The Big Blue Feedback Thread

[AceofRains]

I’d like to start of with saying that I am exceptionally enjoying Blue Mage. Almost everyone I have partied with on my spell collection journey has said they are having a lot of fun. I have completed all of my spell hunting and Masked Carnivale. All that’s left really is to complete my log and Best in Slot my gear. I’m more and more hopeful that Blue Mage will make its way into normal content. I’m envisioning Blue Mage as the perfect “All-Rounder”.

12/5/2020 EDIT

I will reiterate that I am very much still enjoying Blue Mage and hope to see many quality of life improvements with the 5.45 update. There is much that still frustrates me about the job, and after gaining much more experience with it by a near completed Blue Mage Log, I have many criticisms, both of Blue Mage, and it's comparison to the non-limited jobs. In many cases, my opinion on certain abilities has changed as I have toyed around with my set-ups for all roles to a point of min-maxing with or without instant death spells.

JOB GAUGE
First of all, I would appreciate one important piece: A Job gauge that I call, “The Libra Gauge”. The Gauge is not a resource bar like other jobs. It is simply available at level 1, or perhaps as a reward at level 70- and allows Blue Mages to see the “resistances”, both built up and immune by your current target.

LEVEL SYNC
I cannot stress enough how much I wish Blue Mage can be a normal job. One of the things that makes it exceptionally too powerful for the duty finder is the fact that Blue Mage has ALL of its spell slots from level 1. As a call back to FFXI's Blue Mage, I think it would be appropriate to portion out spell slots per level. This will push players to "Best in Slot" their spells, similar to how the old cross class skills system encouraged you to slot the best spell for the earliest level. This would also force players to think how early they want access to certain actions. You wont necessarily see someone take Level 5 Death into Satasha if they only had about 5-7 slots accessible. Logic would push you to take the actions that are most important to your role (and mimicry as well if you're not queuing dps.)

MIMICRY
-Aetherial Mimicry must be available by Whalaquee totem. 60 is too late to gain such an important ability, however the option learn in dugeon is acceptable. A Whalaquee Totem should become available after level 50. Some of the sync’s learning content could go a lot smoother. While its great that this ability is available in a dungeon, its too important to wait. Too many people running level 50 content that didn't have it yet made it all the more difficult to succeed. My opinion on this has not changed since my original post.

-Role icons should be changed instead of simply giving a status effect. For starters, there are many times in content where a boss will specifically target those of a certain role. Because Mimicry does not actually change the role, a Blue Mage will be hit at random. This can lead to some unpredictable circumstances that may cause a death even if you did everything right. However, I'm not sure if changing role like this should give access to role abilities, or keep the Mage role abilities. I quite like the idea that, despite changing role, Blue Mage continues to be a Mage. I like that instead of having a bunch of direct damage mitigation cooldowns, I have to think about when to Diamondback an incoming tank buster. When compared to other tanks, it makes me think that main game tanks have TOO MUCH mitiagtion- and rather that mitigation should be spread to other jobs.

-Aetherial Mimicry itself is uncomfortable to have on the Hotbar for danger of deactivating during a fight. Once it’s gone you can’t get it back. My suggestion is that once you are in an instance, it CANNOT be removed.

STATUS EFFECTS & CROWD CONTROL
Playing as much Blue Mage as I have made something abundantly clear to me. Main jobs are severlely lacking in CC options. Far starters- Sleep is useless everywhere it exists. My suggested change is that the action that awakens a target should always be a Critical Direct Hit. Blue Mage's Freeze and Petrify are very powerful options. However, I'm also frustrated by their application on Blue Mage in the first place. When playing tank BLU, it can be very frustrating when a party member freezes your wave as you're trying to pull and position. I believe that Freeze and Petrify should be adjusted to severely reduce damage to a target that is under that condition. This way, Freeze and Petrify become more situational to protect a tank who is getting hit too hard. Perhaps even other jobs should have access to some the spells that make Blue Mage "too powerful for the duty finder". Paladin and Monk could have its own Raises, Ninja could have a Mijin Gakure, or Dragoon it's own Final Sting, Black Mage could have Death and actual Freeze. Paladin and Dark Knight should get their Blinds back. Status effects and CC make for a more creative experiance to me. CC has been severely lacking throughout Shadowbringers, with all of ironically being present on Blue Mage.

