So...About Blue Mage

[SenorPatty]

More seriously sometime i wish they just change it to something more constructed with 3 archetypes (dps,heal,tank), each coming with its separate set of spell that you have to learn and balanced to do content with other jobs.

I think this is a good middle road. Out of unsynced and/or premades current content, BLU retains all its original potency and effect spells. When it's doing current content, player picks a role, a set of rebalanced spells temporarily replace the og spells to fit that role. It would be a good compromise, imo.

[deadman1204]

It can never be a full job. Its totally unbalanced for a party and would basically need a complete remake from the ground up.

[ReiMakoto]

It can never be a full job. Its totally unbalanced for a party and would basically need a complete remake from the ground up.

Mans just stormed into the thread, not read anything and has been like "nah needs a total rework from the ground up". To catch you up, no it doesn't really, its pretty much on the cusp of being balanced as is, the current blu rotation isn't particularly overpowered and most of its more aggregious elements of its kit don't work/ are very sub optimal in hardcore content anyway.

[Irenia]

At this point, non-limited PVE job design has become so genericized and toothless, I would not want that to happen to BLU.

Instead, I would prefer the opposite. Make BLU non-limited *as-is* and bring up every other job to be equally as broken and distinct. Use the PVP designs as a foundation and build out from there.

Screw balance. The evolution of FFXIV has been a gradual heat death as everything approaches absolute zero in the service of "balance". I don't want to play a balanced game, no matter how "challenging," if the individual job fantasies aren't engaging and fun.

Haha, reminds me of the time someone told me that (paraphrasing) "There are only six jobs in FFXIV : Tank, Healer, Melee, Caster, Missile, and Blue Mage. You can choose your flavor of each."

[SeverianLyonesse]

Haha, reminds me of the time someone told me that (paraphrasing) "There are only six jobs in FFXIV : Tank, Healer, Melee, Caster, Missile, and Blue Mage. You can choose your flavor of each."

Really only five, because I can think of at least four flavors of Blue Mage that correspond to Tank, Healer, Melee (Kamikaze), and Missile/Caster (Moon Flute/Matra Magic).

[Packetdancer]

Will the blue haired step child finally be made a full Job next expansion since we're probably going to New World then. Or will it remain a niche, left in the molding dust of previous expansions?

I don't think Blue Mage is a "limited job" because they want to not give it attention; I'd argue that with the Masked Carnivale, the Blue Mage Log, and a ton of Blue Mage specific achievements, there's a solid chance that it's received more job-specific attention than any other job in the game (limited or otherwise). I think it's limited because they wanted to do Blue Mage with actual Blue Mage mechanics.

Blue Mage's whole core conceit is learning spells by seeing them cast by enemies you defeat. It would be extremely difficult to both have BLU able to learn things like Tsukuyomi's "Nightbloom" and still have them able to participate in real content. Not because the primal spells are necessarily OP compared to other job abilities, because of the versatility. Who'd want a black mage as the caster in their raid static if you could have a BLU who can use attacks they learned from the fights on previous raid tiers that might well trivialize specific mechanics, and act as a backup healer at the same time? (As the joke went with the Endwalker summaries of jobs, BLU sitting here going "Laugh all you want. This expansion I get Light Rampant.")

So, okay, you make a 'real job' version of BLU, and restrict them to the GCD spells that you learn, stripping out all the potentially-difficult-to-balance oGCD ones you learn from trials and raids; prune the list quite a bit, to make it so the spell sets are more or less balanced with the other jobs. Or something else to make the spellbook not difficult to balance alongside other jobs in content. At the very least, adding minimum levels for the spells, where you can't use a given spell when level synced down, so that BLU at level 50 doesn't have multiple hotbars of abilities where most jobs have only a few.

A bit disappointing (and potentially an immense pain if you take a hotbar into leveling roulette and end up at a level where you don't have any of those spells available), but it's at least still BLU where you go deliberately learn the spells.

But now you have the scenario where you get a BLU in roulette who hasn't learned some key spell, and the party's upset about it. (One need only look at the commentary when someone shows up in content without their job stone -- or having forgotten to do some job quest that a key ability was locked behind -- to see that the problem's likely to arise.)

