Speaking personally — as in, I allow for other people enjoying different things, and I'm not going to be angry if you get what you want out of it, but I still feel the need to speak up about what I'd prefer — I think Limited Jobs are a near-complete failure, and I have no desire to see any more of them.

Almost everything about BLU is basically an underwhelming gimmick that could have just been another dust-collecting Gold Saucer minigame like Verminion.

It's commonly argued that "BLU is so OP, though!"... but I don't even really see that. BLU is good at farming Moogle Tomestones and other trivial forcibly-sync'd content... and not much else. I know I'd much rather have an Unsync'd L90 real Job for most farming, than try to use BLU for anything, since BLU is frankly much more work for much less payoff in most situations.

So BLU only feels "OP" in situations where specific gimmick circumstances are contrived to make it so... and even then, it barely feels impressive, and rarely creative. You take a few predictable actions and repeat them over and over... same as any other Job.

I feel like the developers are just fundamentally-confused, and cannot make "Job full of optional actions!" actually interesting in the situations that the game's design actually creates. Again, the only time BLU's massive spellbook of mostly-useless "haha, that's cute" garbage ever becomes interesting, is when a laundry-list of artificial restrictions are invented to justify one of the niche tools actually having a purpose. Most of the time, you don't do anything except follow the same formulaic system as any other Job: take all the highest-DPS actions, maximize their usage, maximize your burst windows... because you're stuck with only 24 of them, and in XIV, more DPS is more useful than almost any other situational nicety. So most of the "wild OP utility" never really does anything productive, nor even appears on your hotbar.


In fact, in the opposite of being "OP", BLU is actually significantly more annoying to do almost anything with.

A sync'd BLU Tank is an execrable experience, with miserable DPS, a miserable "rotation", low mitigation, low HP, and :joy: cast times on its defensive tools, with the "fun" of spamming miserable junk like Blood Drain just to be able to mitigate the next tankbuster. Warrior Tank is actually OP; BLU Tank is pointless masochism.

BLU Healer? It's like being trapped as a Level 20 White Mage... forever. It's not OP, it's boring. Your Esuna is literally inferior, and requires standing on top of people. Even the healing isn't OP. Yeah, you have a few fun gimmicks — like snapshotting a White Wind right before White Hole-style set-to-1 HP mechanics — but by and large, BLU Healer is both less powerful and less interesting than just bringing a real healer.

BLU DPS? Your 24 actions are overloaded with overpowered OGCDs / CD-GCDs that you need for your live-or-die 2 minute burst cycle (haha, hmm, where have I heard this story before...), and the few optional spaces that you have left are rarely going to be occupied by anything interesting. Using defensive tools like Diamondback, or making the regrettable mistake of being KO'd, can actually deny you the MP to do your burst properly, making you basically as useful as a Summoner Carbuncle. Your "rotation" consists of spamming one or two dull spells over and over, until you play Cooldown Xylophone during Moon Flute (and probably resort to Third Party Tools to fit it all in without clipping yourself out of something critically-important).

So quite honestly, BLU DPS is hardly interesting or unique, either — it's just a cruder, clunkier version of every other recycled DPS formula: "fluff around for X seconds, vomit out CDs, repeat". Except your CDs are also weird and hypersensitive, combining all the best parts of MCH Flamethrower and HW WAR Pacification into one awkward package to make you less satisfying and more frustrating than just bringing a real DPS.

The only reason BLU DPS has any claim to notoriety is because its potencies are artificially-inflated. If this rotation and utility system was given to any full Level 90 Job, it would be excoriated as being dull, boring, uncreative, and annoying.


I'm sorry, but honestly, I feel like Blue Mage is one of the clumsiest, most unimpressive implementations that I have ever seen in this game. I think it's a (if you'll pardon the melodrama) completely-disgraceful way to treat a Final Fantasy series iconic Job that is a beloved favorite to multiple generations of FF players, and I frankly don't see how they ever thought this was actually going to be a good idea with long-term value. It gives me zero hope that another Limited Job would be anything better than a glorified Yo-Kai Watch event.

Blue Mage could easily have been implemented as a proper Job — which would make people "just happy", in the same way as being able to raid as Samurai or Red Mage does.

It doesn't need to perfectly-capture some mystical quality that Mr. Yoshida rambles about in interviews — it just needs to be a Mage... that wears Blue AF armor... and uses animations from Monsters.

That's it. That's the Job. You're done. It's fine. People will be happy. Same way Red Mage is only tangentially-related to previous incarnations of Red Mage, but still wears Red AF suits, wields a rapier, and casts Black and White spells... so people are happy.

I also take serious umbrage with the assertion that "Blue Mage is only Blue Mage if it can hunt down OP monster spells and be OP". I think that is a patently-ridiculous claim.

What makes Blue Mage "Blue Mage" is not being OP, any more than figuring out the optimal way to exploit any FF Job was ever said Job's entire identity. The developers didn't deny Dancer the ability to be a real Job just because it couldn't exploit Sword Dance to one-shot bosses... they just figured out a way to make Dancer work in XIV.

What made Blue Mage "Blue Mage" was that it:

• Wore blue clothes
• Stole, copied, or learnt skills from Monsters, rather than leveling-up or spell-scrolls
• Wielded Monster skills in battle, rather than traditional Black/White spells

THAT'S. IT. That's Blue Mage. That's all you needed to do!!


Lordy hells, sorry, I know I'm really popping-off right now, but honestly... even now, Mr. Yoshida's justification for what Blue Mage became in XIV raises my blood pressure a bit. It's not just irrational and illogical, it's borderline disingenuous — especially when you look at other classic Jobs like Samurai (does not one-shot entire groups of mobs, nor kill people by throwing money at them, nor break its katana to shoot ghosts at people), Red Mage (is not literally just the BLM and WHM spell lists glued together, with no further elaboration), Dancer (does not attack by performing randomly-selected dances, nor one-shot bosses by rolling the correct number on its dagger attack, nor function as a "physical healer")... and this list could go on and on.

I will die on the blue-colored hill that it was absolutely possible to capture the "flavor" of BLU, in a Job that worked within the FFXIV gauge-and-rotation combat system. Red Mage did it. Samurai did it. Dancer did it. Machinist did it. Summoner did it. But for Blue Mage, the developers chose not to do it, because Mr. Yoshida (and advisors) apparently decided to use his (their) biased and distorted personal impression of what Blue Mage is, to define the boundaries of what the Job could or could not be for everyone else.

...Yes, I am especially salty about Blue Mage, I know. Blue Mage is my favorite Job in the FF series, I have always played BLU characters in FF games, I did FF5 as 4x BLU the first time through, I always had Gau, Strago, Quistis, Quina, and Kimahri in my parties, and I was waiting for BLU in XIV for a long time. I just like being the Monster Job.

And then finally getting... this... was extremely disappointing, and even now, I'm still pretty frustrated about it.