Alright, I Did It. [Blue mage Review]

[Kabooa]

I (mostly) solo leveled Blue Mage to 50. I hunted world skills. I've gotten the non-EX/HM dungeon skills. I beat Masked Carnival 25. I have done the content as presented.

TLDR: 6/10

To call it side content is simultaneously unjust and incredibly accurate. It -is- side content, but was at least done with a faithful representation of what Blue Mage is supposed to do, to a degree. In this regard, all of SE's side content is done to some amount of polish, even if they can be shelved the day after it comes out. The Job quests are about on par with what standard ARR jobs got.

What Blue Mage does right

Presentation, flavor, and rooting itself within the game world. Blue mage not only feels like it belongs, but the bits of story we are given feel like a natural placement for how it would fit within the world of FF14.

The skill animations are good, the player animations fit the pomp and flair of someone set to perform - Which is the Blue Mage we are given here.

Some new skills feel fantastic to acquire. Their current implementation does justify keeping Blue Mage out of party as they allow for dumb things to happen. (However, I would rather have Blue Mage made for regular content)

What Blue Mage Does Wrong

Progression

Obviously this more open ended skill learning is bound to mean that we can't judge Blue mage progression by our standard, right?

Right. Obviously. And I'm not.

I'm judging it by the standard Blue mage has set for itself. The idea of a lateral toolkit that you change to suit your needs and wants.

It has not succeeded in this regard. In many cases, the enemy skills you learn as Elemental-swaps of each other, or are straight up superior to previous skills. There are minute differences between them, but these differences require caring about High Scores in the Masked Carnival to matter, at all.

Here's a typical example.

Mindblast compared to Ram's Voice, Mindblast loses in every scenario. It loses in CC, it loses in range, it loses in damage, and it loses in potential interactions. Mindblast would be completely irrelevant except for two reasons.

1. Tightly packed ice immune enemies in the Masked Carnival
2. You literally need it to advance the Blue Mage quest.

For the first, this only matters if you're going for a bonus (Caring about the high score) instead of just using another AOE that is both superior, and can exploit a double damage weakness.

For the second, there's a video series that explores this style of game gating, and it's rarely favorable. If I could unlearn mind blast after doing the Blue Mage quest, I would. As it stands, a majority of Blue mage's abillities are not interesting in mechanical use in the overworld (Where you spend most of your time), but the Masked Carnival at least gives them relevance.

But you can also mostly just spam Glower or Drill and be just fine.

The Masked Carnival also presents more annoyance than challenge. Rather than giving you 'challenging fights' that you can excel with by picking the right toolkit, you are given fights you literally cannot win without having this one specific blue magic spell. I could have beaten the last round of Masked Carnival the moment I unlocked it except I was missing two skills.

It wasn't creative use of skills to win, it was mandatory, thus cheapening any sort of puzzle element towards the encounter. From a progression standpoint, this didn't quite bring the encounter clear catharsis that I usually get. I honestly came out of it more frustrated with clearing than when I entered.

I will add a slight addendum here that I do not have -every- skill, and it is entirely possible there are unmentioned interactions that play further into the Masked Carnival, but I do doubt it.

There is also apparently no basic wind spell, yet wind resistant enemies are basically in every stage of the Masked Carnival. This is a heavy oversight as every other element and non-element is represented outside 5 ranks, except Wind.

Conflicted Focus

Blue Mage is touted as a more solo oriented playstyle, and the primary reason it cannot be put in the same realm as the others. For this reason, and the unique skill learning, it cannot be allowed to casually pug with even outdated content - As it not only breaks the content, it can also be a giant hindrance.

But then immediately afterwards, half of your skills come from dungeons. Stuff you cannot solo as a blue mage. You must either band together with other blue mages, or convince a friend to come with you to help you out.

????

So in order to gain our skills for our job that can't play nice with parties, we have to...form parties.

The most overpowered abilities of the Blue Mage are also the least satisfying to use. Stripping that away turns Blue Mage into one of the weakest classes were it not for the inflated basic action power (50% increase) and the complete lack of interesting -damage- spells.

