Thank you SE for...

[Hestzhyen]

I'd love to get more time with BLU but... OP is right.

I'm a true solo player. I PUG everything since nearly all my friends have quit and I'm very limited in the time I can play nowadays. So I thought cool, BLU sounds like a fun little thing I can do until Hildibrand is released. But no, I can't. Without even mentioning the bum rush that forced grouping to learn many skills in the overworld, the requirement to join instances to learn skills when the job can't even go in with the Squadron really kills the fun for me.

I guess in short don't sell it as a SOLO JOB when you need to join groups to get over half your skills and progress the job's questline. This job is soloable in the same sense Eureka is. Maybe something got lost in translation? Maybe SE doesn't define "solo" the same way I do? Either way I'm disappointed and I can't trust SE to really make solo content soloable.

[Deceptus]

SE did not present Blue Mage as a solo job exclusively. That's it. That's my point. My entire point. There's nothing more to it. Nothing else to extrapolate from it.

Except they did. You can try to defend it all you want but a picture is worth a thousand words.

[Taebok]

Kind of hard to mis-interpret "designed for solo play" ... yet people find a way.

[Shougun]

Except they did. You can try to defend it all you want but a picture is worth a thousand words.

The issue is if you say beef soup or off road car, mountain bike, or whatever. That doesn't say it can't or shouldn't or isn't even designed with other aspects in mind. Beef soup doesn't just have broth and beef, mountain bikes are just fine on not the mountain, off road all terrain vehicles spend most of their time on the road lol. Blue Mage even on their own documents isn't designed exclusively for solo if you keep looking through the presentation, they mention in their own words when you watch that you'll need parties to get some of the bigger spells (which imo is a mistake, not that they said it but that they designed the job that it needs it that way).

I am 100% with people going ".. I wish this class was better at solo'ing, I feel hobbled by this instanced content I need to be carried through or suffer slowly through - I'd like to do it by myself as a job that's going to wipe the floor with these primal's silly EX faces" (or something like that lol).

Just right now I see people arguing over whether the name of the soup is a lie rather than what in the soup you didn't like. I feel like they could have presented blue mage a bit better, in that it'd also sound worse (imo lol) too but I don't think they've lied when they say designed for solo (carnival is the "peak" reward of blue mage and is purely solo).

They put beef in the soup, they just happened to do something else to it too (incomplete party mechanics, etc), I think Fyce is defending that SE didn't lie by calling it beef Soup even if people don't like the soup and they normally like other beef soups lol.

Everyone can keep arguing over that I guess, can't and wont stop anyone. But I personally want to see something about the job change, and at least personally I imagine we'd get SE to do something in a way we prefer if we focus less on word choice and more on "it can't do this, I don't like it because of that". Yes of course it's frustrating it can't join DF or use squadrons (MSQ?), but that doesn't mean it was exclusively designed for solo it just means they cut up the party content and a lot of people didn't like that (I didn't at least, MrKimper clearly thought it was weird too - I laughed at mystical fun play lol).

Imo, the job needs a pass before 5.0 that buffs up some aspects - preferably adds many new combos and potency modifications, makes % chance spells rely on other less frustrating mechanics (like longer cooldowns but higher reliability), while also making the class less like this on buffs: https://youtu.be/6dxICJHd518?t=27 (cooldowns, instant casts, other things to make it feel less buff spamy to be strong, imo). Blue needs, imo, to be what one might call "balanced OP" -where the fun that 1k needle introduced is not just one spell but rather an entertaining weave of OP destruction (later you can stack buffs to be OP but, imo, not entertaining to do that).

