So where does Blue Magic fall in this game?

[Khaos]

Blue magic always seem to be completely freaking worthless or completely freaking busted. Blue mage in FFV was just HILARIOUSLY broken in a good way.

Where does it fall in this game? Should I bother using a slot for the learning pin and backtracking a ton? I really doubt I'll ever 100% this game, so I don't want to do it just for the master the scholar achievement.

[Chii]

Situationally OP, solid most of the time. Provided you can find all the spells, it has access to some of the strongest tools in the game.

[Snapp]

my main healer is a scholar/warlock. I ran them as cleric early, warlock mid, and then switched to scholar for the mana benefits. I just had the learners pin on them the whole time. They're situational but their job perk of "mana costs reduced by 20%" is insane by itself.

[River Running Games]

I tried to make it so that most of the "core" scholar spells show up a few times throughout the game, so if you would rather not, you can avoid backtracking and should eventually run into the magic again.

[Shylaar]

It's pretty good here, though mostly for utility, since there are only a few directly damaging spells in its repertoire. Or at least, only a few that I've found, since I still have about 7 spells missing and haven't found any new spells in many hours at this point.

[JarJarThinks]

From what I've seen it's very much a "Jack of All Trades" skill set, I currently am missing 6 but I know where one is, notable skills include:

Regenerate: Single Target White Wind, decent if you can threat manage.

Sun Bath: Cheap AoE Healing, not quite as strong as the Cleric's (60 + 1.2x Spirit vs 150 + 2x Spirit), but it's half the mp and serves well in the Jack of All Trades role.

Build Life: 25% HP Revive, good to have access to.

Aero / Whirlwind : Bread and butter Scholar magic, 80% accurate, but higher output per mp than the Wizard's selection.

Lucky Dice: Luck/Variance build perhaps? Scales directly off Luck, and has 100% base Variance, good dmg, if there's equipment that increases Variance for magic, then this is easily the bread and butter single target of that build.

Sleep Aura: AoE 2 turn sleep, very good substitute if you don't have a rapier/dagger user to use Trickery with for Sleep Bombs or otherwise don't want to only have Steal and Sleep bombs taking up the sub-class.

Of course, there's some non-obvious stuff you can do with Scholar, like a Mage Tank since there's a Mind-scaling Taunt in the pool.