipped at a time; only FFXI ever did that, and 80% of Blue Magic spells in that game were trash (and about half of the remainder were only good because they enabled certain job traits, like Auto-refresh).

BLUs don't have all their spells? Kick them, and deservedly so, just as you would any other job that doesn't have all their job abilities. This situation should be no more common than it would be for any other job, so long as acquiring Blue Magic spells was made no more difficult than acquiring job abilities. "Random chance to learn" can die in a fire; it wasn't fun in FFXI, and it won't be here, either. Make 'em one-and-done, and any BLU that doesn't have their spells clearly doesn't care about their job or gameplay whatsoever, and has no place in difficult content.

Some Blue Magic spells affect even scripted bosses (like stunned Shiva), and therefore will throw off endgame? Don't do that! Seriously, this is the easiest thing to address. Lots of jobs have CC abilities that are nerfed against bosses; BLU should be no different. Just as Sleep is pointless to use on Omega, so should be Bad Breath.

Honestly, it boggles the mind. There's any number of ways that BLU COULD have been added to the game as a fully-fledged job without breaking the game. YoshiP, though, was apparently stuck in this mental vision of what BLU MUST be, which was pretty much incompatible with the game, and rather than tailor his image of the job to fit the game (which is what was done for pretty much every job we DO have, and most notably changed were BRD, DRK, and SMN), he created this bizarre minigame just to make folks shut up.