Okay, so to avoid that, you just make sure that BLU gets the spells, guaranteed, at specific levels; no worries about someone having not unlocked that spell yet. But I question whether people who enjoy playing BLU would still like that BLU... because, to me, that doesn't seem like Blue Mage anymore; it just seems like another caster DPS.

Edit to add one additional note: if BLU becomes a full, real job, you likely end up with the same scenario as all the other real jobs... namely, you get maybe 2-3 new things per expansion. It would hardly be balanced easily if you still had 10 new abilities to learn from the various raids and trials over the course of the expansion, while another caster DPS gets an upgrade to one existing spell via a trait, one new oGCD, and then a capstone ability when they hit cap for that expansion.

BLU is a limited job not because it doesn't get enough love, BLU is a limited job because it pretty much needs to be in order to actually be BLU. Or, at least, to be a proper incarnation of blue magic.

[Soge01]

Snip*

Buuuut, that's the reason why I suggested just making it so you have your standard limited BLU that still functions as it always has, but also an "unlimited" BLU so you can participate in all content from the get go, while limited BLU can still be worked on as a fun niche activity with other BLU players.

For example, when I think of a really good Job that takes an established iconic job and recreates it into something new, but still has all the key traits that still make it what it is. I think of Red Mage. No other Red Mage in any of the previous FF games function like XIV's. And yet, it is still a Red Mage because it still retains its classic roots, just repackaged in a unique way. Its physical attacks are all magick based due to he fact that we have to charge up our rapier with magical energy from casting spells. Our magical attacks and certain support capabilities are all derivatives of Black and White Mage magick made into something entirely new that functions differently compared to the other two and, again, helps charge up our rapier for close range powerful magical attacks.

I think, if the devs think it through well, they could do a similar thing with Blue Mage while keeping all of its core traits that make what a Blue Mage is intact.

Personally, I would say the devs should focus on giving an "unlimited" BLU access to various types of iconic Blue Mage spells that would work well within a standard XIV job class. Again just like how they did it with Red Mage.

My limit of Blue Mage experience is only to XIV, VIII, VI and X, so I can't really give any examples of what I would pick to use for a classic standard XIV job class version of Blue Mage; especially since it's been awhile since I played any of those and XIV as a BLU on my alt. But...I just look at Red Mage and think "you know what? They can make a version of Blue Mage that functions like a standard job if they can do it with the likes of Red Mage and it's weird functionality in previous FF titles". So...yeah, I shut up now. x'D

[Packetdancer]

Buuuut, that's the reason why I suggested just making it so you have your standard limited BLU that still functions as it always has, but also an "unlimited" BLU so you can participate in all content from the get go, while limited BLU can still be worked on as a fun niche activity with other BLU players.

Sure, I get that. But if you have "limited BLU" versus "unlimited BLU" as basically functionally separate jobs, and you have to strip away everything that basically makes blue magic "blue magic" (e.g., learning the spells by seeing them cast) in order to make it play well within level roulette... why not just make a different caster? Instead of a broken blue mage stripped of its blue magic identity, why not come up with a different caster that has some identity that works better in roulette?

Or, to put it another way: if, in order to make BLU work in normal play, you have to...

• Ensure that BLU learns spells at specific levels like other jobs (rather than learning them in content through observation), so you can guarantee that a given BLU has the necessary spells (rather than joining Roulette at level 63 while only having Water Cannon).
• Strip out the spellbook functionality, so that you can guarantee a given BLU DPS in a roulette has the necessary skills to function at that level, rather than some custom spell-set that doesn't work. (Who's going to want to wait for 15 minutes while a BLU tries to shuffle their spells to something appropriate to whatever they got in roulette?)
• Ensure that BLU syncs down in roulettes, so that (for instance) you don't have 17 AoEs in Sastasha while the other DPS has precisely none.
• Limit BLU to the DPS role, rather than allowing it to tank/heal, so that roulettes can role-match in a sane manner.

...then I would ask, what exactly about blue mage makes you want to play it in normal content? This is not a facetious question, I am genuinely curious; to me, all the things that would need to get stripped out to make BLU work in normal content would be most of the things that I personally feel actually make BLU... well, BLU. As opposed to just another caster?

