Do you people even REMEMBER Blue Mage?Follow

To hold it back they may make the BLU use TP for the special attacks...wouldn't that suck.

Straggo is still my favorite. Grand Train ^^

As for the OP's actual question, I think half the reason people are getting sooo excited about it is simply due to the novelty of a new job being introduced. Most of us started with FFXI and RotZ and had all of our jobs available to us from day 1, so when something new comes out... everyone's all over it.

The cycle will probably be something like.. SE introduces new job > People get all excited > Everyone decides to play it (elitists first) > Elitists decide that they don't want to enjoy the job and quickly switch off, priding themselves in being the first to shun it > The new job's numbers will decline > Everyone will talk of how they knew it would be "gimp" like that in the first place > The job will be reduced to a "secondary" in peoples' eyes, like DRG or lower level SMNs > Balance is restored.

Bards asking the party to reposition = Reasonable, and a desire to make the party fuction better.

A BLM asking the party to move to a cramped camp in the zone's armpit just so he can use his shiny new -aga = unreasonable.

Same will go for BLU. Unless it's absolutely necessary that they use that -aga magic, they'll just have to work around it.

Strago was fun...Go Grandtrain!
Also if we get lv based spells it would be nice to test functions of bst jug pets in ballista than having to find some eyes to oblige

Edited, Mon Sep 19 02:53:00 2005 by anonone

well, maybe they'll get spear-type weapons (well they're forks) like quina quen? o.o; it does lotsa damage if you can stand to play .. it!

i never seen a weapon in the mini film of it playing, so wouldnt it be cool if it has no weapon what so ever so just like a monk and subs /Ninja for shadows lol bum/nin "weird i know"

I'm not seeing the difference there. The Enemy Skill materia WAS essentially "Blue Magic". Who cares whether the character or the materia learns the magic? It still produces the same effect overall; it lets your character use enemy skills after the character got struck by them.



The bolded ones are the ones BLU will likely get.

Again, I highly doubt they are going to let us have any instant death moves ever in this game, for any job.



LOL. That's what, 3 games? But granted, FFX indeed had a poor set of Blue Magic, it was more a novelty than anything else (probably because they couldn't think of anything else to give poor Kimahri, bless his heart).

The reason why many people aren't seeing the usefulness of the class is because you'd usually overpower through the game in some other way. Who cares about Blue Magics in FFX when you can just Quick Hit everything to death for 99,999 a pop? Or in FF6 where you could just Genji Glove+Offering and shred pretty much any foe with one turn of eight 9,999 damage attacks, or just Vanish+Doom everything that even remotely presented a challenge?

In case anyone's unaware, you cannot be overpowered or cheap like that in this game. Even at max level, 1000 Needles is still enough to take a lot of us down in one hit or at least to near-fatal in a solo situation. We cannot hit foes for 999 a hit, let alone 9,999 or 99,999. Blue Magic could definitely be put to use in situations where you could not simply powerlevel or use a cheap trick to win, in battles that had to be fought strategically.

It's hard to say how exactly Blue Magic will be made to work in FFXI, but anyone who says it was worthless in all the previous games was simply missing out on a potentially fun aspect of battling. People have already noted many notables of note with regard to Blue Magics in previous FFs, and I do not feel it necessary to go over any of them again.

As a side note, most of the "Bard" characters I remember from previous FFs also sucked. Chew on that one for a while the next time you find yourself inviting one.

Edited, Mon Sep 19 06:44:04 2005 by Fynlar

I partly agree with you - the "buzz" around new jobs make people getting ready to accept almost anything "new" ^^

A bit of FF history....

* FFIII : the "SCHOLAR" job added...My guess is it was the actual ancestor of "Blue"...Not really a mage, but definitely not melee, he was fighting with crappy books (scholars have to "learn", don't they ?!?), but he had the very useful ability to "check" ennemies stats/weaknesses.

* FFIV : Cid was an "Engineer" (kind of scholars in his activity ^^), who also had the "Check" ability.

* FFV : "Blue Mage" job added, as a "Melee/Mage-type" (along with RED & ENCHANTER, BLUE was able to equip armors + swords). His main abilities were to "SCAN" ennemys (also named "Peep", "Libra", "Check"...) to see their stats/weaknesses and the "Learning" ability to learn special magic from the ennemies. The list of spells hasn't changed that much afterwards, it was quite exhaustive, but BLUE SPELLS COSTED A LOT OF MPs (even more than Sumnr) // which made this job quite difficult to play.
However the spells learned were very powerful and very diverse (Blue was the "real-trade-of-all-jacks" ^^).

