So...About Blue Mage

[Eorzean_username]

So, why not give Blue Mage the chance to possibly experience a similar rebirth in XIV? The devs claimed they couldn't make Blue Mage function in XIV like all the other Jobs, but I find that to be crap. All it takes is a little creativity to make a Job like Blue function in XIV like the others. Just gotta throw caution to the wind and brain storm on what they can do!

Honestly, with the way Job design became from Stormblood onward, it's really simplistic to make "actual" FFXIV Blue Mage.

All it needs is:

• A set of animations and visuals that fit the iconic FF franchise concept
• A rotation that feels "like the Job"
• A gauge, probably called the "Blue Gauge" or something else simplistic and obvious, that relates to the rotation and concept in some way
• Some AF sets that mimic iconic appearances from throughout the FF franchise history
• A Limit Break 3 animation.
• A role in an organized party.
• Probably something else that I'm forgetting that someone will point out soon.

BLU already has almost all of those, and the remainder are "easy" (quote-unquote) to fill in.


I think that Mr. Yoshida fundamentally misunderstood something when he asserted that what makes Blue Mage a "Blue Mage" is just hunting down overpowered actions and then being ridiculously overpowered. This is... really wrong.

Maybe it's true for some players, but for many other players, what made Blue Mage a "Blue Mage" is that it wears cool outfits or is otherwise a quirky memorable character, and it uses enemies own attacks against them, rather than traditional FF spells. And that's just... cool. The "overpoweredness", and/or lack thereof, was never the point for me.

I just like being blue. And using monster magic. That's... it.

The BLU questline could just be about hunting down monsters and acquiring their magicks (already implemented — done). And SE is basically "over" Job Quests now, so any further explanations or explorations aren't even needed (which is depressing, but another topic for another day).

As for the "rotational gimmick", well, just as a random example — look at things like FF9 Quina's Eat and FF10 Kimahri's Lancet. These characters consume something from the enemy, and then wield it themselves.

So a Blue Mage Gauge would be about drawing something from the enemy (obviously, in FFXIV, it's going to be... "aether"), and then using it to fuel magicks based on enemy attacks.

Maybe it's randomized each time, and unlocks a different set of monster action types depending on what type of aether you manage to draw.

So, BLU wants to draw aether from monsters/enemies to fill up its Blue Gauge (or whatever), and when it has enough, it can expel that enemy aether to perform a Monster Mirage (or whatever they want to call it) where the BLU briefly channels the learned magic of a previously-encountered foe.

So for example, something like

• Water Cannon filler
• Blood Drain on-cooldown every 15s to generate Blue Aether
• Sharpened Knife on-cooldown every 30s to maximize damage output in exchange for a bit of melee-range riskiness
• (some other fluffernutter inserted here and there, to make the rotation feel more complete)
• As you generate Blue Aether, your own aether reacts unstably, and so the exact monster that you're going to Mirage if you use your gauge keeps changing — you can either spend when you see one that you prefer, or keep generating more Blue Aether to try to gamble for a different monster
• When you're ready to dump Blue Aether, or party buffs / encounter timings necessitate it, you Mirage into whatever monster you've ended up landing on, and use its action(s) — whether it be Number 24, Greater Malboro, etc, etc, etc.

By keeping the dump simple (ie, 1 or 2 actions, such as a GCD+OGCD combo), it allows BLU to have a large catalogue of potential Mirages, contrasting it with Summoner, which uses a small selection of deeply-attuned Primals that have more involved actions and rotations.

So for example, if you end up with Malboro Aether when it's time to dump gauge, you might do Vine Probe (GCD) + Bad Breath (OGCD), then return to your baseline rotation.

Then this gets built on, like most basic rotations, through the addition of cooldowns, procs, and other modifying factors.

Maybe flesh this out by adding some of the slick lore and theming that FFXI BLU had going on, and scale back the slap-stick cheese of the current BLU storytelling.

Then we get to the other classic BLU feature, the "build-a-bear" quality of slotting together different monster actions into combos and sets.

Basically, I think that the solution to this is to keep the core DPS rotation locked-down and "pre-formed" in structure, like other Jobs — this makes balancing practical. Then allow BLU to swap around its Support actions from a pool of learned monster actions.

For example, BLU might have 2 "Healing" slots. It can bring a Raise, a HOT, a direct heal, a barrier, etc — but it can't bring everything at once.

Maybe 1 "Enhancement" slot that grants the party a useful buff or debuff, such as Off-Guard or Peculiar Light.

1 "Enfeeblement" slot that grants a support tool, such as Silence, Stun, etc.

1 "Defensive" slot that grants a protective tool, such as Diamondback (which... would need to function a little differently), Dragon Force, etc.

1 "Movement" slot that grants a movement tool, like a dash, backstep, teleport, etc.

This support-slotting design lets BLU still feel kind of "tricky" and rewarded for gathering extra monster spells, without forcing BLUs to jump through collection hoops just to have a functioning core DPS rotation and jump into content — that aspect would be standardised and tuned on the assumption that it's the same for all BLU.

...But yeah honestly, this doesn't seem complicated to me, in terms of "How do we give Blue Mages what they want?"

Black Mage gets a new fire spell every expansion.

White Mage gets a new boring healing spell every expansion.

Red Mage gets a new flamboyant weird spell every expansion.

Blue Mage gets... a new famous monster skill? Right? I'm happy. That's all I want. I really don't care that much if I have to go manually vacuum it out of some boss's skull, or if it just shows up in my spellbook when I complete my daily Frontline and level up.

Hells, man! Just make the new Blue Mage spells come from enemies that players literally have to encounter during each expansion's MSQ. Now you can conceptually have BLUs "learn" those spells as they level up, and design their rotations around that, without worrying about whether all BLUs will remember to do it — they literally can't access new content without seeing and defeating the monsters that drop the spells, because everything is gated behind the MSQ anyway.