Summoner Health Check

[ForsakenRoe]

The nature of BLU, means that you can reach level 80 with a singular spell learned, the one that is forced upon you to start at all, the Job has no progression, any spell could be your second spell, which would make it very easy to find a BLU who is incapable of performing its basic role, this isn't an error, this is by design, the Job fantasy around Blue Mage exists to demand you to go do funky shit, to go out of your way, to get your spells, you can get them at any order, you can select any number of them for you active spellbook regardless of how well they work together.

This lack of natural progression, is what I believe is the reason behind the decision to making them limited, the fact you could get a BLU so bad in a party that the Tank is out-damaging them with autos, everything else, the funky things they can do like instakill effects, spreading every status your heart desires, the sheer power behind them, is the carrot on the stick to attempt to make them appealing despite the limitations.

And I need to stress, to just give BLU a natural progression, for spells to manifest out of thin air, for them to be handed to you through story quests, would destroy what makes Blue Mage into itself, it's the nature of the Job to function the way it does.

This again...

Yoshi-P mentioned this in an interview, the problem of 'a BLU might join a party to raid, but have no spells learned'. If it was such a problem, why design the possibility into the Job? They acknolewdged a potential problem, and then made the problem possible to run into.

A lot of enemies are resistant to 'every status your heart desires', and a lot of bosses are straight up immune to instakill effects, with seemingly no pattern as to which are vs are not.

Spells already DO manifest out of thin air, or are handed to you via story quests, with BLU. They're just obscured behind the additional layer of 'receive totem from vendor, use it in your inventory to learn spell'. Do you think that Breath of Magic is somehow vastly different, because you learn it from a totem unlocked at level 80, rather than directly 'because you hit level 80'? Or how about the 'you learned X number of spells, here's a totem that teaches you one more'? Like, they gave us a totem for White Wind, despite White Wind being in ARR content (Enkidu, from Gilgamesh fight #2)

Let me tell you what I think 'makes BLU, BLU'. EVERY FF game I've played that has BLU in it (Which is admittedly not all of them, but is most of them), I've had a core kit of spells, sometimes it varies in number, but it's never been more than 32. When I go into a fight, in any of those previous games, I do not need to pick a 'loadout', I take every spell that I've learned thus far into the battle. In EVERY FF game I've played, I can use a BLU in my team and complete the story, up to and including the final boss. In EVERY FF game I've played, the METHOD by which spells are learned, is often different. FF5 you have to be hit with the spell and survive it, FF6/FF7 you have to see it and survive the battle, FF8 you use specific items (I guess this is where the Totems idea came from), FF9 you eat specific enemies, FF10 you use Lancet on specific enemies, FFTA/TA2 you get hit by the spell and survive it. It's only in FF11, and now FF14, that you needed to make a 'loadout', so I dunno why they stuck so rigidly to that 'version' of BLU. Plus, even in FF11, you could 'play through the whole story' as BLU, so limiting BLU and preventing it from completing MSQ in FF14, is an FF14-only decision. Now who's 'destroying what makes BLU into itself'?

'What makes BLU, a BLU', is very simple IMO. It learns spells from enemies, and uses those learned spells in combat. That's all. So, there's absolutely ways they could have made BLU a 'real job', while preserving some of its wackiness for when it's doing Masked Carnivale, soloing content or even doing BLU-only Raids. But now that we have this version of BLU, the well is poisoned, and people have convinced themselves that 'the only way SE could have done BLU, is this way'

This is actually exactly why BLU is a limited job, you hit the nail on the head. Yoshi struggled with the idea of adding BLU to the game for years because he couldn't think of a way to make it work here and preserve the core "skill hunting" aspect of the job while making it progress the same as all the others. The compromise was the limited job system.

In my opinion however, this system was a mistake. I would have rather they forced BLU players to progress learning their spells in order to do things such as use the duty finder but honestly? I'm not sure even THAT would be necessary. FFXI has blue mage and while other jobs occasionally have to say, buy spells to learn them BLU works completely fine there while hunting down it's own skills with or without help from other players which takes MUCH more work than just waltzing to the auction house and buying a scroll. In that game if a BLU joins a party and has no spells do you know what happens? They get kicked from the group. Same thing could easily happen here and it wouldn't even be remotely a problem. Would some players complain about this? Yeah, sure, definitely, but at a certain point we have to stop coddling and tell people to get over it and properly prepare for activities or people won't want to play with them.

Instead of this however they chose to completely remove BLU from regular content and gave it absurd training wheels and it's just... Bad. A joke. A mockery of what the job could be. Every time I think about limited jobs I'm just reminded of how miserable the design philosophy is around jobs in this game. They refuse to take any risk whatsoever, friction is not allowed and that's just boring.

Yeh. I keep thinking about how you could learn, via Job Quests/Levelling, a core kit of... Let's say 24 actions. You'd then be able to go out, and hunt for spells from enemies, which would have the same function as those 'base kit' spells. For example, from the level 10 Job quest, you learn... Azuro's Razing Gaze, a basic Cone-shaped attack. You'd be able to go out and learn Ink Jet, or The Look, or Flamethrower, or Northerlies, or Protean Wave, or Kaltstrahl, or Aqua Breath (I'm probably missing a couple others) and they'd do the same thing: basic Cone-shaped attack. You'd even be able to go and learn those actions, BEFORE you get the 'basic' version from the Job Quest, so you can feel like you've beaten the devs by sequence-breaking

Here's an example of how a rework to LV5 Death, one of the reasons that 'BLU is too OP to be a real Job!', could work to allow BLU to be OP in older content (as it is now) and still able to participate in current content:

It's Showtime! - Trait
When in a party comprised entirely of Blue Mages (including a party of just yourself), It's Showtime!
While It's Showtime, certain actions are enhanced to incredible levels of power.

LV5 Death - 120s CD - Spell - 500MP - 6y Radius, 30y Range
Deals 1200p damage to enemy, and 50% less to all enemies near it.
It's Showtime!: Instantly kills all targets hit by the attack, if their level is a multiple of 5. Has no effect on enemies within 5 levels of your own.

With that example, you can still instant-kill everything you currently can. However, there's some improvements to its functionality. You'd be able to instantkill anything, and I mean anything, so long as you're in a party entirely made up of BLU, or are soloing (ie going into old content Unsync'd). There's no accuracy check on the insta-kill in this example, because it's looking at 'if the enemy is hit by the damage', so it's far more reliably going to trigger. Because of the 'within 5 levels' stipulation, you still can never use it to cheese something that forces a level sync like Eureka/Bozja, or Ultimates, or any current expansion endgame content. Which is the same list of excluded content as now, because BLU currently can't even enter current expansion endgame content, or Eureka, or Ultimates

Tell you what, I'll do one for White Wind too:

White Wind - 300s Recast - Spell - 3000MP - 10y Radius
Restores HP to self and allies, equal to the caster's current HP.
This action's recast timer is separate from other actions, and is not affected by stats or gear.
It's Showtime!: Recast timer reduced to 2.5s

Now you can use White Wind, in current content, and it's (sort of) balanced by having a 5min CD