Toggle Background Color
Hiya, folks! Welcome to the first bonus update provided by me, Yapping Eevee. This one is not actually about a crafter or gatherer, as there is one other job that would take DN a very significant time investment to show off: Blue Mage.
You see, Blue Mage is the first (and currently only) 'Limited Job' on FFXIV. This means that it cannot be used to queue up for roulettes, and indeed requires a pre-formed group or undersized party to do any dungeon content at all. So when it's difficult to use for such a major part of the gameplay, why is BLU here?
Well, Blue Mage was initially billed as a 'solo' levelling experience. It gets a large boost to experience earned from killing regular overworld mobs, and you are meant to grind your way to 50/60/70 off of those. (The boost doesn't even apply to FATE enemies!) Presumably this was meant to include you experimenting with different foes to try and find new blue magic spells to learn... but the initial batch were all datamined before the job was even released, with similar results for the later batches. 
That's just the kind of people you get in the videogaming community.
The good news is that BLU does have a special game mode all to itself, which is actually pretty neat. The bad news is that you need to get to 50 before you can access it. But let's not get ahead of ourselves...
Blue Mage is unlocked via a quest in the Limsa Lominsa Aetheryte Plaza, which only appears once you have completed all the ARR 2.0 content. (So up to and including 'The Ultimate Weapon'.) It involves one of the Yellowjackets investigating a man claiming to sell soul crystals that promise immense power, but which people have reported as failing to work for them.
It turns out that the schmucks buying the crystals have simply failed to understand the instructions, but the seller, a Hyur named Martyn, is still told to pack up his business due to the dangerous nature of his offerings and some unsavoury business practices involving faked attacks by a pair of Mamool Ja. Fortunately he is instead offered a position by a passerby, performing and demonstrating his craft in a special attraction at Ul'dah's arena. Your character becomes his protege with promises of being able to perform too once properly trained, and you are thus sent off to learn some spells...
(As an amusing sidenote, the Mamool Ja are allowed into Ul'dah as well, as the anti-beastmen laws were only written up to bar the Amalj'aa from entry.)
And so you are provided with some cosmetic armour, a cane and a spellbook. It is worth noting that Blue Mage does not draw on weapon power for its combat formulas like all other jobs, so you never need to replace this cane if you like its simple look. (There are several others later on with the same stats, although a few offer materia slots.) Instead, BLU is heavily reliant on Intelligence, so keeping their gear up to date is more important than usual if not resorting to cheesy tactics. Boy does BLU have a lot of cheesy tactics though.
The spellbook itself serves as a way to receive vague hints on where new spells may be found, as well as providing lore and further details on spells you already know. It further allows you to designate which spells you have access to; you can only use 24 of them at any one time, so you will need to plan some loadouts. You can save/load up to 5 preset ones, and then tweak them as necessary. They even recently added functionality to tie hotbar set-ups to the loadouts, which is incredibly handy.
At this point, you can go ahead and start roaming around, poking at enemies to see who might teach you something... Or you could refer to a guide, and snatch up whatever you can ASAP. At 5, 10 and 20 spells learnt, you can go back to one of the Mamool Ja and receive some very useful new spells (barring the last one). More of these spell totems were also added in later patches.
Important note: as the intro quests state, to learn a new blue magic, you only need to have seen it cast (ie. don't stand in Bad Breath ya dingus) and to be part of a party that has significant aggro on that mob. I do suggest that you at least hit the mob once yourself, just to be sure.
So, how do you level up Blue Mage? Well... You can either go it alone, slowly murdering things around your own level and getting chain bonuses to have a nice leisurely grinding experience.
Or you grab your nearest high level friend, go to the highest levelled area you have access to (that doesn't exceed BLU's level cap) and smack something. If your friend then murders it for you without being in your party, you will still get the full amount of experience for it. This will let you skyrocket BLU to 50 and beyond, and will probably only take a few hours to get you to its current level cap of 70.
As a sidenote, this is a great time to get your chocobo companion out for some grinding. Their challenge log entries for 15% of a rank are a great thing to get done with BLU.
When you've hit L50 after either six million years of solo grinding or no time at all with the power of friendship, go ahead and do your L50 job quest to receive a free set of i130 left-side gear. Grab a belt and some accessories, and your BLU is good to go for L50 content.
