I Thought BLU Was Made For Solo Players

[chaotix69]

I’ll admit, i’m late to the party on this, but it just now hit me. I started getting into BLU and I really enjoy it. It’s been something fun I can work on outside of the usual grind for gear and progression through raiding. However, it was a huge letdown when I realized that most of the titles and even a mount are all locked behind completing some of the hardest content the game has to offer. I never got into savage raiding because I just never had the time to commit to being in a static. But to get all the good BLU achievements, you pretty much need one. It feels contradicting to what the whole “solo content” that BLU was pitched as. Sadly I don’t think ill ever be able to do it.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

It stopped being about solo content the moment you hit Lv50 and wanted to obtain the first 49 spells due to the EX trial requirement back in 4.5.

The content for solo players was the Masked Carnivale. The reason why BLU is limited is because they saw the need to make "game-breaking" skills which don't work in 95% of content, yet standard BLU damage rotation is pretty much just another Caster with some slight nuances - basically the devs forced a self-fulfilling prophecy.

For what it is, 8-BLU raids are some crafty stuff, but tbh at this point I wish they would've given us a second job stone, call it "Memoires of the Blue Mage" that just acts as a standard Blue Mage kit with skills tied to levels and design more BLU sticks to work as normal weapons (with VIT).

Instead, now we have the dread of another job receiving "Limited" status on the horizon. I really wish they'd stop.

[Absurdity]

It stopped being about solo content the moment you hit Lv50 and wanted to obtain the first 49 spells due to the EX trial requirement back in 4.5.

The content for solo players was the Masked Carnivale. The reason why BLU is limited is because they saw the need to make "game-breaking" skills which don't work in 95% of content, yet standard BLU damage rotation is pretty much just another Caster with some slight nuances - basically the devs forced a self-fulfilling prophecy.

For what it is, 8-BLU raids are some crafty stuff, but tbh at this point I wish they would've given us a second job stone, call it "Memoires of the Blue Mage" that just acts as a standard Blue Mage kit with skills tied to levels and design more BLU sticks to work as normal weapons (with VIT).

Instead, now we have the dread of another job receiving "Limited" status on the horizon. I really wish they'd stop.

This is the biggest thing, I just find it utterly baffling that they want to create another job that relies entirely on the devs making new content for it to even give players any reason for playing it.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

This is the biggest thing, I just find it utterly baffling that they want to create another job that relies entirely on the devs making new content for it to even give players any reason for playing it.

Imma be perfectly honest, at this point I see anything Limited as a dooming label.

Solo arena challenges? Only for BLU now.
Spice and variety in your job kits a la skill trees? Only for BLU now.
Challenges to incentivize syncing old Savage content? You better be a BLU, bozo.

Besides the dread of having another job be potentially doom-labeled with Limited like Beastmaster when Summoner is allowed to have rotational summons, the re-dread that follows is having to guess what type of game design will also forever be cemented into "will never happen to non-limited".

When BLU came out I saw it as a handy Beta Test sandbox for them to experiment with game concepts like fast cast, ogcd cast, conditional effects, etc., but I stopped hoping at this point.

[Saraide]

Imma be perfectly honest, at this point I see anything Limited as a dooming label.

Solo arena challenges? Only for BLU now.
Spice and variety in your job kits a la skill trees? Only for BLU now.
Challenges to incentivize syncing old Savage content? You better be a BLU, bozo.

Besides the dread of having another job be potentially doom-labeled with Limited like Beastmaster when Summoner is allowed to have rotational summons, the re-dread that follows is having to guess what type of game design will also forever be cemented into "will never happen to non-limited".

When BLU came out I saw it as a handy Beta Test sandbox for them to experiment with game concepts like fast cast, ogcd cast, conditional effects, etc., but I stopped hoping at this point.

I would love to have solo arena challenges for other roles.