SELF SACRIFICE
-Angel Whisper should be self targetable for the effect of Re-Raise. This will allow healers to take better advantage of Transfusion, and for DPS to take advantage of Final Sting and Self-Destruct more efficiently.

INSTANT DEATH
-Keep dungeon mobs immune to instant death. Keep all dungeon BOSSES immune to instant death. Dungeon trash is just that- trash. Be it on a normal job or Blue Mage, we always take the path of least resistance to get the job done. Despite Blue Mage having access to instant death spells, it is not necessarily getting dungeons done any faster than a normal group. The normal strategy for the non limited jobs is to take all the mobs and AoE them down. This goes much faster some times for normal play despite the existence of instant death on Blue Mage. It's a little frustrating that Blue Mage is considered to trivialize dungeon runs, when the fact of the matter is, Tanks will group the mobs and they get AoE'd to death. There is functionally no difference in triviality when it comes to trash mobs.

CONCLUSION
Overall I think Blue Mage is on its way to being in a great spot. My opinion has not changed on that. I'm very excited to see it catch up to the jobs. Though I have my gripes about not being able to do main content, Blue Mage is undeniably a fun job to play. So fun infact, that I'd rather be playing it in the main content with other jobs. With that, I welcome what is to come in patch 5.45, will enjoy it for what it is, and keep calling upon the developers to make it a real job by next expansion.

[ReiMakoto]

I’d like to start of with saying that I am exceptionally enjoying Blue Mage. I have completed all of my spell hunting and Masked Carnivale. All that’s left really is to complete my log and Best in Slot my gear. I’m more and more hopeful that Blue Mage will make its way into normal content. I’m envisioning Blue Mage as the perfect “All-Rounder”. It’s so close to that execution. That being said, I took notes while climbing on what really needs to be adjusted.

First of all, I would appreciate one important piece: A Job gauge that I call, “The Libra Gauge”. The Gauge is not a resource bar like other jobs. It is simply available at level 1 and allows Blue Mages to see the “resistances”, both built up and immune by your current target.

Next I’ll get into what we already have that assuredly needs adjustments. Most of this are quality of life tuning for Aetherial Mimicry.

-Aetherial Mimicry must be available by Whalaquee totem. 60 is too late to gain such an important ability, however the option learn in dugeon is acceptable. A Whalaquee Totem should become available after level 50. Some of the sync’s learning content could go a lot smoother

-Role icons should be colorized when using Aetherial Mimicry. When using Aetherial Mimicry on a Blue Mage who has swapped roles, you mimic the role they have taken on, rather than DPS.

-Aetherial Mimicry itself is uncomfortable to have on the Hotbar for danger of deactivating during a fight. Once it’s gone you can’t get it back.

-Housing totems for mimicry would be excellent. With this you will always have a place to mimic.

-Mighty Guard should no longer penalize damage reduction when Mimicing tanks.

-Angel Whisper’s cooldown is way too absurdly long. I don’t understand why it’s not treated the same as other raise spells while meanwhile Red Mage can fast cast raise for days.

Keep dungeon mobs immune to instant death. Instant death should be for carnivale and over world use.

If dungeon mobs were immune to instant death, then there would basically be no reason to not have blue have an optional "for duty finder" mode as they are the most OP thing that blue can do in dungeons that would significantly reduce clear times. As for the other changes, mighty guard should probably retain some penalty, otherwise there would be no reason not have all blues in mighty guard, it just needs to be a much less harsh than currently is, otherwise I agree with a lot of this.

[AceofRains]

Clear times shouldn’t even be an issue. Spell hunting and dungeon runs should feel organic and normal. The addition the Completion log at least helped people not always drop after grabbing a spell, but all in all there’s no reason for instant death to function in a dungeon. At 60 with all spells, playing a different role feels good enough to ignore the instant death spells. Blue Mage needs to be in a place where it can queue with other jobs and that requires foregoing those instant death spells.

In the same vain as spells like Pom Cure and Gobskin, Mighty Guard can be adjusted to only apply no damage reduction to tanks.

[Brightamethyst]

-Aetherial Mimicry must be available by Whalaquee totem. 60 is too late to gain such an important ability, however the option learn in dugeon is acceptable. A Whalaquee Totem should become available after level 50. Some of the sync’s learning content could go a lot smoother. While its great that this ability is available in a dungeon, its too important to wait. Too many people running level 50 content that didn't have it yet made it all the more difficult to succeed.

Agreed. Mimicry should be a level 50 totem. It's insane that a spell that vital is locked in a level 60 dungeon.

