New job (Scholar) confirmed via data mining?

[Ouch!]

That could work with the concept of scholar as it was in FFXI, what with their line of helix spells (massive elemental DoT) as well as other spells like HP, MP, TP regain that they got in FFXI as well.

And yes, massive stat adjustments makes sense as an alternative to restricting abilities.

[Del Murder]

Based on the way the game is structured, there probably won't be a Blue Mage huh?

[Ouch!]

What makes you say that? Yoshi-P has expressed that he wants to bring in as many classic Final Fantasy jobs as possible--not just those from FFXI, but also ones from earlier Final Fantasy games.

Frankly, the class/job system makes it far more likely that we see more jobs than not. They've already discussed second jobs for each class. At the launch of ARR, there will be eight classes, which means when they roll out second jobs, we'll have sixteen jobs. Each new class they bring in from there will introduce two more jobs. The addition of blue mage seems more of an "if" than "when" to me, but maybe I'm optimistic.

[Del Murder]

Well I say that because it seems that the jobs are linked to classes in some way and the abilities are shared among several jobs. Blue Mage is unique in that all of its spells are learned through enemies they don't really fit with any other job or class. Here's to hoping though!

[Ouch!]

The thing is we haven't seen how much they plan on changing that structure for ARR yet. Keep in mind as well that this game includes weapon skills as learned abilities (so the base class could provide the sword-skills you expect of a blue mage while the job provides the monster spells). In addition to the way that BoB and I had discussed as having a base class that branched into beastmaster and blue mage, it's possible that they could introduce a fencer class and from that you'd get both red mage and blue mage.

Because all the classes are new to the series, it could work in any number of ways that you would see blue mage.