Let Blue Mages Queue without a pre-made party

[Valavaern]

With at least 2 of the BLU quests gated behind abilities that can only be gotten from dungeons, Blue Mages NEED to be able to queue for these duties normally, without needing a pre-made party.

If you're worried about them having enough damaging skills, then you could do some sort of integration with Stone Sea Sky: say in order to unlock the ability to run certain content, you have to pass the dummy check.

[MistakeNot]

With at least 2 of the BLU quests gated behind abilities that can only be gotten from dungeons, Blue Mages NEED to be able to queue for these duties normally, without needing a pre-made party.

If you're worried about them having enough damaging skills, then you could do some sort of integration with Stone Sea Sky: say in order to unlock the ability to run certain content, you have to pass the dummy check.

The problem is mostly the other way around - Blue Mages are generally too powerful compared to the other classes.
They are simply not balanced against other classes/jobs and are not intended to be, and it would be hard to make them balanced without a complete rewrite of the job.

[ReiMakoto]

The only way this is viable is if you introduced some kind of level sync for blue mage (which i wouldnt be against btw), but making a decision about what level what skill should be available at is not the kind of effort that SE is going to put into BLU considering how long it goes between blu updates and how little they get. Without this kind of level sync blu would be the de facto class for roulletes (unless they were banned from those), or could become problematic for those running a dungeon for the first time with blu "ruining the expeirience". There also comes the question of trolling, intentional or otherwise. Remember when titan egi had the ability to tank, and how annoying it was for the tank when summoners wouldnt switch off it? Now imagine that but with mightguard blu ripping aggro off of all of the other tanks with little to no effort, slowing down runs as opposed to speeding them. What about a blu who just decides to just slot in abilities that deal little or no damage, because they are unaware of the facts of the game that pure CC/ healing isn't conducive to a successful run (hell we even have this in current content with 0 dps healers, now imagine one of your dps being replaced with one of them instead of your healer).

If you introduce some kind of system where you need to slot certain skills, and certain skills are banned when trying to queue without a matched party, congrats, you've made a balanced DF blue and youve eliminated the need for blu to be excluded from the end game, which will then create more work for SE when people inevitably ask for this version of BLU to be unlocked, as they'd need to make gear for it and make sure the "balanced" skills are balanced around the rest of the endgame cast (which id be fine with, but at this point its clear SE isn't fine with it) which is just a lot more work for them than they are willing to put in.

Now saying it couldn't work would be a lie, it would just take effort and balancing decisions that the devs do not want to do, because by doing them it shows that BLU could be a balanced job if they do it well, and could cause a myriad of issues if they do it poorly.

The problem is mostly the other way around - Blue Mages are generally too powerful compared to the other classes.
They are simply not balanced against other classes/jobs and are not intended to be, and it would be hard to make them balanced without a complete rewrite of the job.

A yes and a no here. A level 60 blu with a setup to maximise dps without death skills and without dps mimicry is basically balanced against other jobs at level 60. The problem lies with the fact I just had to eliminate a bunch of skills there. So no, you wouldnt need a complete rewrite of the job, however yes, you would have to introduce a "banned spell" list for df content, as well as a level sync for these spells.

[Ceetee]

The easy solution is to just have a separate queue, along with a roulette. Blue Mage can queue up for any content, but won’t be paired with normal players. Likewise the Limited Job roulette would pair you with anyone queuing for something as BLU.

Could have the roulette give a good chunk of poetics + allied seals.

[tyranical69]

I am in on the idea of Blue Mage queuing with the rest of the other jobs and letting it participate normally in duties.

[ADVSS]

I agree, its only level 50/60 dungeons anyway. Just disable missile or something, though to date the only boss ive seen it used on and work was the diamondback turtle boss we were farming for diamond back. Damage wise wasnt really that broken imo, other than the range of some abilities like voice of dragon, which isnt even a ohko and needs to be spammed many times anyway.

[Gruntler]

Blue mages can solo most of those dungeons at the level of those dungeons, or at least, they could back before they got buffed.

They cannot coexist in the normal play ecosystem. They warm the normal play ecosystem, unless you think 100-0ing bosses in one gcd and hard ccing the entire trash of a dungeon in a mad rush to a one-shot boss room -when level synched- is okay.

You can't solve this by reducing their skills--they'll just take the best skills.

The problem is not 'blue mage doesn't have enough' when they can hit a button at level 20 that does 1000 damage when black mages struggle to hit 200 with fire.

[ADVSS]

Blue mages can solo most of those dungeons at the level of those dungeons, or at least, they could back before they got buffed.

They cannot coexist in the normal play ecosystem. They warm the normal play ecosystem, unless you think 100-0ing bosses in one gcd and hard ccing the entire trash of a dungeon in a mad rush to a one-shot boss room -when level synched- is okay.

You can't solve this by reducing their skills--they'll just take the best skills.

The problem is not 'blue mage doesn't have enough' when they can hit a button at level 20 that does 1000 damage when black mages struggle to hit 200 with fire.

At level 60 BLU unlocks a DF-like thing, but you still have to sign up as a group of BLU. I was talking about letting them queue solo with match making, since it is literally the DF interface. It already has an insurmountable list of dungeons, trials etc that have bonuses like the duty roullette. But you cant even sign in solo for matchmaking, its quite silly