How could Blue Mage have been different?

[Seraphor]

I’m seeing two distinctly different takes on how people think Blue Mage should have been done to fit into the role system.
1. That it could maintain it’s ability hunting trait while somehow having a separate skill set for duties.
2. That it should be squeezed into a caster role like the other jobs, and not have an ability hunting side to it.

Well, I don’t think either of those options are really that feasible, and I’ll explain why.


1. Jobs that fit into the role system, by necessity have to have a mostly linear skill progression in order to function at all. These jobs have defined rotations, or skills that interact with each other in ways that to lose one of the skills would severely gimp the class. Even by Satasha you have some kind of combo, whether it’s a weaponskill combo, or the BLM’s fire-ice interaction. Tanks have at least two enmity skills in addition to defensive cooldowns and Healers have far more at their disposal than just one healing spell. These jobs are built to function in one very specific way and they take a predefined set of skills to do that.
What happens when you mix that with a horizontal progression system like hunting down enemy skills?
Well it goes much further than annoying PUG groups who expect you to have a certain skill, it fundamentally changes the way the job plays. Skill combos and interactions will no longer work the same way. You can’t have a combo, because you might be missing the skill in the middle of that chain. You can’t have skills that interact with each other or feed off one another, like astral fire and umbral ice, like white and black mana, or any kind of aetherflow system, because if you’re missing one of the key skills you’re utterly impotent.
This means that Blue Mage will play in a completely different way to any other class, each skill has to be meaningful on its own, not as an ensemble piece, and each skill has to be powerful enough to carry you to the next one, whichever that is because it won’t be preset. Already we can see that balance, in the way other jobs see it, is completely out the window. With a focus on hunting down their skills being the core of their gameplay, this balance takes precedent.
I don’t see how you could reconcile this with some kind of preset end-game skill set. That set would have to be completely different to the way the job plays outside of instance content, you’d also need to reliably have obtained every necessary skill by end-game, and we know that isn’t the way Blue Mage will work. You won’t be grinding for tombstones for the next step in the gear ladder, you’ll be grinding for blue magic, and that’s the whole challenge, that’s why it’s going to be difficult to learn blue magic, to make it an engaging and meaningful horizontal progression, which is something people have asked for.
You would have to nerf this challenge, and relegate ability learning to a minor inconvenience that got in the way of raiding with your predefined end-game skill set. At that point… what’s the point? It may as well be a regular job…

2. So what if it was just a regular caster job?
Well obviously we do away with hunting down enemy skills. This alone would alienate a good deal of Blue Mage fans. Sure they might get over it, they did with RDM, but I think this aspect is more important to Blue Mage than whatever was lost with RDM.
In addition, it would have a set skill set, a set rotation, it might be interesting, but it would ultimately be comprised of a set of elemental magical spells, plus some crowd control debuffs, the latter of which wouldn’t be used because debuffs don’t work in raids, so they’d be useless. It might be fun, it might be a refreshing new caster for some people, but it wouldn’t be all that different from BLM or RDM.
Minor grievances right? Well actually, that is a problem. Not just being ‘more of the same’ you could argue that for any new job, but for making it more casters in particular.
DPS jobs compete with each other for party slots, and when they don’t they compete for loot.
More competition for caster gear would be the ‘greed only in 24-man’ debacle all over again, and if we look at the job role distribution as it stands, together with a typical party composition, we see that we already have too many caster jobs, and adding more won’t help.
If the other two jobs in Shadowbringers are Tank and Healer as leaked then we get:
Four tanks competing for two party slots. 2:1 ratio.
Four healers competing for two party slots. 2:1 ratio.
Four melee competing for two party slots. 2:1 ratio.
Two ranged physical competing for one party slot. 2:1 ratio.
Three casters competing for one party slot. 3:1 ratio.
We don’t need another caster to make that 4:1. Yoshi P knows this, therefore we would not have been getting Blue Mage as a new caster DPS in this patch anyway. At the most, we might have had it in 6.0, but even then, we’re far more likely to get a new maiming and scouting class, or even another ranged physical, before we get a new caster, because they’re already lacking in roles anyway, in addition to having this extra competition to consider.