[Gralna]

The reason why BLU is limited is because they saw the need to make "game-breaking" skills which don't work in 95% of content, yet standard BLU damage rotation is pretty much just another Caster with some slight nuances - basically the devs forced a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That's one example given and most easily quoted, the other is that to make it a full job, they'd have to get rid of the blue mage book and the method of learning spells, and turn BLU into just another caster that learns from leveling and doing job quests. We wouldn't get learning parties for spells, or have people trying figure out what spells to equip for running content. People are already upset when we see someone go into CT or a post level 30 dungeon as their base class, how would people react if we started getting blue mages in content that only knew water cannon.

Tbh, really enjoy the current iteration of BLU, especially the part where a lot of it isn't "solved" yet. There is a lot of room to play with what spells to equip and strategies to try for soloing dungeons, trials, maps... maps are some of my favorite content to do as a blue mage, especially when I make it all the way to end of the dungeons.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

That's one example given and most easily quoted, the other is that to make it a full job, they'd have to get rid of the blue mage book and the method of learning spells, and turn BLU into just another caster that learns from leveling and doing job quests. We wouldn't get learning parties for spells, or have people trying figure out what spells to equip for running content. People are already upset when we see someone go into CT or a post level 30 dungeon as their base class, how would people react if we started getting blue mages in content that only knew water cannon.

Tbh, really enjoy the current iteration of BLU, especially the part where a lot of it isn't "solved" yet. There is a lot of room to play with what spells to equip and strategies to try for soloing dungeons, trials, maps... maps are some of my favorite content to do as a blue mage, especially when I make it all the way to end of the dungeons.

A paragraph further I requested a second differently named Soul Crystal named "Memoires of the Blue Mage". A healthy medium that would give us a standard kit for BLU so it and Limited BLU can coexist on different planes of existence - one for the traditional BLU fans of spell learning and one for those like me who simply want another caster with a gameplay twist they can use in *all* content.

[Shougun]

I’ll admit, i’m late to the party on this, but it just now hit me. I started getting into BLU and I really enjoy it. It’s been something fun I can work on outside of the usual grind for gear and progression through raiding. However, it was a huge letdown when I realized that most of the titles and even a mount are all locked behind completing some of the hardest content the game has to offer. I never got into savage raiding because I just never had the time to commit to being in a static. But to get all the good BLU achievements, you pretty much need one. It feels contradicting to what the whole “solo content” that BLU was pitched as. Sadly I don’t think ill ever be able to do it.

I don't see anything wrong with having party content be an option, and certainly it seems some people are having fun with that so might as well have it be a thing too, but I do also hope / wish that these types of jobs are intentionally designed to stand on the solo concept either first or at 'the end'. Either a sort of delayed release to solo ability (so it pushed people into PF for a few patches), or perhaps some method that might dissuade but allow a fun solo alternative for the log.

Like if you use approximately 3 beast tribe worth of tokens you could join the dungeon with a variant of echo for blue mage (ideally it just dynamically adjusts the dungeon so it's neither too easy nor too hard, it shouldn't feel like Red Mage solo in FFXI where you can finish your lasagna in the oven before you finish pounding your head into the sand till victory, but neither 500 item levels over the target unsynced where sneezing means victory). Being tribe tokens has no major significance but the thought was thematically blue mage has a tribe like association, tribe tokens have a limiter which would impose an encouragement to do group content still (but not dissuade it), and rewards can be granted for doing the content without much concern since the tribe tokens are already pre-associated with rewards.

I find it funny at this point. WoW, the hardcore raid-only MMO, is now giving you the ability to get endgame raid-level gear from just casually playing the game and plans to expand this to even more solo content with Delves in the next expansion.
While XIV has suddenly become the "raid or bust" MMO when it comes to gearing your character.

They're better than that even since you can play them with friends, or alone. I suppose one might link it to the variant dungeon, but those of course don't nearly have the staying power that a Delve is intended to have (also pretty cool you can stumble upon them seamlessly).

I would be for variant dungeons getting some sort of substantial benefit even if the major reward was on a sort of timer (like leve, beast tribe, weekly challenge log, etc are- in order to balance reward quantity and reward quality).

