Fates and Blue Mage balance

[JudgeLordJorge]

So I just managed to finish all of the Yokai minions and weapons (and now have an adorable cat couch mount and a couple of less adorable ghost mounts which are perfect for those times I want to freak my partner out by zooming in close in their face while flying in a dark rainy environment). It took a good few days of work, but I'm pretty happy with the results and it generally seemed really quick because there were so many people doing Fates. I started playing the game a few years back and at the time fates were not particularly being used, so it's nice at moments like this and the start of the Shadowbringers expansion when you see people doing fates together and the mechanic being used.

However, one of the issues that I found in the lower level areas was the use of Blue Mages. In some scenarios (mostly around 4pm) it would get to the point where a fate would spawn a small distance away and then by the time I got there it would have been taken down because a couple of Blue Mages got in and used thousand needles or missile and sniped it. In one scenario I got to a fate early and a Blue Mage appeared and used doom on the fate boss monster, which just seemed particularly naff as it stops everyone else from being able to get involved in the fate and achieve the completion rating required to get items. On the positive side, it seems to balance out above level 50 so getting the Red Mage/Samurai/Dancer/Gunbreaker gear was simpler.

Has anyone else had this experience? Is there anything in particular that could be done about the balance in these scenarios? On one hand it seems easy to say that Blue Mages should be nerfed in fates, but on the other hand some of the Blue Mage abilities are earned through repetitive participation in fates and in those scenarios it made sense to use thousand needles to speed up the process once everyone got a hit in (I guess the last part being the important part of the sentiment, but you can't really do much to ensure people are kind about when they use the abilities). I'm not really sure on the right thing to do, as scaling abilities like thousand needles seems a bit counterintuitive to the nature of the ability. One of the suggestions was to flip the effect of those abilities so it healed fate monsters, but I imagine that isn't the simplest to code in. Yeah, I dunno. What do you think?

[Aulayna]

I mean anyone can unlock BLU and play it. 1000 Needles isn't a particularly hard ability to learn either. On the flip-side a party of physical ranged DPS can AoE fates down very quickly too. It is a bit contentious that a BLU can use Tail Screw (though admittedly that ability requires some effort to learn) to insta-kill boss mob fates though, but most of them don't use those abilities out of consideration for others.

Frankly, it's about time BLU had some fun outside of the Masked Carnevale and BLU challenges. That being said the effectiveness of BLU in fates drops off pretty quickly in fates in the later HW and SB areas. In ARR, especially lower level fates, yes they are pretty strong. But it's exactly that - they are ARR fates. Outside of this event hardly anyone would be touching the ARR fates. This is just the initial zerg in an event that runs up until 5.4 releases (which is likely going to be early December so people have literal months to finish it).

There is no problem to fix, it's just people being impatient and wanting to finish everything "Day One."

Had this been something like Eureka, then I'd agree it's a problem. But for now, this is just the mad rush at the beginning of the event. It's a storm in a tea cup, and in a week or two it'll be forgotten about it.

[JudgeLordJorge]

That's fair, I think that makes sense. I think you are right with people getting inpatient to finish things on day 1 and I felt some of that when I was going through this content recently as I contributed to the swarm of people just as much as anyone else did - so in that regards for things like 1000 needles I think you are right. I think that the thing I find challenging is that consideration of others element. While most people wouldn't use tail screw some do, which is where the frustration comes in. While I am up for blue mages having fun, as most content isn't made for it, I do think that things like tail screw and doom used in that way is not great (the doom one is still getting to me, because there was just no point in using it in the scenario where I saw it being used except for individual lols, which I guess is fine but makes it more frustrating for a lot of other people in the process). After having some time to think into it I think that I agree there isn't a reason to change the balance, as long as there is some consideration being used in regards to abilities like tail screw.

But yeah, you're right, probably won't mean much in a few days and overall, at least for me, gave me a couple more stories to remember when I think about the game, which is nice.

[Jinx]

BLU was a mistake from the very start.