I'm burnt out on BLU

[GenericMagus]

Another thread on BLU. Following the patch, this game made me feel apathetic, uncaring and just dropping BLU. They repeated the same mistakes since launch, but now they gave a reward in a mount as a carrot on stick.

This is completely backwards design on "solo" content, because to do it you have to do the raid tiers of previous xpacs synced and no echo. Like less than 1% of players will actually be able to do it, this isn't Ultimate, this is recycled content but now for BLU.

What is the direction BLU has? No BLU DF, the log system is just a tally system, many moves are again copy + paste, the Masked Carnivale is again one and done again. Solo content yet needing a party to do absolutely anything, it's pointless and has no impact apart from a "do this for 100%".

I was told by the player base to keep waiting, BLU was meant to be bare bones on release, and guess what. Still bare bones now.

At this point, scrap BLU and make it a real job, the very things I predicted happened. This shouldn't stand, Yoshi and his design team are restricting themselves and unable to move past this terrible design.

[Omymy]

Its a snack content to kill time.

A class we didnt need (Hello healers), with a mount as reward so you look at it eventually.

[NealSnow]

I feel the same way, and for context I tried to be the voice of reason before blu was even out. Said let's wait an see. And yeah I waited I saw and I'm unconvinced of still even after the update that limited jobs are a good idea. I mean it's already becoming dead content, blu parties are slowing down because only a small minority even hit cap, and fewer care to get all the spells.

Making the mount behind savage was a terrible idea to try and pad blus lifecycle but it's not working, tons of people have given up on the idea of getting it at all and the small minority that does attempt once they get the mount they have zero reason to help others try.

They have 1-50 to try and sell it to the players, it failed. 50-60 but already the majority refuses to touch blu. It's a poor system when not even a month has passed and blu activity is already dipping, yet Hades ex, has been out for a while and there's more pf for that vs blu.

Masked carnival is eh to me. Good for the rewards kinda but after that no real reason, a lotta people ignore the weekly rewards. Hopefully they abandone this whole limited job idea because if we got a real pet job like beast master and it was limited? Ohhh there'd be hell to pay by everyone who's wanted it since 2.0

[Nalien]

XIV really isn't designed for a job like Blue Mage. Almost all the content is instanced, there is basically nothing of value in the open world to do where Blue Mage might be a fun. Any instanced content it can do that's casually fun, is ultimately pointless. Old dungeons, that you're running once a week for a measly amount of poetics and allied seals? There's no value in any of that.

If we had something like a ZNM system in place, perhaps off the back of Levequests, instead of what we have for Hunts? I could perhaps see value in Blue Mage. That would be open world content, where it's dumb OP spells potentially have value. Ultimately that would be Hunts, so still Allied Seals as a reward, but a ZNM system is far more engaging than following a Hunt train IMO. That's something you can log on and just do, rather than waiting for spawns and following. No daily or weekly lock outs. You just log on and engage with the content as you see fit. XIV desperately needs content like that, and Blue Mage could potentially be "fun" for it. Treasure Maps are likewise good pieces of casual content that Blue Mage could do, more so now that its 60 so Aquapolis is a possibility now. If it cannot enter Aquapolis it really needs to be allowed to, but again the trouble with Maps... 18h allowance on them... That's so asinine... Fine slap an 18h allowance on the newest one, but all the old maps? There is effectively no point to them as is. We should be able to gather as many as we want, stack them up, they should be earned in vastly more ways (I'm a fan of letting FATEs randomly drop them, and giving old maps to GC Vendors to give Seals more purpose, heck Allied Seals for old maps makes perfect sense here). That would be open world content that we'd then be able to just log on and do, which in turn would be content that Blue Mage can just have fun with... They're all outdated content at this point anyway, so why not?

As for the OP spells... One thing I really don't get is why they didn't simply let them work on bosses... I don't mean the spells like Tail Screw, but the stuns, freezes and petrifies? Many of the "fun" combos Blue Mage can do are tied to those. Not allowing them to work on the vast majority of this games content is utter stupidity... They don't even have to truly work, just let the debuff apply and the boss carries on as if it didn't. Change them from CCs to effectively just combo debuffs for such fights, Garuda gets frozen but still moves, but I can still do Dragon's Voice on her for the bonus potency...

Repeat spells... Yeah... Easy way to fix that is to just carry over XIs Blue Magic Traits system, then there is value in them outside Masked Carnival, as well as another avenue to boost Blue Mages power and make it a bit more engaging to interact with the spell book. What I really don't get is why the single target attacks are often 200 or 210 potency, while the AoEs are 220... We get Sonic Boom and Alpine Draft, both wind based, both same MP cost and Alpine Draft is just objectively superior in every way... I guess it's another Masked Carnival thing, single target for not waking enemies, but it really is just bizarre... Again, a trait system could really help here, by taking Sonic Boom and some other spell, you could perhaps gain a "Enhanced Sonic Boom" trait, which buffs its potency, instead of just going for run of the mill traits like XI Blue Mage did.

