General: It's a Blue World

Of the three new jobs in the expansion, Corsair, Puppetmaster and Blue Mage, Blue Mage is the one I was most interested in playing around with sooner rather than later. I do want to level Puppetmaster at some point (perhaps when Wamoura Cocoons are a bit cheaper), and though Corsair doesn't yet hold any appeal for me, that may change. I am however, very interested in seeing how BLU works. Back when I was obsessively playing Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, one of my challenges was to get my Blue Mage character to learn all the spells he was able to, and though I didn't really use that job much in my normal play, it was a lot of fun. I'd really like to see how the FFXI BLU works. It could actually prove to be a very useful subjob for my PLD when we're not exp'ing, and WAR/BLU might even become an accepted tank. Time will tell. I think at the lower levels, BLU/WAR will be a decent tank, but they can't wear the best tanking armor, which will probably limit their effectiveness.

To unlock the Blue Mage job, you need to complete the quest An Empty Vessel, started with Waoud in Aht Urhgan Whitegate. He appears to be a fortune teller, and asks you a series of questions. Depending on how you answer, he'll either take 1000 gil and tell you that you should go harvesting or fishing, or he'll ask you to bring him an item from the "Middle Lands". Kiki got lucky and got the quest her first time through. It took Grymalkyn 4 or 5 tries, and since you can only try once every game day, it was a slow process.

Waoud asked Kiki for a Siren's Tear, and asked Grymalkyn for Sun Sand, so they both picked up the item they needed while running around doing other things. Elboron later was also asked for Sun Sand. When we brought our items back to Waoud, he said it wasn't really for him, but asked us to take it to someone else in Bhaflau Thickets. We made our way through the Thickes and into the Aydeewa Subterrane, where we found a fountain and met with one of the Immortals. We had apparently passed a test of some sort, and were transported back to Whitegate. We had obtained the Mark of Zahak, and could now become Blue Mages.

Grym and Kiki headed to San d'Oria, and ventured into East Ronfaure as BLU1/MNK1 and BLU1/WHM1, wearing little more than their Federation Aketons. Our goal was to learn Foot Kick from the rabbits and Sandspin from the worms. We would engage a rabbit or worm, bring it down to a sliver of HP with our bare fists, then turn our back on it and let it pummel us to build its TP and use a special move. More often than not, the bunnies and worms would use their TP on moves we cannot learn, but eventually Kiki learned Foot Kick. This helped speed the process, since the mobs get 10% TP from us using abilities on them, so Kiki would Foot Kick the mob as much as she could. We managed to get to level 2 and we learned both Foot Kick and Sandspin.

Later, we ventured out into East Sarutabaruta, both of us as BLU2/WHM1. Here we were targetting bees and mandragoras for Pollen and Wild Oats. It looks pretty funny to see a Mithra and Tarutaru, bare fists up, ready to hit, standing with their backs to an angry bee or mandragora, spamming it with Foot Kick, then standing there getting hit and cureing themselves (or later, using Pollen) to heal themselves waiting for the mob to use its special move. It was especially funny when one of the Tiny Mandragoras kept using Photosynthesis, and its Regen recovered HP faster than we could knock it off with our bare fists, since we'd run out of MP and couldn't use our Blue Mage. We ended up having one of us disengage and /heal while the other tried to keep the mandy occupied. I remembered I had melon juice as well, so drank one of those. We finally managed to kill that Mandragora after about 15 minutes, but didn't learn anything from it. We did however attract the attention of a low level SMN, who probably couldn't figure out what the hell we were doing. He even followed us to watch us fight our next mob. We both got to learn Pollen and Wild Oats before we hit level 4, but continued to kill things to get our level.

Our next time out as BLU, we decided to head to Bastok to try to learn Sprout Smack. This time we picked up a couple of bronze swords from the weapon shop, as it was getting riskier to rely on our bare hands to kill the mobs. Getting Sprout Smack took us over two hours (some of that travel time getting back from our home point in Whitegate after getting aggro'd by a Quadav when we were a bit low on hp and mp), but we finally both got it. The saplings were really reluctant to use that move, and seemed to greatly prefer Slumber Powder and Sprout Spin, which didn't do us much good. Since Kiki's WHM is only level 1, I went as BLU/BLM, for the extra MP boost. Kiki learned Sprout Smack relatively early in our attempts, but we'd pretty much resigned ourselves to Grym not getting it until later, since it was time to head back to our moghouses for the night. We'd decided to fight the saplings we'd see on our way back to Port Bastok, and one of them used Sprout Smack. Grym used her BLU two hour (Azure Lore) before we finished the sapling off, and I don't know if that made a difference or not, but she learned Sprout Smack!

We're pretty close to level 6, and will head back to the San d'Oria area next to try to learn Power Attack from the beetles, Queasyshroom from the funguars, and Metallic Body from the crabs.

One of the really interesting things about Blue Mage is that you do not have access to all of your spells. You actually have to pick and choose, and have a limited number of Blue Magic spell slots and Blue Magic points (these both increase as you level). Each spell takes up a certain number of Blue Magic points. This is SE's way of keeping BLU from being able to do everything at all times, and I like the concept so far. Setting certain spells together also gives you job traits, such as a Killer trait (Kiki has Beast Killer with both Wild Oats and Sprout Smack set - both are plantoid abilities and beasts are weak to plants), or Auto Regen, and so on. The spells also bestow other attributes just from having them set, such as +1 VIT from setting Sandspin. One thing somewhat annoying about this is that when you change your job to BLU, it doesn't reset your spells the way you had them when you were last BLU, so you have to set them all. This sort of customization is a very interesting change from the other jobs, and I'm looking forward to playing around with the combinations as we continue through the levels. Just after changing the spell list, you have to wait 1 minute to be able to access any of your Blue Magic, so it's not too convenient to switch things on the fly in an emergency, but it would be very handy in an exp party to be able to modify what you can do as you fight different mob types, or get replacements and need to fill a slightly different role.