Yes, it's possible they could basically define a set of spells from the BLU spellbook and just give them to you at various levels, and turn it into a normal caster; mechanically, that's possible. But what would give BLU a separate identity from any other caster at that point? What would make it worth making one of the two jobs in 7.0 be "BLU with a set spellbook where spells unlock automatically level by level, enforced DPS role, and with all the weird buffs/debuffs that would make balancing high-end content (like Savage or Ultimates) incredibly difficult if they had them", as opposed to some other caster?

Personally, I would prefer BLU remain BLU -- and a limited job that can be all the weird things -- and just get another caster. Because if you've split BLU into functionally two jobs... what's the gain? This is a genuine question, because I don't understand what it is that people actually want out of "second BLU".

And you would have to split it, realistically, because 1. existing BLU needs to be able to learn spells in the overworld, but you wouldn't want someone advancing the MSQ with that, and 2. you wouldn't want someone able to power-level "unlimited BLU' via "limited BLU"s absurd overworld XP buff. Among other things.

(I mean, this is leaving aside the fact that if they did make "unlimited BLU" one of the two jobs for 7.0, I can just imagine the howling on the forums about "that's not a new job, they just took an existing job and stripped all the neat stuff out to give us another caster DPS! That's so lazy! We should get a third job!" or whatever.)

[ReiMakoto]

Sure, I get that. But if you have "limited BLU" versus "unlimited BLU" as basically functionally separate jobs, and you have to strip away everything that basically makes blue magic "blue magic" (e.g., learning the spells by seeing them cast) in order to make it play well within level roulette... why not just make a different caster? Instead of a broken blue mage stripped of its blue magic identity, why not come up with a different caster that has some identity that works better in roulette?
Or, to put it another way: if, in order to make BLU work in normal play, you have to...

• Ensure that BLU learns spells at specific levels like other jobs (rather than learning them in content through observation), so you can guarantee that a given BLU has the necessary spells (rather than joining Roulette at level 63 while only having Water Cannon).
• Strip out the spellbook functionality, so that you can guarantee a given BLU DPS in a roulette has the necessary skills to function at that level, rather than some custom spell-set that doesn't work. (Who's going to want to wait for 15 minutes while a BLU tries to shuffle their spells to something appropriate to whatever they got in roulette?)
• Ensure that BLU syncs down in roulettes, so that (for instance) you don't have 17 AoEs in Sastasha while the other DPS has precisely none.
• Limit BLU to the DPS role, rather than allowing it to tank/heal, so that roulettes can role-match in a sane manner.

...then I would ask, what exactly about blue mage makes you want to play it in normal content? This is not a facetious question, I am genuinely curious; to me, all the things that would need to get stripped out to make BLU work in normal content would be most of the things that I personally feel actually make BLU... well, BLU. As opposed to just another caster?

Yes, it's possible they could basically define a set of spells from the BLU spellbook and just give them to you at various levels, and turn it into a normal caster; mechanically, that's possible. But what would give BLU a separate identity from any other caster at that point? What would make it worth making one of the two jobs in 7.0 be "BLU with a set spellbook where spells unlock automatically level by level, enforced DPS role, and with all the weird buffs/debuffs that would make balancing high-end content (like Savage or Ultimates) incredibly difficult if they had them", as opposed to some other caster?

Personally, I would prefer BLU remain BLU -- and a limited job that can be all the weird things -- and just get another caster. Because if you've split BLU into functionally two jobs... what's the gain? This is a genuine question, because I don't understand what it is that people actually want out of "second BLU".

And you would have to split it, realistically, because 1. existing BLU needs to be able to learn spells in the overworld, but you wouldn't want someone advancing the MSQ with that, and 2. you wouldn't want someone able to power-level "unlimited BLU' via "limited BLU"s absurd overworld XP buff. Among other things.

(I mean, this is leaving aside the fact that if they did make "unlimited BLU" one of the two jobs for 7.0, I can just imagine the howling on the forums about "that's not a new job, they just took an existing job and stripped all the neat stuff out to give us another caster DPS! That's so lazy! We should get a third job!" or whatever.)

