The future of BLU

[ValentineSnow]

I've beaten the masked carnivale, gotten every spell and done all the achievements, so I feel like I've done everything there is to do on BLU right now and I'm ready to look to the future.

Future spells
Having completed the spell list there are a few moves it feels like BLU is lacking.

-Raise/reraise.
Basically the primary reason that BLUs don't do all BLU runs for primals and such to learn their spells is if you die, you don't learn the spell. Since BLUs have no way to revive themselves or each other this means if you die and everyone else learns the spell then tough luck. If they could revive themselves it would go a long way to seeing all BLU parties.

-Healing and tanking.
In the same vein as above, BLU lacks the tools to specialise as a healer or a tank, making it hard for all BLU parties to work.

Mighty guard is ok as a tank stance although it cripples any AoE potential since it requires off guard to negate the damage penalty to any significant degree. Making ice spikes, the look and veil of the whorl ignore the mighty guard penalty would fix this issue.

Another tanking issue with BLU is that it has no provoke skill, if there are mechanics with a tank swap the only way to handle it with all BLUs is to lucid dreaming away your enmity and hope someone else is close enough behind you to take it which is not ideal.

For mitigation, diamondback is great, but due to the high mp cost and locking the BLU in place it doesn't make for a sustainable mitigation tool. Same goes for white wind, the mp cost is high and if the BLU gets too low on hp it becomes less effective thus requiring even more mp, BLU needs more healing and mitigation tools, even just a cheap self heal like pollen in ffxi and a minor mitigation buff like cocoon would really bring BLU up to code.

Useless spells
Now, I've got nothing against the carnivale having little gimmicks in the fights that make you use specific spells to beat them. What I'm not ok with is those spells having no purpose outside of that one gimmick.

You want to make mobs heavy me so I have to use loom? Fine. You want to design loom so it's completely useless to BLU outside of that one specific scenario? Not fine. This could easily have had no cast time and been a BLU version of shukuchi, but no they gave it a cast time to the point where unless you're heavied you're better off just walking. This was a silly design choice and it just clogs the blue magic spell list with spells that could have worked but don't.

I'd like to see this system reworked so these spells all have a purpose outside of the carnivale. As mentioned above, remove the cast time from loom and it becomes useful. The primal skills are another one where the moves are just clones of each other with different elements which has no meaning outside the carnivale, these could have different effects or uses, like how glass dance and veil of the whorl share a recast but veil is better for tanking while glass dance is better for dpsing. The same can be said for a lot of BLUs dps spells like the breath spells. It just feels like a waste to make these spells exclusively useful in the carnivale when they could be bringing something more to BLUs kit.

Spell learning cap
I understand that these spells are supposed to be rare and keep BLUs running primals into the foreseeable future. But the drop rate on these spells is soooo annoying!! What I thought would be a good idea would be to let us buy empty whalaqee totems and as we fight the primal it fills with aether and once its full we can use the totem to learn the spell, so after say 99 runs of titan not getting the spell you could use the totem to learn it, just putting an upper limit on how many times we have to do the fight similar to mount farms would really alleviate some frustration. Even if you'll never hit that upper limit, just knowing that it's there will make the grind so much more bearable.

That's all I have off the top of my head. What things would you like to see on BLU going forward? (We are assuming it's going to remain a limited job, please no "make it a full job" posts, I want it to but I don't see it happening based on the interviews and live letters).

[Destati]

- I'd like to see more spells that can be "combo'd", something that could be incorporated into a potential rotation. The Chimera spells are a good start but as it stands I feel the spells generally lack "flow".

- More unique animations would be nice. I understand those kinds of things take time but it's admittedly off-putting when I see iconic moves from the series like 1000 Needles and Bad Breath being relegated to sharing the same animations with so many other actions.

- I'd love it if the spells had a higher potency and/or were generally more powerful. It just feels that they were so worried about BLU being overpowered that they made it really weak. I don't know, it just feels like it takes soooo long to kill anything.

- Give us a more reliable means of getting the primal spells. I haven't spent too much time trying to farm for them but I would feel better if they had a totem system where you'll at least be guaranteed to get the move after a set amount of attempts rather than running it over and over again not knowing when - or even if - you'll learn it.

[TheGrimace]

I'd like to have a reason to melee as BLU. It's pretty pathetic that WHM and BLM are more effective with their weapons than BLU since BLU is stuck with a 1 DMG weapon forever. Maybe atleast add a trait to the job that scales its melee damage with its level?

More glamour options for the weapon would also be highly appreciated.

[ReiMakoto]

A neat "combo" system i'd like to see for Blu is say:

GCD Water spell, 1 sec cast time, applies dropsy (3s)
OGCD Lighting Spell, 1 sec cast time, deals bonus potency when enemy suffers dropsy. (15s or so CD)

Basically add 3 of these pairings, so a Fire -> Wind and a Wind->Ice

Then make Shock Strike deal more potency with dropsy, Feather Rain deal more with Burn, and Glass Dance deal more with windburn.

This makes BLU's single target rotation about rapid pace 1 sec cast time blasting, and also adds some nice natural weaving to their burst while also making elemental weaknesses relevant (sort of). You could even add a trait to reset the CD on one of the OGCD element spells under certain conditions (maybe direct hit for diversity) to add more dynamic elements to their rotation.

