BLU for Duty Finder and Raids! Show your support!

[Saefinn]

As one who was disappointed that BLU got the solo announcement, I am warming up to the compromise of premades. Premades, people can consent the state of the blue mage in their party, in duty finder they cannot beyond a kick, which could mess up the duty finder eco system, either in a BLU that cannot function well or just having to kick a BLU and get another DPS in. There is also the fact Blue Mage is not restricted to a role and the system is not built around being able to select a role to queue as like in WoW and I suspect there would be core system changes needed to get it to work like that. Whilst there are solutions to each problem, it does seem like something that can create a lot of problems. There was going to be compromise somewhere regardless and they've had to find where to make that compromise and thusly you have a situation where there's going to be people not happy regardless of what it is.

As they've implied BLU is the "first" of its kind, this suggestes they want to play with this idea further in the future on other jobs. One complaint has been that they keep dishing out the same formula, so it may be a good thing they're trying something new/different. And for comparison SMN was a disappointment on release, whilst there are many of us who love SMN, they did sacrifice its identity to get it to work within FFXIV's system and some people are still unhappy about and they're currently caught between two identities, a DoT mage with a pet and something that summons powerful aetheric beings to fight for them. This system may well in future give people the summoner people hoped for in addition to the summoner we got. Because it is still a Final Fantasy title, so people do have certain expectations about how certain jobs should be. And a job's identity is difficult to capture when the system don't give much leeway. Red Mage I think they were clever with, because they were able to keep its identity, despite Red Mage being a jack of all trades job.

[Dualgunner]

No, SAMs balanced should be improved to be more accepted by the community. My point about SAM is about community reaction, and how if this is happening to SAM now, then making BLU able to raid would be disastrous to either the job or the raid scene (or both). What would be needed for the job to be able to raid would be to redesign the job from the ground up to be a regular mage with some random abilities from enemies that you get from levelling. Which isn't BLU, and it isn't anything new or interesting.

It could also be a vengeance based tank, using its Learn mechanic to both work as a cooldown against future attacks and as a rebuttal to tankbusters and raidwides.

[Syrus718]

I Dont Understand Why There Are so many people here acting like what yoshi p said isnt true... A Blu mage in raids cant be balance with its potential kit and you know it so dont kid yourself. Making enemies immuned to what will turn out to be most of my strongest attacks wheres the fun in that?. Unlocking skills during quest was my idea but it's really not blue mage and that would have been your complaint.
When it comes to raids im a blue mage but I dont have or want to use the Specific moves you want so I get kicked. Every party doing a skill check before we Que but Because I dont wanna fall in line with some dumb meta that a youtuber or twitch steamers will create I cant join. people already seriously tell others to go watch videos of new content Instead of just learning it your own way... if you need a example look at the age old pressure from the community saying healers have to dps (which has only been admittedly proven necessary 1 time) I dps but would never tell my co healer you better also or you will be kicked... if you think such dumb scenarios wont happen with the blue mage you live in a bubble and dont know the community Your playing with. Instead of isolating the random person playing blu from raids making them feel like crap SE decided to isolate raids and tell blu you too strong for this.

[Asheilin]

There are plenty of ways showcased in other FF games to make BLU in GROUP CONTENT POSSIBLE. not least of which ffxi which everything was group content.

The Level 5 Death example in the PLL while true if it was how it worked 99% of Blue Mage KO skills either did a good chunk of damage to a boss or boss was immune to it. This is Cannologically Lore to the series. Why restrict it? Does Stun work on all bosses? Sleep? Knockbacks? Of course not.

There is also the well if they dont get their skills they're useless/unprepared.... Make a system check (Does Blu have X set skills, yes? Can queue Y dungeons and lower) This would be a check just like "Are you a battle Class?" or "Are you level? "Is your Ilvl High enough"
Could also use the Masked Carnivale to be a prereq for 8man content. A Quest marker (ie the way you can't run 8m Raids until you've completed X MSQ) Before you start screaming that it's solo gameplay, I know. The purpose would be Win 3 sets ( or how many) of Carnivale. This would then Unlock 8man+ content because you showed sufficient proficiency of Blu Mastery to run content.

I'm sure there will be achievements for Skills Unlocked. Could make one, ie 30, unlock roulettes.

[Floortank]

I like most of what SE is doing for Shadowbringers, but locking BLU out of PUG duties is a horrible idea, and has killed a lot of people's enthusiasm for the class.

I get that SE wants the Blue Mage experience to be as accurate as possible, with a big list of spells and abilities and lots of arduous hunts to gather them all, but there has to be a way of structuring the basic BLU into your general content. In fact, it can easily be done, and the game already has the solution built-in.

In Palace of the Dead, you can be a level 30 WAR who has all the abilities up to 60.

So why can't a BLU automatically get bread and butter spells for each duty the moment they load in? Maybe not the best or rarest spells, but just the ones that they need to participate in that particular dungeon or that particular normal raid?

Obviously, it's not a problem with Savage content because you need a premade for that anyway. Anything you need a PF for--any high end duty--the game shouldn't help you; your BLU should be tested on their own merits. Similarly, any powers or spells deemed "too strong" for regular duty content can be locked to solo content.

By using the Palace system you can get BLU into every regular duty, and by banning certain OP spells from group duties you can keep the solo experience rewarding.

When a BLU already has better spells and abilities learned, no help is needed and the BLU just uses the higher level spells they've learned that are on their bar already.

It takes extra work and thought, but it's doable, and BLU is worth it.

[Zakuno2]

Well I generally trust the Dev team to listen to feed back. So i think if people are loud enough about this they might just change this decision. Say what you will about the Dev's but they have done some crazy stuff in the name of pleasing the players. So make some noise, people.

[travenkirkwall]

i was exited to see blue mage geting added but that excitement turned to sheer disappointment.Saying it cant be done for party play as i think of blue mage in FF 11. honestly i hope they take a long hard look at what they did i hope they change it. one more thing about the "what if one joins the party with the wrong spells?" that isnt a argument i can ask what if you dont show up with the right gear?hmm right you see my point we are not stupid spells for blue mage are counted as gear.

[Floortank]

BLU doesn't work for party content, don't pretend that it does. What we would get is this, or a watered-down imitation of BLU, which would generate backlash regardless. This is BLU exactly as BLU should be, and putting it in a party scenario wouldn't work because it can't be balanced against other jobs. This is how the backlash looks:

Community: "We are bored of the predictable formula, give us something we have never seen before"

Devs: "Here is a brand new concept for how jobs are played, and here is BLU exactly as it is in other games"

Community: "Nooo, we never asked for that"

This is a strawman argument. Show me a single post where I've made any of those criticisms? And yet I feel BLU not fitting the content the way the other jobs fit is a problem.

Yes, it's very obvious that BLU having a large roster of spells is hard to balance into regular content. But we're not allowed to use certain spells or abilities in certain content already, see also: the division between PVE and PVP. BLU could be the same, with some flex. It'd be nice to have BLU be a little bit OP in raids and trials if it had all the rare unlockable spells and abilities, and not all of them were banned from group content.

[Beckett]

As disappointed as I am that Blue Mage is a "limited job", they've already committed to this. The job has already had so much work put into it that makes it not work for group content, that making it work for group content would require scraping everything they have and starting over. I would have loved if they had made BLU a regular job from the start, but at this point I don't want them to cancel a new type of gameplay that some players are looking forward to, as well as cancel whatever else they were going to work on next in favor of restarting work on BLU just so that I can have what I want.

[travenkirkwall]

you can just say they cant use the op spells in content like that problem solved they can still be used to solo or get new spells.