#dashingthoughts

I think people genuinely think "cest" is just, like, a quirky little suffix denoting shipping that's not inherently derived from the word we all know it's hinting at. Even if they clearly have tension between the two going on with nothing familial, I can understand why they might not want people posting about it

My take's always been "shipping two characters who are technically the same person is fine except the second either considers the other as family, then it's weird and it not being "possible in real life" is clearly not the issue being discussed (looking at you adventure time)

acknowledging the context this is under, I do think it's important to note timecroi *is not* that

but like many things it's really a matter of "I am begging you to popularize a better name for this than something used from the fandom days where people really didn't care about being against -cest shipping" and "yes, optics and context do kind of matter when talking about shipping, even if that sounds dumb"

neither of which are going to really happen because the term selfcest is pretty self explanatory and shorter to type than "mirrorshipping", and you cannot convince the internet to change its mind about anything, especially if it involves acknowledging how others might feel about something

The mechanics and "friction" people talk about are cool and all, but trying to keep up with quests at all, let alone any of the main stories of the game just felt more effort than it should, and dancing around the menus and item storages whole novel, didn't help towards that

Like, I get the old MMO style of "collect item drop from monster and turn it in to NPC", but actually keeping track of the quest with no way to keep it on screen or set teminders once you jave the item, or remind you where to go unless you go SUPER old school and write it down or go back and forth between menus is like

Sure, that's completely doable, but when I'm still just barely starting the game, it's not a strong motivator to get to the wild moments I see people talk about, when my character is still in the main city, trying to find the storyline npc, while a bunch of side quests are just chilling in my log because there's no convenient way to track their progress

I don't think the end result of the backlash should've been a dissolvement of the diamond cutters and then her basically never showing uo again, but it feels reductive to boil down how poorly Lanolin's decision making canonically was to "well, she was tricked by the trickster" and "well, she just met guy who had no references or backing and guy who people know and can back up their results", especially when there was a whole comic series about her saying that she would try to be more open and then that immediately not mattering, and some of her mistakes having nothing to do with Duo/Mimic's lies

Having a Frank Grimes to a Homer only works if the Homer is actually truly incompetent, and while we've all seen the ABT comic, that dynamic is simply not in the comics or at least not portrayed convincingly.

I'm also curious if they're going to "fix" the problem that arises with a lot of stuff like this, where technically your kit is extremely flexible and you have a lot of fun options and interactions, but the payoff for doing them is way worse than just working towards the "optimal strats" and two minute openers

Blue Mage has always had the issue that you get a bunch of spells that end up being

200 potency with no real effect outside of being different elements

<200 potency with niche debuffs or combos with other moves, that end up not working on bosses, anyway

>200 potency boss spells that get added to the main kit because it does big damage within the moon flute burst window

And all dungeon runs are just rotating instant kill spells, which is fun the first couple of times, but aside from everybody having different spell acquiring progression, outside of masked carnival there's rarely any incentive to experiment, especially once you get to raiding

We know for beastmaster, the chimera is able to freeze enemies and then has an extra skill that damages frozen enemies more, which is very reminiscent to a lot of blue mage skills, which can be interesting for dungeons but once again useless for bosses, and it also depends on how they plan to have players interact with the planned solo content

am I bummed that we couldn't get a blue mage update in the expansion that introduced the land they came from, even if it would only be up to level 90 anyway, so it literally could not go to tural, because it's always content made for older expansions?

yeah a little

but the sooner they lay the foundation for beastmaster, the sooner they can expand on it, and again, the guy designing it is cracked at fight design, it's going o be fun

maybe to make up for it they up the blue mage levels by 20 and then they can have a questline into tural

regardless, is it funny to doompost about blue mage, however?

going in a dungeon solo with a pack of monsters is cool, but does that mean you just don't party up ever?

because blue mage outside of the carnival, slowly became the "quirky raiding" job and always sort of leaned towards group play (for better or for worse you partied up to learn spells from raids and dungeons unless you were overleveled, and even then the solo skills boosting your stats a lot weren't in until a while later), so I can understand if they move away from that despite both of them being "limited jobs"

Whether blue mage and beastmaster are *expected* to interact with each other is based on whether:

there are skill interactions (beastmaster lowering elemental resistances/blue mage having elemental attacks or beastmaster applying debuffs/blue mage taking advantage of debuffs)

there are achievements that reward beastmaster for doing content with blue mage (will clearing a fight with full limited jobs matter or just one, and even if it does, would you not just bring a full part of one or the other)

my current theory is dissonance and pedestals:

oh this thought was longer than I intended