To take your points a few at a time:

An unlimited blu is not stripped of its identity, peope have this no true scotsman fallacy built up around blu's identity. At its core BLU is just a caster who uses monster spells, how those spells are learned and implemented changes from iteration to iteration, and is even not "true" by a lot of peoples conditions in xiv, because many of your impactful spells are learned from totems.

"then I would ask, what exactly about blue mage makes you want to play it in normal content". If you've played blu raids, you'll have noticed that for the majority of most fights you are playing as "just another caster" if youre running dps blu. And you know what, DPS blu's rotation is fun to me, you make the point of "all the weird buffs/debuffs that would make balancing high-end content (like Savage or Ultimates) incredibly difficult if they had them" but what are you actually talking about? Current BLU in raids isn't unbalanced because of any debuffs they have, theyre unbalanced because dps mimicry gives an absurdly large arbitrary DPS buff, the rest of the stuff they have is not particularly unbalanced, and a lot of the time only becomes unbalanced by the nature of stacking multiple of the same job, which is something you also witness in 8 tank clears of savage/ ultimate so is not exclusive to BLU's identity.

The other thing is for some people, BLU is their favourite job in the franchise, imagine a world where for some ungodly reason RDM was a limited job because "it was too hard to balance being both a Black Mage and White mage ability". People would want an unlimited RDM because RDM is their favourite class, its not hard to wrap your head around.

Also "Limit BLU to the DPS role, rather than allowing it to tank/heal, so that roulettes can role-match in a sane manner" is not even a problem, there is no planet where someone would want a BLU tank over a regular tank, BLU tanking is a novelty much like titan egi used to be, or DPS tanking in Bozja, it works but very not well, and the same but to a lesser degree with healer, although thats a whole other can of worms with healer design, and you probably would want to take a blu healer, but only because healing reqs are so low in this game that a BLU being a healer would have more dps options.

TLDR:

Current BLU already has a pretty balanced and fun rotation so WHY NOT have that available as an unlimited form, the game already can gate your progression by checking what spells you have, and adding level ranges for spells is not particularly challenging. For a quick fix, just block DF/MSQ access to unlimited BLU behind finishing the level 70 blu quests, and have another quest that checks if you have the right spells unlocked after. From that point on just have BLU's overworld leveling disabled for above 70 and have check ins every 10 levels where DF access for the next set of 10 levels in disabled until youve learned the 1 or 2 skills added to the unlimited rotation in that level range.

[Soge01]

Sure, I get that. But if you have "limited BLU" versus "unlimited BLU" as basically functionally separate jobs, and you have to strip away everything that basically makes blue magic "blue magic" (e.g., learning the spells by seeing them cast) in order to make it play well within level roulette... why not just make a different caster? Instead of a broken blue mage stripped of its blue magic identity, why not come up with a different caster that has some identity that works better in roulette?

Or, to put it another way: if, in order to make BLU work in normal play, you have to...

• Ensure that BLU learns spells at specific levels like other jobs (rather than learning them in content through observation), so you can guarantee that a given BLU has the necessary spells (rather than joining Roulette at level 63 while only having Water Cannon).
• Strip out the spellbook functionality, so that you can guarantee a given BLU DPS in a roulette has the necessary skills to function at that level, rather than some custom spell-set that doesn't work. (Who's going to want to wait for 15 minutes while a BLU tries to shuffle their spells to something appropriate to whatever they got in roulette?)
• Ensure that BLU syncs down in roulettes, so that (for instance) you don't have 17 AoEs in Sastasha while the other DPS has precisely none.
• Limit BLU to the DPS role, rather than allowing it to tank/heal, so that roulettes can role-match in a sane manner.

...then I would ask, what exactly about blue mage makes you want to play it in normal content? This is not a facetious question, I am genuinely curious; to me, all the things that would need to get stripped out to make BLU work in normal content would be most of the things that I personally feel actually make BLU... well, BLU. As opposed to just another caster?

