All right. So are we done with people being mad about Blue Mage in Final Fantasy XIV yet? No, of course not; that was a silly hope and it’s silly for asking. The same people are going to be angry about that basically forever, and no amount of explaining the situation over and over using increasingly smaller words is going to help it. But that’s not what we’re here for today, and so if you fall into that “still angry about it” crowd, you’re going to be disappointed as we’re not talking about that today.
No, today I want to talk about how Blue Mage might have kind of thrown a wrench into future plans for limited jobs. It can be assumed that this was never intended to be the only limited job because it seems a little odd to make an entire category of jobs that has literally one entry. But Blue Mage is unusual insofar as it works in a way that will be difficult to replicate for other jobs… and it might be the best possible job for a limited concept as it currently stands.
Let’s start by examining Blue Mage and its ever-growing power. Unlike abilities for other jobs, every single ability that Blue Mage learns is officially learned at Level 1 because these abilities are not learned via leveling. This means that even in synced duties, Blue Mage has a full set of abilities available to it despite the lower level. Combine that with several powerful abilities, and Blue Mages can easily rip things to shreds in alarming amounts of time.
Of course, Blue Mage also has the advantage that this is how it has always worked. Blue Mages learn spells by seeing enemies use them, and once learned they can be used indefinitely. And even when it was first announced, there were other potential jobs discussed, like Beastmaster and Puppetmaster – jobs that would be too difficult to make work within the context of a traditional FFXIV role but could definitely work when given what amounts to their own structure and content.
But let’s re-examine that slightly for a moment. The thing about Beastmaster and Puppetmaster is that they do not learn abilities like that. Beastmasters learn abilities based on what animals they have to control, and Puppetmasters have an ability set relying entirely on their automatons. And for various reasons, these do not map as smoothly as Blue Mage has on to its particular template of abilities.
In the case of the former, consider Tam-Tara Deepcroft specifically. Based on the usual template, Beastmasters would either be using the handful of bestial enemies in that particular dungeon or they would be summoning pets that were outside of that dungeon… and neither one maps precisely to the sort of direct improvement you see in Blue Mage. A level 50 Blue Mage has access to a limited number of things to learn spells, while a level 70 Blue Mage has access to far more enemies for learning abilities, and those later spells are powerful and versatile in ways that make the more experienced mage more deadly in content.
But a Beastmaster just learning new and more powerful spells by summoning more powerful pets… is basically just Blue Mage again. And that’s generally something that FFXIV has avoided. There’s no reason to make Beastmaster if it’s just going to play the same way Blue Mage did with very slight variation in aesthetics or learning mechanism.
What about Puppetmaster? Well… the thing about Puppetmaster is that it’s all about how you build your automaton, right? It’s hard to create a system wherein you can fairly craft parts for the automaton without things becoming overpowered. It’d have to be based on your own personal ability rather than being sold… but how would you gate that to fighting enemies? Would you just farm high-level materials to make better items? Would you have to fight enemies to earn those items? Wait, isn’t that just Blue Mage again with more steps?
Now, I’m not saying that these problems are impossible to solve. But they are complicated problems, and they’re exacerbated by the fact that Blue Mage is, in many ways, the perfect job for the limited job format. Blue Mages are always perfect hybrids between multiple roles, and this is just as true in FFXIV; you can tank, deal damage, and heal with the same basic skillset, depending on how you load yourself out. All of the components are there. Moreover, leveling works unidirectionally; leveling up gives you access to higher dungeons and stronger enemies, who may have otherwise unavailable skills, but that can be set up so you don’t lose them when synced down.
Heck, both of the aforementioned pet jobs raise the question of how new abilities would even work when you take into account that new abilities are solely the province of your pets rather than you. If you learn new abilities just by leveling, then you remove that sense of power, and there’s no compelling reason to avoid making Puppetmaster a pet-based tank that just syncs up and down normally like any other job. You have to make limited jobs feel satisfyingly overpowered, and that’s a tricky project to manage.
If you’ve never felt overpowered on Blue Mage, go turn on Basic Instinct and Mighty Guard solo in Tam-Tara and Ultravibrate your way through every trash pack.
Now, I mentioned right at the start that I think more limited jobs are in the works on some level behind the scenes. I assume this mostly because, as mentioned, this is not a concept that would have been put into practice at all if the developers had no intention of expanding it. But I also wouldn’t be surprised if the challenges inherent in this particular project are why we haven’t heard anything more about limited jobs subsequently. It’s not that the developers have abandoned the idea; it’s that the idea is tricky to make work properly.
Some people probably don’t care too much about this. Some people don’t find Blue Mage particularly compelling. (The people who are just whining about it not being what they wanted are not relevant in this particular discussion.) Personally, though, I like the idea of trying to put a different gameplay skin on the game and giving people a different arena to compete in, from the challenges of the Masked Carnivale to the different gameplay feel of Blue Mage as a whole. I’m curious to see how else it would work. But I think it’s probably a lot harder than making Blue Mage work in the first place.
I’ll probably like Beastmaster more than I did in other games, though. Or maybe not. That might be an open question.
Feedback, as always, is welcome down in the comments below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. I will also note that “feedback” does not rhyme with “arguing points that have already been refuted.” Next week, as we’re still a bit out from more patch information (as far as we know right now), I want to talk a little bit about one of the major elements of Endwalker’s ending and speculate a bit as to why it worked out that way. It concerns an organization, you see.
The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizing Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.
