Two Months of BLU: Discuss!

[JunseiKei]

All depends on how Blue Magic is implemented. If spells are easily accessed, and learn rate is 100% (like it is in every single FF game except for FFXI's BLU, and this one), the only excuse for not having a spell is because the player didn't take a few minutes to go and learn it. Learning Blue Magic doesn't HAVE to be a difficult and time-consuming process, and I don't believe it enhances the enjoyment of the job when it is. I certainly don't feel enriched by the seven-plus hour session I spent butting heads with Ifrit, back before you could learn it from Ifrit Normal.

In such a case, exclusion due to not having learned a spell would happen only to the most extremely lazy of Blue Mage players. We're talking a level of laziness far in excess of, say, a WAR who never learns Steel Cyclone because they're too lazy to do their job quests - and I doubt there's a player here that would have a lot of sympathy for a WAR THAT lazy! Learning BLU spells could (and in my opinion should) have been as easy as tracking down and fighting one or two of the appropriate mob, or possibly running a dungeon or trial exactly once.

No, concern about Blue Mages being excluded from parties for not knowing a spell is as much nonsense as Yoshi P's other excuses. Whether it's actually a problem or not depends on how the job is implemented, and it doesn't take a lot of imagination to find plenty of ways to prevent it from being a concern. Folks that criticize the "party exclusion" excuse are NOT kidding themselves.

The bottom line is that Yoshi P had a vision for Blue Mage that was frankly incompatible with the job structure in FFXIV. He felt he had to choose between compromising on his vision to make the job fit, or adding the job as a side activity that kept it safely removed from the game's major content. He went with the latter. The thing is, though, that Yoshi P's vision is only one interpretation of a job that has had a TON of variance over the history of the Final Fantasy franchise. Basically the only things that all Blue Mages have in common are that they use monster abilities and they have a collection of abilities to fill out. The latter is pretty flexible as to just HOW they learn the spells, as well - Quistis, for instance, could learn Bad Breath without EVER having fought a Marlboro (all you need is the drop, and she doesn't have to be in party to get it). Even the way we DID get BLU takes advantage of this flexibility - several of the spells learned are learned by consuming items!

I agree, Blue Magic doesn't have to be difficult and time consuming and it certainly wasn't fun trying to get someone's Glass Dance and still not getting it after 54 kills before that person just gave up. It also doesn't surprise me that the only other BLU incarnation from an MMO would be followed for ... an MMO (I'm mean the spells not learned at 100% rates). For the most part, I don't think the rates of learning most spells are particularly bad - just the chances of primal ones are absolutely horrendous.

I wouldn't compare it to doing job quests and getting the skill automatically. I'd compare it to ARR and HW's requirement of needing to level up a completely different class to learn a skill. Although it's not RNG, it still required a lot of time and effort to get something that would legitimately help make classes actually playable (because let's face it, invigorate was 100% required to play any melee in ARR at least and you lost so much DPS if you didn't have Blood for Blood, either and getting lancer to 34 was an actual chore). Yes, there were parties absolutely excluding players for not having skills, mainly because how necessary they actually were. If the past demonstrates a behavior the community is willing to abide by, you don't dismiss it for another case where you willfully present the same issue. That's called folly.

Again, this clashes with how people will define the job - you could make the learn rates 100%, but then what keeps you from stuffing them in a job quest to go defeat X monster and learning it that way? You know, the same way you learned Water Cannon. Quistis did learn Blue Magic uniquely. She learned them exclusively through items. Such a system could be mimic'd here in XIV thanks to the Walaqee Totems, but I doubt that would have been satisfying and agree with BLU fans. I still stand by this particular statement, though, especially seeing we have another job that often gets criticized for its implementation, despite being a fully functioning one.

Full job, limited job, it doesn't matter, there'd probably be just as much complaints because BLU ultimately wouldn't be something X person imagined it to be (looking at you SMN).