More content would be nice. I wish they'd just unlock the BLU log. The only thing stopping me from tearing through the BLU log is the fact that duties must be completed with a full party. Most people don't even care about the BLU log, I usually see people asking for the weekly targets in PF at the start of the week and during the weekends, but there's not that many listings.

Maybe it really is down to rewards. Allied seals seem to be BLU's choice of currency, but I'm always at cap. They could do something with that at least too.

I think it would be a really nice addition to the solo / low party side of blue if they did something like you suggested here. Since mentioning Delves and variants, could use a notch of dynamic scaling for gameplay benefit. Certainly you could do most unsynced but if the intension was to enjoy some mechanics, or alternatively avoid hyper attrition battles then a touch of dynamic scaling could make it harder and easier where needed.

We have the tomestone armor and weapons but they suffer from strict weekly lockouts due to the low tomecap and with the weapons themselves having you to wait 4 to 7 months (during current patch) to get a single one in a game that encourages you to play multiple jobs is such an out of touch design choice. Yeah I get it, its mostly there to keep retention but seriously we couldn't have other avenues that help bypass that limit just even a little bit? The current tomecap and weekly lockout wouldn't be insulting if it wasn't the ONLY way to get that gear.

Game needs to spread its loot structure to other forms of content and not just Savage raids.

I really wanted to see PvP become a valid gear source... personally.

One of the interesting things that WoW essentially will have is jobs but without our lockout and tome lock issues, I believe FFXIV / SE need to look at WoW more closely soon as it appears, imo, that WoW is looking more closely at FFXIV and taking some of it's best features (the intended claims will provide them essentially jobs, but with more QoL and customization in almost all situations, improved class fantasy, and story telling focus). They are still different games naturally, but when I watched WoW's latest expansion news it felt to me that blizzard was doing what made it good initially (which was taking from the best and attempting to make it better / fit their game).

I wonder if after your first tome cap purchase all items of that same type can be purchased at a significantly reduced cost might be one potential solution? Like if you buy a weapon, then all the other weapons of similar ilvl would become massively discounted.


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Didn't really want to bump a thread for it, nor create a new one, but blue feedback- the new spells like the last tier are interesting, while wishing the 1 to 50 had similar level of interest. Also perhaps having some weaker variant of core skills included in early carnivals to improve early solo experience (like maybe an oGCD just okay heal). Avoiding to be as complicated and detailed in previous posts (though most feelings in those posts remain as they were, with the continued addition that I believe SE has taken feedback into account and skill quality has increased).

- Basic Instinct always grants basic instinct when possible, however when using it perhaps grants all stances to the next spell cast (tank, healer, damage - to the spell effect specifically not the passive buffs applied to the character via mimicry).
- Make aetheric mimicry a class mechanic, it can be a quest to run around and collect roles (running around town casting spells on people could be cute) but once 'unlocked' it is just a mechanic where you select the role you want and it takes up no spell slot. You could create a specialization or slot passive system (thinking inspiration from FFXI's blue mage or Diablo 3 and 4 systems), where then basic instinct could also go here. On that... I'd love to see some better and more tangible encouragement to collecting spells (mantra magic might be a counter argument as it takes 100 spells to earn), but I was hoping more FFXI blue mage passives or such (where each spell had a tangible impact, like "now that I learned this I can get +5% max hp, or I can combine it with Y to get this new interaction with lightning spells).
- Remove self stuns (it's not fun, strongly imo, to not able to play, at all, and feels worse when great effects are put behind that concept) and where obviously divergent return skills to similar glory of their source (for example Fire Angon - was far beyond a regular fire spell, or Diamondback which had a cool reflective thorn effect)

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It stopped being about solo content the moment you hit Lv50 and wanted to obtain the first 49 spells due to the EX trial requirement back in 4.5.

The content for solo players was the Masked Carnivale. The reason why BLU is limited is because they saw the need to make "game-breaking" skills which don't work in 95% of content, yet standard BLU damage rotation is pretty much just another Caster with some slight nuances - basically the devs forced a self-fulfilling prophecy.