-Angel Whisper’s cooldown is way too absurdly long. I don’t understand why it’s not treated the same as other raise spells while meanwhile Red Mage can fast cast raise for days.

Yeah. I get trying to limit the near infinite raises you're have in an all BLU party, but a 5 minute CD is just crazy. A 60 or 90 second CD would be more than enough of a limiter.

[Lambdafish]

-Angel Whisper’s cooldown is way too absurdly long. I don’t understand why it’s not treated the same as other raise spells while meanwhile Red Mage can fast cast raise for days.

The reason for the absurd cooldown because BLU is all roles, this means that a group of BLUs ideally has 8 raises available to them. If there was no cooldown, then a party of 8 BLUs with raise, magic hammer and blood drain would be unkillable. The cooldown HAS to be there. My solution to the problem is to either make the raise healer exclusive, or to reduce the cooldown if used by a healer.

Yeah. I get trying to limit the near infinite raises you're have in an all BLU party, but a 5 minute CD is just crazy. A 60 or 90 second CD would be more than enough of a limiter.

At 60 seconds, a person could die every 7.5 seconds and have a raise available. Considering each of those raises every 60 seconds is from a different person, MP penalties are negligable.

At the current 5 minutes that works out to one raise every 38 seconds, with only the cost of one raise impacting each player.

The lowest I would ever want the cooldown to be is 4 minutes, which works out to one raise every 30 seconds.

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As for my own feedback, here's what I'd like to see in the future:

- BLU specific PF tags, so you can clearly label duties as "For BLU content"

- Allied seals rewarded to all players when someone gets a spell (like first time bonus), to incentivise players to run spell learning parties even if they already have the spell.

- Allow mimicry targeting dummies near the masked carnival as well as being available as a housing item, so you don't need to find a player.

[P0W3RK1D]

Along with all of that we must not forget the 3 (currently useless) Suicide spells, that now have a debuff that makes the skills un-castable for twice as long as angels whisper CD (even if you are revived)....and you SILL die when casting them.

for thoes of you who dont know, im talking about "Final sting, Self Destruct, and Transfusion"

[Lambdafish]

Along with all of that we must not forget the 3 (currently useless) Suicide spells, that now have a debuff that makes the skills un-castable for twice as long as angels whisper CD (even if you are revived)....and you SILL die when casting them.

for thoes of you who dont know, im talking about "Final sting, Self Destruct, and Transfusion"

They are far from useless (particularly final sting), it's job is to be used as the finishing move of a boss, meaning you don't have to deal with the last 10% - 20% of the fight.

[Hasrat]

I just want to be able to run Squadron dungeons on BLU.

[Pepsi_Plunge]

Along with all of that we must not forget the 3 (currently useless) Suicide spells, that now have a debuff that makes the skills un-castable for twice as long as angels whisper CD (even if you are revived)....and you SILL die when casting them.

for thoes of you who dont know, im talking about "Final sting, Self Destruct, and Transfusion"

The Debuff is there because it's easy to cheese bossfights or carnivale with them. It's part of some BLU savage-strategies to have your team blow up one after another, dealing massive dmg and finishing fights much faster. Without the debuff everyone could even do it at least twice, thanks to Angel Whisper.

In carnivale you can clear stages very easy by buffing and blowing yourself up, killing sometimes adds or bosses with 100-30% HP left. The debuff stops you to just final sting 3 times in a row on a fight with multiple acts like stage 25 or stage 30 (it doesn't matter that you die as long as the enemy dies with you).

So it's quit the opposit of being useless. On the contrary, it's actually their strongest tool, turning BLU into pretty effective suicide bombers.

[P0W3RK1D]

look me in my eyes and name me atleast 5 people in this universe who casually (AND USEFULLY) use TRANSFUSION without being at gunpoint.

im just saying, i think there are better alternative debuffs to thoes 3 spells than INSTANT death on top of a 10 MINUTE CD timer.

hows about:
When the player uses things like Final sting he dosent die immediately, instead is afflicted with a new (brush with death). brush with death will not only stop the player from using final sting again , but also reduces his hp to 1 (healing does not refill it), halfs both his movement and cast speed, and reduces all of his damage spells by 50% for the next 20-30 seconds.
meaning, for the next 20-30 seconds you cannot cast any of the 3 final spells, your damage is usless, your slow as SE's healer updates, and if you take ANY damage from ANY source your die immediately.