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?