* FF ... : since its first FFV installment, the Blue job hasn't changed much (Strago, Ennemy Skill materia, Quistis, Quina...). However I agree that its latest forms (Quistis, Quina !!) were really crappy.
Interesting note on Quistis (FFVIII) : her "ennemy skills" were ONLY available as "Limit Break"...
=> Imagine in FFXI if your BLUE magic IS ONLY a 2-HOURS ability ??!?! (yes, that would make it very crappy ^^).

However, ONE THING remains true : FFXI is no common "FF" in the serie, and most of the FFXI features are not the same than in the regular "offline" games. So we'll wait & see, but SE may enhance & adapt former job with new improvement !!

^^
Alc.

<3 BLU, always have. Just beign able to use spells on a mob that used them on me to either kill me or help themselves makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Others have said the same so no reason to really repeat, but Enemy Skills were always useful depending on how you used them.


Other Skills to learn:

Has anyone even considered the Fomor attacks?! COME ON!
--TP RESET
--That flippin damn Defense Down (Aegis Schism?) that takes like 270 defense away...I cried when this happened to me. Went from gettin hit for 1-10, to like 70-100...i cried like a little girl.

What about some of the other abilities? Like Pinecone Drop or whatever from Treants...and their Leafstorm?
What about Funguar Paralyze, poison moves?
Saplings with their sprout smack and sprout spin?
Birds with their Helldrives
Flies with Cursed Sphere
Lizards with Fireball
omfg and and....Sea Monks.... Maelstrom!!!! /faints.

I love the first pioneer of Blue Magic..... Rydia!


i know I know, your all gunna say she was a summoner. But, she really was whm/blm/smn/blu!

When you first get her she knows some white magic, some black magic and one summon (chocobo).

Later she forgets white magic to focus on black magic and summoning.

And then if your really dedicated you could have her learn extra summons from monsters. I'm not talking the ones everyone had (Asura, Bahamut, Leviathan, Sylph). I'm talking Imp, Bomb, Coctrice, and I think arachne? I may be missing one there, but those summons spells you learned by killing said monster over and over and over and over....

I like to think of it as Rydia being the first blue, and she just didn't know much about it yet so she would eventually learn these spells but she made them into summons instead of just doing it herself. ^^

Ok ok, she's not a blu, but the way you get those last summons to me is where the idea for blue came from.

The sad fact is that a great number of these abilities are already with the smn job. To me blu really sounds like an adjunct to replace smn.

Slowga -> leviathan spell
Acc down -> Fenrir ability
Eva down -> Fenrir ability
AOE dispel -> Fenrir ability
AOE cure -> Whispering wind, spring water, healing ruby II
Eva up -> brd/Fenrir ability
Acc up -> brd/Fenrir ability
Def up -> brd/Pld rampart ability
Attack up -> brd/ifrit/warcry
AGI up from dhamel -> Fenrir ability


All I can really see as the good "blu pacts" that would make it party worthy are the:

attack down
defence down
bad breath
1000 needles (lol you know this is going to get gimped somehow if it's in the game or you'd just end up needing a lot of raise III's as a blu)
Petrify (this I can definately see as very useful but probably going to end up along the lines of how stun works more or less and we all know how often smn get to stun with ramuh or how often a great deal of blm's cast it in exp party, yes some great blm's do, but sad fact is a lot of blm's and drk's don't even seem to remember they have this ability)

So once again, things will be pretty much where they were for the most part. Blu will ultimately be a one to 3 trick poney like all the other jobs but I still think it'd be a fun job to play with anyway.

It'd be really tough for the newbie player to pick up this job unfortunately since most mob specials are AOE's and alot of new players don't quite grasp just how much range AOE's tend to have. If they do limit blu much like smn, since their ability lists do run simularly, with some sort of gimped 1 min ability timer, it'll probably kill the job too.

I'm hoping for something refreshing and just fun to mess around with personally. I don't really care if it's going to be underpowered or weak as long as it's interesting to those of us who's got to 75 a few times already and just want new something to play with.

Personally I still want the pirate job. Heck I'll make an all Pirate LS if they ever do that. I have no idea what job abilities the pir job would have but who cares XD it's just for fun anyway.

Keep in mind this job is being released with new zones, mobs, and consequently mob attacks.

I think it is highly likely that the moves that come to define the Blue Mage job may not even be in the game yet, but are rather introduced through the expansion with BLU in mind.


Here's where you can pick out the chronic Allakhazam forum whiners (not just these two, they were chosen at random). The job hasn't even been released yet and you are complaining about it, based 100% on assumptions.

I think the best rebuttal to the OP by far was:

So before you say FFXI Blue Mage will = Strago or Quistis, take a look back at a certain worthless "spoony bard" and compare him to perhaps the most useful job in FFXI.