Now, the really unusual thing about BLU is that despite being initially billed as a solo experience, a lot of their spells are locked behind dungeons and trials. So you'll want some folks to take you through a bunch of dungeons, hard and even extreme trials. (Dungeons can be pretty safely soloed with some of the newer spells under your belt, particularly Basic Instinct.)
When the job was first released, all spells had only a chance to be learned, which varied based upon the 'rank' of the spell. This meant certain spells were harder to learn than others, especially the primal ones. It took an unreasonable amount of time to get them all... 
Fortunately, SE later corrected this by making it so that if you do a duty synced and with echo switched off, you will get any spells in that duty 100% of the time – provided you are alive when the related mob dies. This means the only spells that are particularly tricky to get are the two from Garuda and Shiva, because they require doing the Extreme versions of their fights. But you can still try with the lousy unsynced learn chance if you prefer.
The other big thing at L50 is The Masked Carnivale, a special set of challenges for Blue Mages to try and overcome. These are basically puzzle fights of one-to-three stages, which are actually quite well designed. It certainly feels like the job was designed with confronting these challenges in mind; they've become a bit quicker these days because early BLU spells used to only have about half the potency they do now.
There is a video that covers all of the L50 challenges and gives suggestions for beating them, but I want to put a small disclaimer on it. The video in question is by Mr Happy on Youtube, who has a bit of a reputation for rushing out guides of poor quality and sometimes containing outright incorrect information for the sake of being 'first'. I would normally suggest that you consult MTQ instead for all your FFXIV guide video needs, but she did not make one for the carnivale, so... This video is the best you're gonna get.
There's a special title if you can finish the 25th carnivale challenge without being hit at all, while also using a spell of every element and finishing under a reasonably generous time limit. So if you feel like declaring yourself a Perfect Blue, good luck with that. And outside of covering the plot of the job quests, that's pretty much all you need to know about Blue Mage at ARR levels!
To provide a brief 1-50 plot summary as a bonus for those curious: Martyn has you do some odd jobs for extra funding, and it's discovered that the reason he wants it is to buy medicine for the Whalaqee people of the New World, who are ill because of a disease Eorzean explorers and researchers brought over with them. He ends up having to strike a deal with a former-researcher-turned-ceruleum-merchant, a Roegadyn named Whastrach.
Whastrach does provide the medicine needed, but also seizes some of the Whalaquee's ceruleum-rich lands in the process. There's some debate about whether or not he tricked the elders into signing them away... So circumstances end up dictating that you challenge Whastrach in The Masked Carnivale, where he serves as your final opponent. Once beaten, he honours the agreement... and a Whalaqee boy helps serve as his guide for finding ceruleum in the New World on unclaimed, non-sacred land.
Martyn ends up staying on with the arena after all of this to earn funding for a new project, setting up a proper Blue Mage's Guild in Eorzea.
So, what about BLU beyond 50? Well, you get access to:
- Five more Carnivale stages at 60, and one more at 70.
- Over 100 spells in total, introducing all kinds of new overpowered nonsense that BLU can get up to. Choosing just 24 at a time becomes quite a struggle.
- The 'Blue Mage Log', a checklist of dungeons, trials, alliance raids and some normal raids that you get bonuses for completing synced with a party of nothing but BLUs. (Doing 24-BLU alliance raids can be a great time!)
- A special store full of unique items, including a minion, an emote and some triple triad cards & orchestrion rolls. All purchases cost Allied Seals, which both the Carnivale and the Log provide.
- A greater selection of canes, and a fancy new job armour at L70. (Pictured above.)
- 50-60 and 60-70 story arcs, both concerning new trials and tribulations of Martyn and the Carnivale that inevitably culminate in you having to beat up someone dressed up like a character from elsewhere in the Final Fantasy series. 50 is Azulmagia from V, 60 is Siegfried from VI, and 70 is Gogo from VI.
Oh, and there's also a special mount for doing certain 'Savage' difficulty raids under Log conditions. I don't have that kind of patience, but it's a Morbol.
Next Time in Eevee's Bonus Updates: We begin our journey with Carpenter, as Beatin teaches us about wood. 