"Low accuracy" skills basically translate into "Spam it until it works". Spamming stuff until it works doesn't go great for capitalizing on advantage windows, of which every single DPS job is designed around, especially with one of those "Spam it until it works" skills is akin to an auto kill.

Skill interaction isn't only minimal in number, but in potency. Why would you Aqua Breath into High Voltage? That's two skill slots for a weaker effect than double Ram Voice, or Flamethrower, or anything else. If your goal in the Masked Carnival is to exploit these skill interactions, then they, you know, need to be worth using over double Glower.

The entire reason they were excluded is because it was touted that they'd break content for everyone else, and I'm over here thinking that now I have a little bit of what the people who bought Fallout 76 felt when they stepped out of the vault.

How to improve Blue Mage Within Its Current Scope

This is not about making it a full class. That is what I want. However, this section is primarily about improving what we have right this moment.

Skill variety. Everything is a spell. Even the OGCD is a spell. Every attack spell is a palette swap of another. Some diversity here really would fulfill the promise of creating interesting toolkits, such as:

More melee attacks (Goblin Pauuuuuuuunch)
Proper OGCD abilities (Loom should be in this category, to really make Ram/Dragon combo flow)
GCD variation (Slower speeds, faster speeds, create more interesting action dynamics)

Blue mage is literally the canvas that SE can test out mechanics to implement on other jobs, and yet it somehow has the most bland kit out of all of them, just being this disjointed mess of stuff you just eventually stop using because Glower Spam is best.

[silentwindfr]

i must say i have the same feeling that you on most you have said, but i want to add one thing, outside the low accuracy of the blue mage (probably link to the lack of int on the weapon)
the low damage of the whole jobs is concerning, right now needle make most of the leveling trivial.... but right now passed level 45.... needle is a junk. but on other hand the spell available are not strong enough for allows the blue mage to go in dungeon for get the spell it needed....


same like you have said, the blue mage is means to be a solo job.... but we lack a lot of skill needed for be a solo job. like dispel.... one more time the loose of vitality of the weapon is hurting badly... means any dot can be deadly really fast... in final fantasy 7 White wind don't only heal, it dispel too... i don't say to make it like in final fantasy 7, but i feel they need to add one spell for dispel like angel whisper!
same we have 3 spell that have no logic behind, self detonate, transfusion and last sting.... in solo this three spell have no logic... mostly because we lack a reraise spell...

the blue magic was extremely developped in the series, you have a lot of spell available and i found the spell list soo far quite lack luster... like teh fact that we only have 1 mono target spell for age... water cannon is the only mono target spell we get for very long...it work with a job like white mage that is not means to be a dps or to be played in team, but for a job like blue mage that is more solo oriented is not good.

by the way, some spell need an increase of potency really important.... blood drain is a junk skill, it give back almost nothing in mana and deal pitifull damage...

finally like you have said, the blue mage need true OGCD skill.... fast! because right now, i'm not concerned by the 50-60.... i'm dreadfull because it will be a nightmare to continue to level up a job that have soo many trouble in is toolkit...

[Grimoire-M]

i must say i have the same feeling that you on most you have said, but i want to add one thing, outside the low accuracy of the blue mage (probably link to the lack of int on the weapon)

Accuracy has been fixed already. It's based on your level relative to the mob. The RNG skills are different from that and rely on procs.

That said the biggest reason Blue Mage isn't allowed in DF parties is the combo of White Wind, Blood Drain, and Mighty Guard. Infinite self and party sustain with absurd aggro generation and the defacto best tank stance basically lets them free up a tank or healer slot all by themselves. 1000 needles is required to level efficiently solo and nothing else beats it when combined with the above until you get a proper gearset at 50. Given the way the totems work I think it would be possible to tie dungeon unlocks on blue mage to unlocking those spells specifically for normal groups had it been balanced around it appropriately. Similarly I feel the job quests should improve your weapon for completing them instead of purely being used for lore. The scaling just feels off.