Yes, it's possible they could basically define a set of spells from the BLU spellbook and just give them to you at various levels, and turn it into a normal caster; mechanically, that's possible. But what would give BLU a separate identity from any other caster at that point? What would make it worth making one of the two jobs in 7.0 be "BLU with a set spellbook where spells unlock automatically level by level, enforced DPS role, and with all the weird buffs/debuffs that would make balancing high-end content (like Savage or Ultimates) incredibly difficult if they had them", as opposed to some other caster?

Personally, I would prefer BLU remain BLU -- and a limited job that can be all the weird things -- and just get another caster. Because if you've split BLU into functionally two jobs... what's the gain? This is a genuine question, because I don't understand what it is that people actually want out of "second BLU".

And you would have to split it, realistically, because 1. existing BLU needs to be able to learn spells in the overworld, but you wouldn't want someone advancing the MSQ with that, and 2. you wouldn't want someone able to power-level "unlimited BLU' via "limited BLU"s absurd overworld XP buff. Among other things.

(I mean, this is leaving aside the fact that if they did make "unlimited BLU" one of the two jobs for 7.0, I can just imagine the howling on the forums about "that's not a new job, they just took an existing job and stripped all the neat stuff out to give us another caster DPS! That's so lazy! We should get a third job!" or whatever.)

- As another pointed out on page 7, the totems and learning new Blue spells specifically for the "unlimited" version of Blue Mage could be used as a possible way for that version of Blue Mage to learn spells.

- People like myself want a Blue Mage that can play in all content without the restrictions the current Blue Mage has. It's not fun to see your favorite job be restricted to just niche and outdated content when all the other Jobs get to have fun playing through all the current content and even old content that the current Nlue Mage could thrive in, like Eureja and Bozja. That isn't to say I would want to get rid of current Blue Mage for an "unlimited" version. That would be just dumb, lol! While I enjoy Blue Mage for what it is currently, it would just be nice to have a second version of it where it has access to all content. xD

- The identity of Blue Mage, I believe wouldn't be stripped from it if a second version of it were made so it can play in all content. Blue Mage, fron my own perspective from what I've played in this game and previous FF games, has always been a powerful caster class that takes the power of its enemies and uses it against them. To me, this can be easily replicated in an "unlimited" version of Blue Mage. How would one do this, I cannot say. Though a previous poster here on one of the previous pages to 6 made a really in depth thingy on joe an "unlimited" Blue Mage could function and he talked about Blue Mage using the same elemental spells over and over again to unlock bigger and powerful ones. Like, you start out with Water Cannon and you got to Water Breath (I think that's a spell) next and so on, until you can blow up your enemy with Leviathan's Tsunami attack or something as your big water elemental finisher. So, at least in my opinion, there are plenty of ways to keep Blue Mage's iconic traits intact without stripping it of what it is.

- I also wanted to see Blue Mage have a full version of it possibly made for 7.0, because it's the caster job anybody would think of when you mention New World. And since we're more than likely going there next expansion, why not make a fully functioning version of it? Another poster on a previous page to 6 also pointed out how we could get another Blue Mage Job Crystal that functions similar to all the other Job Crystals, so as to also help keep the identity of current Blue Mage seperate from the newer one.

And about those who would complain on the forums about the devs being lazy for just making a second Blue Mage for the 7.0 expansion instead of giving us a completely new class with a seperate identity. Who cares. They'll complain to the high heavens until they actually get their hands on this second Blue Mage job and most of them will either shut their gobs, thinking this new Blue Mage is a fine addition to the already existing caster jobs or they'll screech even harder, complaining that the Job is severely lacking in something or the other like SMN.

Personally, I'd rather see the devs take that risk. I'd rather Blue Mage have two distinct functioning versions one where we can play it in it's own fun little niche content with other limited jobs and expanding on the lore that is that version of Blue Mage. And being able to play a standard job class Blue Mage, where some of us who actually want to play it in all content can finally do so with some fun little unique caster gimmick of it's own that doesn't do what the current casters do.

- And keeping Blue Mage in the DPS role if it's made "unlimited" is fine by me. Blue Mage has always been a DPS of sorts in other FF games. Or at least the ones I've played, so it makes sense it would stick to that type of gameplay, unless the devs want to pull a Dark Knight on us and try something new with it.