Then they keep that up for the limited side ("balanced Overpower"), for future patches. Where solo god blue mage needs no help, but can party pre-made/squadron and do all content that their level cap meets (MSQ, any raids, Eureka, whatever), and might even be seen as the "carry" for other players trying to do old content ("please help me with story mode titan" blue mage: "I will fight with all limbs tied behind my back and destroy him naked, daddy blue mage is coming"). And then also at the same time but over a longer period for quality reasons work in a main portion of the job (for DF) through carefully curated selection of spells the player can learn that will be allowed into DF (with systems put in place so it doesn't burden other players, blue mage becoming the first advanced job in FFXIV).

Ehh, anyway I don't really want to argue SE's intentions . I see what Fyce is trying to say, since I do think there is "beef" and "soup" in blue mage (solo design). With that said I don't think it is currently in the right place and could be much better. I want it to be better (I like blue mage as a concept), but that doesn't mean I think they need to throw it all out either to get to the right place. I want advanced jobs as a concept~! (main job with limited side content).

[Cidel]

The biggest problem I have with the "Designed for Solo Play" spiel they tried to give us about BLU is that BLU has turned-out to be arguably less solo-oriented than pretty much every other existing, non-limited job on the way to it's designated level cap, and then some.

"It can learn a lot of it's spells playing solo in the open world." Well yes- and so can everything else. The class/job quests you get on the other classes/jobs for abilities and spells are designed to be done solo, so touting that a BLU can learn spells on it's own is not even worth calling it "solo play." To add to it, once they start needing the spells from dungeons and trials, it becomes even less a solo experience than everything else which has access to their full job kit provided they participated in their own solo quests- unlike BLU, who is at the mercy of not only the participation of other players but scathing RNG.

To top it all off, BLUs can't even participate in squadron missions; another possible outlet for BLUs to learn some potential dungeon spells. Seeing as you're accompanied by NPCs and not actual players, this would be another place they could go play solo, but nope, BLU currently isn't even allowed in there.

It's almost as if they decided to label it as being "designed for solo play" purely on the basis that the Masked Memeval is designed for one player and to justify not having to balance it for DF usage. Because almost everything else about BLU thus far points otherwise.

[Shougun]

It's almost as if they decided to label it as being "designed for solo play" purely on the basis that the Masked Memeval is designed for one player and to justify not having to balance it for DF usage. Because almost everything else about BLU thus far points otherwise.

I think that's literally true, not probably lol. I imagine the hardest part of the job to design was not adding a bunch of hard to get spells from primals but designing masked, so to them from a design cost perspective probably is fine to say. However, obviously to us the players we spend most of the time banging our head against the instances and breezing through the carnival lol (making the pinnacle of solo content seem like a flash in the pan).

[Elerus]

make your friends giggle then drop it design?

Ah, the FF XIII model!

[JohnSpawnVFX]

Except they did. You can try to defend it all you want but a picture is worth a thousand words.

Except when the next slide contradicts that... But let's ignore that and cherry pick only the convenient one.



And no one's doing synced dungeons to get XP so drop the "It's only partying up for levelling" argument

[Dualgunner]

What can BLU solo that no other job can, within the scope that unsynched is allowed and Masked Carnivale is not?

[TheHeavenAbyss]

The biggest problem I have with the "Designed for Solo Play" spiel they tried to give us about BLU is that BLU has turned-out to be arguably less solo-oriented than pretty much every other existing, non-limited job on the way to it's designated level cap, and then some.

"It can learn a lot of it's spells playing solo in the open world." Well yes- and so can everything else. The class/job quests you get on the other classes/jobs for abilities and spells are designed to be done solo, so touting that a BLU can learn spells on it's own is not even worth calling it "solo play." To add to it, once they start needing the spells from dungeons and trials, it becomes even less a solo experience than everything else which has access to their full job kit provided they participated in their own solo quests- unlike BLU, who is at the mercy of not only the participation of other players but scathing RNG.

That's very true. Other jobs can build their entire toolkit just by playing solo, but not the solo-not-designed-for-parties-job.

I mean, if they really wanted to put some skills locked behind harder challenges, why not use Marks or Fates instead (new ones if needed)? That way you could even breathe some new life into that content.