I honestly think it is a case of getting Blue Mage like this, or not getting Blue Mage at all, and this is exactly what Yoshi P said four years ago and he’s stuck to his guns. So I don’t think Blue Mage could realistically have been any different than what we’re getting.

If you wish we were getting Blue Mage as something different, as a “real” class, I get it, it’s disappointing that this doesn’t appeal to you and your complaints are valid, but it’s not a realistic expectation and never was.
If you would rather we never get Blue Mage than this, then you’re being petulant, and if you’re threatening to unsub because of this, then I’m wondering why you ever played the game in the first place when it didn’t have a Blue Mage anyway.

Ultimately it is new and different content, that might just appeal to a lot of players and keep the game running, because we need more variety.
The end game is limited and for many it’s getting stale and it can’t survive off of scheduled tombstone grinding alone.

So what can we do about it?
Well, there’s always scope for them to change things, and being a ‘Limited Job’ doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t be ‘less limited’ in the future. We can always ask for inclusion in higher level content, extend it up to level cap, get included in deep dungeons and maybe even alliance raids, but I don’t think queuing for PUG groups via DF, or the very latest raid of the current tier, will ever be on the cards.

[Burningskull]

All skills come form job quests that send you out to fight 1 or 2 mobs and acquire their skills by either seeing them or getting hit by them depending on the mob.

Blue Mage could have some party damage mitigating effects such as Mighty Guard to mitigate a very small amount of damage for big attacks or tank busters, and small party heals to help Healers in time of need such as White Wind. Abilities that cause status effects also deal some damage to not make them "completely" useless on monsters that are immune to the status effect.

This is how I thought Blue Mage would work. You would go back to your Trainer, they tell you to go fight a Cactuar some where in the open world. You fight the cactuar, get hit or see 1000 needles. Learn the spell when you kill the mob, go back to the Trainer. They say "good job, I'll let you know if I think of any more monsters you can learn from," or "come back when you're stronger and I'll tell you of a new mob to try to learn from."

[ReiMakoto]

I stole this from reddit but honestly I think it answers a lot

To be honest, I think they can satisfy both sides of this equation.

They don't need to lock the Blue Mage from content. Blue Mage has 2 issues:

Having the correct skills.

Having balanced skills.

So the issue is that, given a Blue Mage player goes to a dungeon, or a raid, and said Blue Mage either has completely broken skills that destroy everything, or they lack the basic skills required to even contribute to the party.Basically, what we need to do is make so Blue Mages will be functional and balanced.
1. First thing you need to do is guarantee they will have all skills.

Let's assume, for example, you pick your Blue Mage from a trainer somewhere,you are unable to do dungeons through Party Finder, you can't raid, all you can do is smack monsters in the open world, be it quests, normal mobs, or FATEs.

A Lv.50 quest appears when you have all skill.

The point of the quest? Unlock all of the multiplayer content up to that point. If you want to do ARR content, which means content up to Lv 50, now you can, and only a SELECT LIST of skills will be allowed to use, up to what makes sense for a Job to have up to that point in the game.

2. How many skills would be required to make the Job functional?

Up until Lv 50, Mage DPS classes have the following amount of skills:
Black Mage: 17
Summoner: 20
Red Mage: 17 skills.
For Blue Mages who start with 49 skills, we are talking about a THIRD of the skills needing balance.
3. Balance the select number of skills you have.

These skills would be the ONLY ONES to be BALANCED.

So the idea is that before you can do the content of a said expansion or base game, you need to reach the maximum level of that expansion, and get all of the skills of that expansion, do the quest and then that will unlock the content for you.

The difference here is BLU has a unique prog system

4. How to explain the system, lore-wise?

Would make sense if, after learning all of these skills you could fight some random monsters on the field, but actually fight hard battles that require you to know what you are doing? You need a FIGHTING-STYLE.

So, the lore would be that, you and the trainer, look at all the crazy NONSENSE you have learned, and then present to you what is the REAL list of skills that you can use in the content that requires balance. Of course, all of the silly skills will still be usable in non-balanced content, which is pretty much open world content.

5. Does all this mean that I won't be able to customize my Blue Mage for certain types of content?

Yes

As for gear, thats a problem that will persist as long as the game is the way it is, hell they could have given blue scouting gear with caster role skills because why not?