So...About Blue Mage

[Deveryn]

Blue mage only purpose is to farm allied seals :3

Centurio seals should've been added for the stormblood cap update.

[Blueyes]

There are some interesting ideas about what could be, but not enough thought about the time it will actually take to make something happen. BLU is a side job and it's fine as it is. It's also very OP in its capabilities. For this reason, it's perma-banned from things like Ultimates and Eureka / Bozja.

Conversion to a non-limited status is moot when you have 19 classes to choose from.

Oh I have taken the time investment into account. Given that SE's original plan was to release multiple limited jobs, my suggestion was to take the development time that would go into the next Limited Job and instead spend it on turning Blue Mage into the full job that it should be. This should have no impact on the regularly scheduled program of releasing two jobs with each expansion. They've shown us that they can give us "two and a half" jobs over an expansion cycle. In the future, they can give us two normal jobs as per usual, plus the "remaining half" of Blue Mage so that it may participate in regular duties alongside every other job.

And no, converted Blue Mage to a non-limited status is not moot. Blue Mage is one of the most iconic and beloved jobs of the Final Fantasy franchise. Some are fine with its limited status, but there are many who see it as a total disservice to the job and its fans.

[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.

[SeverianLyonesse]

Oh I have taken the time investment into account. Given that SE's original plan was to release multiple limited jobs, my suggestion was to take the development time that would go into the next Limited Job and instead spend it on turning Blue Mage into the full job that it should be. This should have no impact on the regularly scheduled program of releasing two jobs with each expansion. They've shown us that they can give us "two and a half" jobs over an expansion cycle. In the future, they can give us two normal jobs as per usual, plus the "remaining half" of Blue Mage so that it may participate in regular duties alongside every other job.

And no, converted Blue Mage to a non-limited status is not moot. Blue Mage is one of the most iconic and beloved jobs of the Final Fantasy franchise. Some are fine with its limited status, but there are many who see it as a total disservice to the job and its fans.

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.

[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).

[technole]

Mighty Guard+ Diamondback is only good within the context of BLU raiding, if you were to have blu as a normal job you would never want to use that over an actual tank. Also "Many different play styles" is a massive reach, you have the BLU rotation and you occasionaly use a different filler (i.e. revenge blast), fundamentally you only have one playstyle of your primal burst+ filler.

Cause that's where the direction is with Blue Mage, it isn't ever going to be normal. These skills were all designed for party and raiding content.

The beauty and difficulty of doing them on blue mage is because the game sees a party of them as all red DPS, and that means any mechanic that was once role-aligned is randomized. Like any party member could get the O4S earthshakers, versus the healers only with a normal comp. Or you can get any gavel mechanic in A8S. This also opens up interpretation of what skills could be best slotted for the instance.

There is different play style because each of the raids you do bring different skills, as you don't take the exact same skills in each one. Like who wants to be the 'DPS tank' to take a swap, buster they need Frog Legs, not everyone does Or one of the DPS mimics has another heal skill in-case the healer gets involved in a mechanic. You need someone with the fish in A8S, or if you go in using Eureka best-in-slot gear you probably need one of the HP raising skills to survive certain mechanics.

[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.