Honestly, Limited Job was poor branding. They never should have sold this as a job, it should have been sold more as Gold Saucer level content. It's essentially the same as something like Chocobo Racing or Triple Triad (right down to collecting cards/spells from random instances... huh), and frankly I'm amazed they gave us Allied Seals for Blue Mage instead of MGP... If Masked Carnival was a Gold Saucer event... Well maybe it wouldn't have gone down any better, but it at least fits in there IMHO.

[RyuSaarva]

which mistakes were repeated?

[TheMightyMollusk]

It was something fun to do for a week or so. Now it's going back on the sideline until it gets updated again. May or may not finish the Masked Carnivale to get the last spell, haven't decided yet.

[Urthdigger]

I see a lot of people say BLU is a "solo job", and I kinda feel that's not accurate. It's a job that CAN solo to level, but so can any class via FATEs really. What it *is* is a call back to an earlier era of MMOs, where one formed xp parties to grind on open world mobs and classes had more customization options with less of a defined role.

The lack of a DF may be what led to this assumption, but BLU has never been a solo job, not since day 1. Even barring the primal spells that were the original endgame for it, you were required to do two dungeons to finish your class quests. That's not a solo thing. However, the lack of a DF is vital to the "feel" of BLU in my opinion. For starters, back in that era making parties was something you did manually, and socially recruiting people was an aspect of the game. So, it's PF life by design. Even barring that, BLU prides itself on the customization options: You have an array of spells and a choice in what spells to set, or even which ones to obtain period (Minus what the class quests demand). BLU isn't necessarily designed to be balanced, and even disregarding the powerful options it has, there is that risk of getting a BLU in duty finder who lacks vital spells. This keeps other players from being forced to party with a class that requires extra work (and thus may have players who don't put in the effort), and also pushes BLU players towards a format where if they want to go for a tank or healer build they can do so. One could argue that BLU could simply set which role they queue as, but then you'd have people queuing as healer with White Wind as their sole healing spell and no raise.

It *is* group content, and the parties I've done with BLU have honestly been pretty fun. I leveled through heavensward with a friend, finding camps in the open world where we could gather plenty of monsters and burning them down. It honestly kinda felt like I was back in 1.0, but in a good way. Memories of camps at the antling caves, Natalan, and Nophica's Wells. I've also been doing the BLU log with a few friends I do savage with. Doing content with only BLUs feels different, like the safety net's been removed. A bigger reliance on statuses, the oddities of tanking and healing on it, it feels less like I'm going in with all the tools I need to succeed and more like I'm trying to force a success out of something that should not be in a way I haven't felt like since the 2.0 launch where people were doing pure arcanist parties to handle the excess number of players leveling it. The BLU log may just be a checklist, but I appreciate that it's there to nudge players to try this.

So, yeah. It's kinda jank, but the jank is by design and I really can't see them emulating the feel they're going for without keeping it. That said, I would appreciate more combos that work on bosses, since a lot of our DPS rotations are essentially "Spam a 220 potency spell", but I can also see why they don't let things like stun, deep freeze, and instant death apply to bosses (Though, I have found most of the 1st and 2nd bosses in dungeons are not immune to instant death). Give us better and more varied counter spells like ice spikes and defensive options for tanks, maybe use this as a place to have some really oddball healing spells like something akin to drain samba in FFXI, maybe bring back some of the old 1.0 spells that got cut like Sacrifice (a decent heal+regen that had an HP cost in the spell).

[Theodric]

I'm still interested in BLU, it's just frustrating that so few people want to aim for the mount. I don't raid at a high level simply because I've never found a group that align with my schedule, are willing to take on and train fresh blood and who are fairly social. Even if I did, though, there's no guarantee that enough of them would be open to doing BLU content.

[Nedkel]

BLU is a hero that nobody needed and nobody deserves.

[GenericMagus]

which mistakes were repeated?

No endgame, recycled content, needing a party to do content in order to be solo, there's no point in having BLU, it dies off way too fast and has no shelf-life compared to the amount of time it takes to do it. The only thing that changed is that there's rewards for doing old content but there's less people that would be able to do it than Ultimate, which again is another retention problem of BLU, so it's a heavily flawed and confused design that SE tried to band-aid fix by making it rewarding doing old content as BLU but it still boils down to recycled content and no real purpose from it.