For what it is, 8-BLU raids are some crafty stuff, but tbh at this point I wish they would've given us a second job stone, call it "Memoires of the Blue Mage" that just acts as a standard Blue Mage kit with skills tied to levels and design more BLU sticks to work as normal weapons (with VIT).

Instead, now we have the dread of another job receiving "Limited" status on the horizon. I really wish they'd stop.

Definitely a fan of an advanced job (both limited and normal) concept... I had really wanted to main blue before it came out. Release blue had me actively upset with the entire game and soured my mood for a while. I feel they've improved quite a few elements but I still feel they made the job really focused on a small group so they can do savage one more time and then hit it and quit it.. Which feels a shame coming from someone who had wanted to use it a lot. Alternatively I like the idea that the duty log is brought into a solo-capable space, and generally solo of value is pushed where it wont break the game.

Release blue was hardly that special anyways, in terms of balance, there were a few tweaks and you would have gone to 'underpowered, uninteresting combo structure, normal job' from release. I think I was 'first world' infuriated (it's still a video game) when it was like "we wanted to make it just how broken it was before and really give you that power", 'btw Death is crazy low chance, most bosses are immune, we changed quite a few spells from their cool boss counterparts into straight potency color changes, added self inflicting stuns, and other QoL damaging ideas so spells don't feel as good as they could, and you will be spamming a lot for a long while'. At the time I had lost some faith in the team lol. I feel they improved the spell design and made some very fast changes to bring the power level up to better justify 'limited' but the release had me go "seriously guys?... this is.... y". There are still some of the 1 to 50 spell designs that I find quite annoying though, and wish they would improve them (whether it is because they didn't capture the spell or because the spell is useful but actively not fun or cumbersome to use).

While you might have missed out on some of the instant kill stuff, I think a normal blue would have been fine and could easily have kept learning spells too (its code, they could have just said "if you don't have this skill from the open world you don't do the level 70 capstone dungeon" so that whole argument was terrible on people going without their kit). Ultra-vibration instant skill is well designed but initially our chance based spells that you had to spam.. I was like "GOOD GOD, YES, PLEASE TAKE THEM AWAY- GIVE ME A NORMAL.." as the spell felt awful to use. In a group you don't spam it very long, but it's such an ugly gameplay (in terms of actual 'game' 'play') concept when you're relying on yourself lol.

If they add another limited job out of the pool of jobs some people would have wanted to main I hope they have a better touch down this time around. Doesn't have much theme to the expansion but my thought was a magitek operator (Xenogears, Armored Core, G-Warrior) like limited job, which wouldn't really be able to fit well normally.. I don't think people would miss that. Undoubtedly some will miss beast master if that's the job (and thematically to the expansion it feels like an excellent fit), so hopefully if they pick it.. it'll be well done in such a way that people wont go "I lost the chance for my favorite job for THIS.. THIS??" which is why I /had/ felt about blue mage. Still a bit sad, but blue mage is in a better place given the improve spell designs and the immediate changes they made after feedback poured in initially.

My other thought might be a morpher, given the theme of the area and some other reasons, though I had wished to be able to transform as a main job.. so would be funny if two jobs I had really wanted to play both become limited XD. Again, hopefully they learned enough from Blue launch to avoid missing the justification of why it might be labeled 'limited'.

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Now I need to find that Shurrikhan post I promised to look at it. I feel especially an interesting one given WoW is improving their own world designs..

[Jeeqbit]

The Masked Carnivale can be done solo, spells can be learned solo, you can solo dungeons with Basic Instinct and the level 30 totems. It can 1-shot many things, such as FATEs, using spells such as Tail Screw or Ram's Voice + Ultravibration.

But it does have party-related endgame content, yes. They went in the direction of creating lore that entire adventurer squadrons could enter dungeons as blue mages and fulfill the typical roles of tank, healer and dps using blue mage spells.

You can PUG some of the raids involved for the Morbol but realistically this is more likely to be the easiest ones, T5 and A4S. The others can take multiple days, weeks or months of progression.