Blue Mage is a mixed bag.
It is fun trying to optimize your performance in Masked Carnivale. It is fun to twink out gear sets with easily attainable (when not screwed by RNG) raid gear. It is fun to run around town breathing fire, shooting eye beams, table flipping the ground, etc.
It’s not fun when the only thing you’re doing is one/two/three shotting things with 1K Needles to level to 50. It’s not fun when you’ve run the same dungeon thirty times for a single spell. It’s not fun when you’ve run the same primal a hundred times for a single spell.
However, this didn’t need to be a Limited Job. SE chose to implement it as is to keep the “feeling” of Blue Mage alive and I disagree with their stance 100%. It could have been kept as is and been made a full level 70 job. I’m going to run down a list of arguments a lot of the apologists are clinging to.
“Blue Mage is overpowered because of Missile/Tail Screw/Doom”.
There are already plenty of bosses, both in dungeons and trials and raids that straight up resist these. It would not be hard for SE to say that all monsters in current dungeons resist these spells straight up, barring them from being used to quicken your way through current dungeons.
“Blue Mage is overpowered because of Self-Destruct/Final Sting.”
These spells could have their potency reduced in dungeons, leaving them usable for Masked Carnivale as many of the times require the usage of these spells. Or, they could be given long cooldowns which reduces the ability to spam Self-Destruct for mass pulls. Three minutes would be more that sufficient.
“Someone could go into a dungeon without any spells and drag down the group.”
Vote kicking is already an option if someone goes into a dungeon and performs extremely poorly, is toxic, came in with broken gear, etc. Or, SE already has ilvl requirements for dungeons/trials. Placing a requirement to have X number of spells set to enter a dungeon/trial/raid is not out of the question.
“Blue Mage is too overpowered and would require too much balancing.”
Blue Mage on its own isn’t overpowered. They might have some spells that are just straight up gamebreaking (like casting Doom on Fate bosses), but this falls back to my first point. Blu is not very overpowered without all its bells and whistles. First of all, it requires Off-Guard to be up 100% of the time to increase damage dealt by 50%, a thirty second debuff. This is a lame attempt at a “rotation”. Peculiar Light inflicts a 30% magic debuff for ten seconds, and Moon Flute increases damage dealt by 50% but at the cost of making you incapable of doing anything for a full 15 seconds which is basically Machinists’ Overheat mechanic but longer. Then there’s Bristle which has a short cast time and makes the next attack deal 50% more damage as well, but it’s not optimal to be casting this every other cast. Very few of their standard spells have potency over 130, and the ones that do have oddball requirements like the target being Petrified or in Deep Freeze status effect which may or may not work if we’re balancing Blu for current PVE. Their Primals spells which do have potencies over 130 are on actual cooldowns (30, 60, and 90 seconds) and aren’t effected by Bristle because they’re abilities and not spells. Without all these things lined up perfectly, Blu damage isn’t that great when compared to the rest of the jobs synced down to level 50.
And the biggest thing going against this argument point is the fact that it’s the dev teams’ job to make these classes and figure out how to balance them. They are paid to design the game. With everything that they have made for this game, with the dozen+ jobs already under their belt, you really think they couldn’t figure out how to make this job work in-game for current content? They were so worried about making the class “feel like Blue Mage” that it feels like they didn’t even bother to try making it work for current content. Between that and not letting Blu queue into content through duty finder (set spell requirements), not letting them run dungeons with Squadrons (why?), not letting them progress ARR 2.1~2.5 MSQ (why?), not letting them run PotD (again, set spell requirements), and the other numerous limitations that they put on this job its like they gave us as little as they possibly could.
“Blue Mage is meant to be a solo job.”
Clearly it’s not because if you want a half a dozen spells, if not more, you’re going to have to party up with people. Primal spells are a pain in the ass. 5% learn rate according to data-miners. Then there’s the dungeon spells that require at least one other person to run with you. And yeah, you can party up with other Blue Mages but odds are you’re probably going to be asking a level 70 friend to speed run you through dungeons and trials. The Masked Carnivale is good content, but it’s way too short and as soon as you know the trick to clearing the stage that’s pretty much it. If this was truly meant to be a Solo-only job, the spells would have been much more overpowered, stat weights would be higher to compensate for being alone, and the Dev Team could have made more unique content. FFXI had “Mini-Trial by (Element)” fights for Summoners to obtain summons alone much earlier than the standard fights. These fights were challenging due to the low level but they were available. Where are our Mini-Trials, our solo Primal fights for Blu with some form of actual challenge and a higher learn rate for spells rather than getting x number of level 70 players and running fights in 30~90 seconds over and over and over? Leviathan Hard Mode can be cleared in 18 seconds, but it can still take two hours or more to learn the spell. I’d rather have spent two hours learning a tricky solo fight, trying to figure out if I had the spells and skill to do it than to queue ceaselessly into a braindead fight, being carried by the four people whose turn it was to carry the four Blus until they finally learn the spell by grace of RNG then start all over for themselves after swapping if the four people who just learned were kind enough to stay instead of bailing immediately. This is not a solo job.
The job was for the most part fun for the course of a week but it’s also bringing out some pretty toxic people into the Party Finder. There’s been good groups, there’s been bad groups, then there’s been the entitled pricks who quite frankly can go jump off a cliff. It’s just a shame that aside from walking around town and those oddball “let’s try running X with only Blu” it’s just not going to be touched until the devs decide to bump the level cap up to 60. I also know that I’m never running an ARR Primal again by choice. The mini-game meant to make players play old content more has done nothing but turn me off of it.
Until it’s relevant again, I guess it’s good for screenshots.