[Huntrss]

Really like your Review but you forgot 1 thing. How do Players Treat us when we Need to go into lets Say A Dungeon.
1, You get a Lovely little Message. Saying WHY do you want to go into say Dungeon ..well my spell in there.
2, Either group with all Blue Mages which there is a bug and not all Blue Mages get the spell.
3, You feel like your either Not useful or Your just Brothering Player to do Dungeons.

I could go on for another 2 points but Yep Blue mage feels like I though it would Done Wrong. from the weapon to the fact players don't know how or what they are to the fact the blue mages grab your mob and kill it before the spell goes off so your sitting there having to do all this to end up luck to get your spell and the flavor of Blue personal dies 2 days from release. if you don't get powered leveled to 50 your nothing but a big waste of everyone time.

[Kabooa]

My personal experience with players has been positive. Even when by myself, going to learn abilities, I ran into players who were playing den mothers, throwing out shields, heals, and raises to anyone in the area, and most people were willing to group up when offered for killing monsters for XP.

[GrenGarm]

Yep. We lost BLU as a real job for this and it is incredibly sad and frustrating. I wish they'd never created this mess of a design. Then at least I could hope. All hope has been destroyed and for pretty much nothing.

[Kalise]

Honestly, in my (Somewhat limited) experience playing BLU, I've not actually encountered anything that is reasonable grounds to justify it not being a normal (Albeit quirky) job.

Like, the main concern from people in regards to it being allowed in regular content is that "It has too many OP spells" but to be honest, most of BLU's spells just plain suck. Like, they're garbage compared to even mediocre spells from other jobs. Like, no-one's gonna be complaining about how much damage AST is pumping out with Malefic, but then you have BLU with their main filler spell for the majority of content being LESS potency than Malefic. Not Malefic II or Malefic III, plain old newbie rank 1 Malefic (Water Cannon = 120 Potency vs Malefic I = 150...)

Same thing for many other spells, many of your early level spells are just useless CC skills or stupid fluff skills that literally have no point unless you're in a party (Self Destruct and Final Sting).

Like the first actual spell that does something notable is 1000 Needles. Which some people might use as an excuse to limit party play because joining the DF for Copperbell Mines or Halatali you'd be so OP for damage output. But even then, you could just make the skill not learnable until a level where a 6s cast for 1000 damage isn't OP (Especially since you literally learn this spell from a level 26 mob that was put into the game specifically to learn this skill from. Before 4.5, Sabotender Bailaor did not exist, or if it did, it certainly didn't exist in the group of Sabotender's right next to Little Ala Mhigo)

So, in essence, they've managed to make a mediocre job, who's apparently "Unable to play well with parties" but kind of sucks at soloing. Then they limited it, so it's only useful for wasting some time collecting spells and maybe doing the Masked Carnival for a bit (If you can even scrape together enough people to go farm HM and EX spells, which I assume in a few days might become tricky as everyone gets bored of rolling the dice on RNG while grinding out those duties, either in full BLU parties, or having a single level 70 character carry some useless BLU(s) through content that the level 70 can just breeze through...)

Why? I don't even know at this point. I mean, if there was tons of OP skills or many cool but ultimately useless skills (Like RNG skills) that could maybe fool noobs into equipping them then there's actual merit to the argument that maybe, just maybe, BLU might be problematic with access to normal content.

However, as it stands, this is not the case. I mean, at this point, I question whether most people will even bother playing BLU again after they get bored at level 50 after trying to get their HM/EX skills, despite the noted like 60+ skills and increased level cap to 60 that's coming in 5.01. Since the "Job" is so shallow and not OP enough to justify all the limitations to maybe get some entertainment out of walking through level 50 dungeons and using your insta-kill skills on bosses and comboing skills together against trash...

