This past week, Final Fantasy XIV released the Blue Mage, FFXIV’s first ever limited job, and the first mid-expansion job to be released since Rogue/Ninja.
Although there likely is still some frustration among the player base about it being capped at 50, the initial reaction at the moment appears to be generally positive towards the Blue Mage.
It may not be exactly what people wanted, but it’s still enjoyable and something different to do.
As we know though, if you leave a loop hole open, there are definitely gamers that will find them, and exploit it. As a result, it didn’t take long for a big Blue Mage leveling exploit to get discovered by the community and passed around.
Here’s how the exploit works according to the FFXIV development team themselves:
“If a player kills an enemy in one hit and immediately changes jobs while in the open world, the job that was switched to gains the EXP.” via the Lodestone.
So in other words, players have been attacking a higher level enemy on their main job, quickly switching to Blue Mage, then getting the EXP for their higher level job towards the Blue Mage.
Normally, this would be something that Square Enix, and specifically the FFXIV development team would try and fix right away since it flies right in the face of the way they originally envisioned the job being leveled up.
However, the fix for this is apparently substantial, as it requires work to be done on “the core structure of the EXP-gaining method.”
A hotfix won’t do the trick, and as of right now the Blue Mage leveling exploit is slated to be included with the release of patch 5.0, better known as Shadowbringers launch day.
Make no mistake about it, the team does consider this to be an exploit, but because they can’t fix it promptly, and it was a previously known issue that they admittedly pushed back fixing since prior to Blue Mage it wasn’t a big problem, they aren’t punishing players for doing it.
We’ll include exactly how the are choosing to define this problem below so you can decide for yourself how you want to approach this issue which will probably be brought up in your Free Company by someone at some point if it hasn’t already.
Personally, I don’t see the rush in leveling up Blue Mage since it’s going to be level 50 for a while and sticking to an area one-shotting trash enemies over and over with no thrill to reap the extra EXP seems to defeat a lot of the “fun” of leveling up with BLU, but we don’t pay your sub, so it’s up to you.
Here’s what the team had to say on the issue with Blue Mage:
“We are making the investigation and addressing of this issue a high priority, but as explained above, it involves changing the core structure of the EXP gaining method, making it difficult to address with a mere hotfix. Currently, we are aiming to address this issue with Patch 5.0.
As a result, using this method for leveling would normally be classified as an exploit, but since we were not able to address this promptly despite it being a known issue, we will not be issuing any penalties for players who are leveling in this way. However, since this was not the intended design, we do not recommend engaging in this behavior, and encourage players to level in the intended fashion.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and we thank you for your patience and understanding.”
