What BLU got this Patch

[Infindox]

Now that the patch has landed, have any of the changes made it so that you don't need to beg friends (if you have any in game to begin with)/form statics/wait around for ages in party finder in order to unlock all the spells?

Still need others for the harder ones.

[Flay_wind]

So. First impressions. Morbol mount is as good as not being there. It's not PUG'able at all.
I understand that people are still new and not everyone has all the skills (still, judging by the combat sounds at least half of our raid had all ARR primal stuff), but i am not sure where the idea of BLU OP'ness comes from. I've run through all Alexander Normal recently and we melted things. We skipped Tornado Phase on Pepsiman, we skipped the entire detach murder robots phase on Brute Justice. With all BLU team we... didn't quite manage that. Also we wiped on Pepsiman. Because Surprise! only 1 person had Angel Whisper (but more on that later) and they actually died first. Whoops.

Thoughts and what not.
I've mentioned this before, but Loom and Cactguard should totally be an intstacast abilities.
Mimicry is a lot worse than i initially thought. The way it works is just stupid. Changing it, so you can just switch between stances would be super helpful. Or at least being able to just go to the relevant class guild in the city and tagging the guildmaster to get the buff.
Healing stuff being more or less uselss outside of Healer Mimicry is bad.
Tanking mimicry is hilariously bad. ytho.jpg
Gating Angel Whisper behind 30 stages of Masked Carnivale is just stupid. Raise is rather important ability in normal content, and doubly so for BLU, considering how underpowered BLU is in general. It should be accessible a lot sooner. Also say hello to 5 mins recast.
Combo skills that do not work, because hello status immunity.

I can't say i am dissapointed. Baffled and confused maybe.

P.S. If i understood the math correctly Surpanakha is essentially 1400 potency on 2 min recast. That's awesome.

[KageTokage]

BLU has...issues when it comes to tanking.

They have lower HP then tanks even when accounting for the 20% temporary buff from Devour and they have no personal mitigation cooldowns other then Diamondback as Cactguard can only be targeted on other players. Even with Bad Breath kept up constantly along with Mighty Guard and tank mimicry I'm nearly getting one-shot by tank busters even from normal mode raid bosses.

Their only way to provoke requires melee range which makes tank swapping when it's needed problematic.

Their damage output is laughably low due to how severe the damage reduction from Mighty Guard is.

They feel more like a "master of none" then overpowered like they were implying against anything their CC and instakills don't work on.

[Powercow]

C-can we give feedback on Limited Jobs yet guys? Has the job been out long enough that everyone else can see what a bad idea the whole thing is? Or must we wait another year before asking SE to fix it?

I rather distinctly recall being told that, of course Blue Mage is going to be great and the whole idea is awesome! Then when it came out and sucked, I was told that it'll be awesome with the frequent updates and huge swathes of engaging and well thought-out content it'd be receiving. What's the excuse this time guys? PS3 limitations? "It'll totally be better next update"? At what point is it acceptable to say that, "yeah no the whole concept was flawed from the start"?

[Flay_wind]

Also, do you know what i want? Actual stats on our weapon. The only difference between our weapon at 60 (800 Allied seals Bomb cane) and any other BLU stick is 2 Materia slots. So, hurray for those 24 substats. And that surely does not impact BLU's damage at all.

[TheMightyMollusk]

The canes don't have damage stats so you can go back and poke low-level enemies without killing them in case you missed a spell.

[Flay_wind]

I am talking about said canes actually having appropriate level/ILvl INT and what not on them.

[Mansion]

The canes don't have damage stats so you can go back and poke low-level enemies without killing them in case you missed a spell.

That's not a reason at all. You can Sardine Slap anything (or even auto attack), draw out your weapon and patiently wait. And most of low level mobs spells kinda appear in higher level versions of these (Bomb Toss, Scorpion tail thing)

Anyway, I gave it a go yesterday and with FC and Rest bonus, I made it quite quickly from 50 to 58 I think. I had some fun looking for spells with two people I found and this made me get good XP. So I'm not really in a position to talk about level capped BLU in 5.1 but in theory it does not change from 50 capped, right? You get a bunch of Masked Carnivale, "incentive" to get on group content for spells/achievements and... that's it?
Even without burning through the content (as I see some people already have 80 spells and all), that's no improvement on the previous BLU at all. That's more of the same thing with a questionably different packaging. For me it is still uninspired, not interesting gameplay, a wasted opportunity for something more solid (limited or not), and likely to be put down in a few days weeks until the next addition (if I bother this time).

Looking at the spells I'm... disappointed. It (again) boils down to same potencies AoE or Crowd Control that won't work on instanced content, with a few good additions (I like Whistle for instance, or the interaction between Dropsy and the Ice Cone thingy).

All in all, BLU is still not proving to be that overpowered so that they had to make it limited.
Does it feel like a legacy Blue Mage? Yes. But that's a shame it had to be restricted to its own gameplay when I'm pretty sure most players would have prefered a watered down but traditional job. Or maybe no BLU at all.

[Tabbs]

Got to level 60, working on getting all the spells. Almost there. Wanted to get stuff done before saying anything, but my opinion is largely the same as 4.5 BLU. It has it's high points, but I'd still much rather it be an actual job. The highlight of this BLU patch is definitely the ability to pick a role and the role-based spells that go with them. On the downside: everything else. It's more of the same. More strange 220 aoe spells, more carnivale, and a PF interface and blu log that don't add much in the way of playable content. Like others have said, why did we need to wait for this to decide if BLU was any good?

Ideally, we'll see it become a full, unlimited job eventually. If thats absolutely not an option? Please, please actually make it a single-player job. Make it as broken as it needs to be in order to restrict it from group content altogether. Make it max level and let it do all the content in the game so people can actually use it for things besides a mini-game.

My absolute biggest gripe is that I can't participate in story content as BLU in a strong, story-driven game. Classes and jobs are meant to be a conduit for experiencing a game's story and world. Is collecting spells a fundamental aspect of BLU? Yeah! But never the primary aspect. In any other FF game w/ a blue mage, you collect spells to help you achieve a greater goal. To save the day and live the story. In FFXIV, you collect spells just for the sake of it. It's fun for a while, but sad that it can't be taken further.

[KageTokage]

I feel like the tank mimicry needs to also give a HP increase of like...30% minimum.

They only have negligibly lower defense then a proper tank, but having 20% more passive mitigation in exchange for 10K+ less HP is not nearly enough to make up for it.

Even at full HP I'm nearly dying from tank busters in normal Alexander raids which feels a little wrong when I'm in full 270 gear.