I sincerely hope that the Devs realise how much they've ruined such an iconic job and decide to do the (Relatively minor) balance tweaks to skills in order to allow the job to participate in all content. So that not only would BLU maybe start to feel fleshed out a little with additional skills up to the max level, but also making it much, much, much less of a pain to actually go and do the duties required to learn so many of their skills by allowing use of the DF to join PuG groups to content (Whilst also, being able to scale to level 70+ would mean that one would be able to solo a majority of dungeons)

[Cabalabob]

The biggest problem I have with BLU is once you have all your spells levelling it becomes incredibly dull. My next spells are in cutters cry and I’m only level 32. So what? I just have to sit in the open world spamming 1000 needles for a few hours before I can continue? It’s not like I can run dungeons in DF or do some FATEs to speed it up.

I’ve heard of people using some exploit to level faster and I can’t say I blame them. If SE doesn’t give us some actual levelling content then what do they expect other than for people to try and speed up the process?

BLU needs some levelling content for between spell learning sessions. Sitting in one spot spamming one spell is not an engaging levelling experience.

[Blueyes]

Alright, time to add my own critique. If you don't mind, I would like to add it here. This will be me taking Blue Mage for what it is.

Blue Mage lacks focus, chief among them is a conflicting design philosophy behind whether the job was created for solo or party play. Blue Mage was heavily promoted as a job with a focus on solo play, but even looking beyond how it was advertised, we know that Blue Mage has Masked Carnival: a solo activity that is exclusively accessible to Blue Mage. At the very least, Blue Mage was designed with that specific solo activity in mind.

And yet, Blue Mage is virtually forced to group up with other players to acquire all of its spells. Blue Mage is pushed into group content to a greater extent than any other job. It simply lacks the strength and survivability to handle content of that caliber on its own. Unless you go into fights unsynced, which trivializes the encounter, Blue Mage may find itself struggling to clear content that is designed for a party.

Is Blue Mage supposed to be a solo job or isn't it?

And speaking of the strength of Blue Mage, we're once again met with conflicting design philosophies. On one hand, Blue Mage is comparatively equal in strength to other DPS jobs at level 50, or perhaps even weaker. And yet, Blue Mage has been given a handful of spells that are ridiculously strong. It's like a weird balancing act, except the result isn't something balanced at all. Either Blue Mage can cheese the fight for an easy win or it will struggle to contribute meaningful damage.

Is Blue Mage supposed to be on par with other DPS jobs or isn't it?

The gameplay of Blue Mage lacks depth. There was potential, but it didn't deliver. There are multiple spell groupings that are designed to be used as a combo, and yet, they all lack practical application. Instead, what Blue Mage ends up doing is repeatedly casting the same spell over and over again. In practice, Blue Mage uses about as much spell variation as a Black Mage at level 50, but without the random proc effects that mix things up.

Repeatedly casting a single spell over and over is something that Blue Mage will continue to do within Masked Carnival. In a few cases, you may want more than one element in your arsenal, but in any situations where there are multiple foes, you'll focus down one at a time, repeatedly casting fire spells, then repeatedly casting earth spells, and so on.

The Masked Carnival itself must also be taken into review as it can be considered part of the packaged deal. To put it simply, the fights are puzzles, and rather simple ones at that. There are tricks to many of its encounters, which can be as simple as hiding behind a wall to avoid a certain attack. Once you figure out the trick, and there's usually only one, any sense of challenge dissipates.

And lastly, I must address the matter of spells with a low chance of being learned. Particularly, the spells learned from Primals, which are reportedly a 5% chance. What is even the point? None of them are needed to clear Masked Carnival, and there's little to nothing for Blue Mage to do outside of that setting. Is it meant to just be something for Blue Mage to do as we wait months for the next update? Because that's what it feels like.

With all of that said, Blue Mage can be fun. I've managed to have fun with it, but I believe that feeling is almost entirely based on the novelty factor of playing Blue Mage. It gets to cast monster abilities. Other jobs can't do that. If that concept alone is something you enjoy, satisfaction can be found in playing Blue Mage. Despite the enjoyment that can be had, the glaring design flaws are numerous. Overall, Blue Mage was poorly executed.

[LeoLupinos]

I'm glad BLU has the majority or the low % learn in instanced content. Trying to learn with overworld mob was hell. Since the majority of the game is instanced content, what's the problem with finding a group if the entire game is basicaly that?