[Physic]

elemental wise, i think they should add a spell or ability/trait that allows the blue mage to attack a hidden weakness in most content. This would essentially make tons of skills useful, and allow blue mages more strategic planning, which i think is a major part of what blue is supposed to be doing in fights in general.

suddenly all those status/weapontype/elemental skills and knowledge of which to use becomes a stronger factor everywhere.

and yeah loom is pretty lame. maybe give some powerful combo where you can heavy or not move with great benefit.

[Nalien]

Spells and specific content for Blue Mage aside, what I really want more than anything is something like this;



An option like this would be amazing IMO. Would allow Blue Mage to just queue for dungeons, Roulettes even, you'd just be put into a queue with other Blue Mages (and other future Limited Jobs) or people who don't mind being paired with Blue Mages as regular Jobs. Like I can't tell you the last time I bothered with most of the Roulette options, it's just been so long I don't remember, but if I could do them as Blue Mage? That sounds fun...

While I'm on the topic... We can't do Squadron dungeons as Blue Mage? Really? Like come on SE, what am I meant to be doing with Blue Mage exactly?

[Seraphor]

Reraise would be brilliant for a so-called solo job, especially one as squishy as BLU.

Just give it a huge cooldown, like 5 minutes, and a reasonable duration like 20s, it'll be fine.

[Auryan]

Auto-Life would be a great addition to BLU's repertoire and is a great callback to past FF titles. However, I would like it to be on a pretty long cooldown and lasts only half a minute at most. I didn't like how it was used as a crutch back in XI and in Eureka.
I second most of your requests. I would love more hybrid/support spells and abilities that compliment this jack of all trades.

Maybe they can look in to loosening some restrictions, like say the squadrons. I take it they didn't want BLU to learn spells and lvl by just grinding dungeons with the squads, but I think tweaking the squadron dungeons when playing as BLU would've been the better solution. Make the chance of learning spells low and lower the EXP. Although, the EXP bonus BLU gets for killing open world mobs is a decent incentive to not use the squads anyway.
This can also be used for Palace of the Dead/Heaven on High. And as far as I'm concerned, BLU can just go nuts in Diadem/Eureka.

[Cabalabob]

Spells and specific content for Blue Mage aside, what I really want more than anything is something like this;



An option like this would be amazing IMO. Would allow Blue Mage to just queue for dungeons, Roulettes even, you'd just be put into a queue with other Blue Mages (and other future Limited Jobs) or people who don't mind being paired with Blue Mages as regular Jobs. Like I can't tell you the last time I bothered with most of the Roulette options, it's just been so long I don't remember, but if I could do them as Blue Mage? That sounds fun...

While I'm on the topic... We can't do Squadron dungeons as Blue Mage? Really? Like come on SE, what am I meant to be doing with Blue Mage exactly?

Problem with limited queues is, how would it work? All BLUs? (And future limited jobs) making it similar to deep dungeon/pvp where the party composition is random? Or would it require a proper party setup of tank/healer/2 dps for dungeons and 2 tanks/2 healers/4 dps for trials?

If all BLUs, as the OP said, the job isn’t well rounded enough yet. If you queued into a trial and got 7 other BLUs, how would you handle it? Who would tank? Who would OT? Who would heal? You can’t do healing other than white wind, you can’t provoke or mitigate, all BLUs just won’t work as they currently stand until they can work as other roles. Even in regular dungeons it can be tough to do fights as all BLUs while synced, now imagine getting paired with randoms who don’t have mighty guard or white wind yet.

If a proper party composition, you run into one of two problems. Either BLUs will be too overpowered for a regular party and there will be no reason to not queue limited. Or the reverse, BLU will be too underpowered and no one will. If the former, why not just make BLU a regular job (with its lower level cap). If the latter, limited queues simply won’t work.

- I'd like to see more spells that can be "combo'd", something that could be incorporated into a potential rotation. The Chimera spells are a good start but as it stands I feel the spells generally lack "flow".

Personally I really like what they’ve done with spells like aqua breath and high voltage, where one applies a DoT and the other gets buffed if the enemy has that DoT, kinda like ffxi’s ninja where using an elemental ninjutsu lowered the enemy resistance to the opposing element, so hitting them with a water ninjutsu lowered their thunder resistance, then hitting them with a thunder ninjutsu would lower their resistance to earth and so on.

I’d like to see the elemental spells reworked to be like that so you’d cycle through them and do more damage for cycling than just spamming one spell (e.g. aqua breath 130 potency > high voltage/glower 130 potency buffed to 150 potency by aqua breath > plaincraker 130 potency buffed to 150 potency by high voltage And so on.

This way you’d have to choose, waste more spell slots on damage spells to keep your rotation going, or take less damage spells and have more room for utility.

[Lubu_Mykono]

they said they had 100+ spells already. Im guessing its going to be another 24 or so per expansion and increase in 10 levels.
The ARR endgame dungeons need to be soloable at level 60 to get the rest of the spells I need.
Its still a major disappointment though the way abilities are locked behind 20 minute dungeon runs for a chance to get them.