Things to Adjust on bst

Just thinking of when Beastmaster might get some adjustments. I know I have made several threads on different ideas, but I wanted to post them in a list.

1. Restore range for pet commands back up to 17 or 20. the change did not have the desired effect. it simply made it easier to mess up pet commands by cancelling them unexpectedly. Its ridiculous to keep track of distance to pet. Unless SE wants to encourage the use of 3rd party addons.

2. More ilvl Pets. I would love to get the 8 unique pets that cap at 114 with merits up to 119. (ie flytrap, hippogryph, leech, adamantoise, sabotender, Coeurl, Lynx, snow bunny) it has always seemed strange that Beastmaster has LOST abilities as it levels up. These pets have some wonderful abilities, but are pretty much useless at high level fights because the level gap is too large.

3. Pets should generate Enmity from self-buffing ready moves (ie zealous snort, secretion, bubble curtain, scissor guard, metallic body, etc). Really this fits the option for being able to tank on BST if a player puts serious effort in, but its not threat to how other Tank jobs operate.

4. Snarl Enmity should be modified by Pet Enmity+ gear (Heyoka set!)

5. TP Scaling for ready moves should be adjusted to go from 0 to 3000 instead of 1000 to 3000. Currently they start at 1000 no matter what actual tp is.

6. Charm and Tame should be allowed even if pet is present. If the game won't support charming all the creatures which should be charmable, (ie almost everything), then let us use them while we have a jug pet. Let us bind w/ charm even if there is a pet out. let us use it for enmity if nothing else. Let us tame mobs even if we have a pet already. It becomes a crowd control move. At least they would not be completely useless as they are now.

7. New pets would also fantastic. The recent update to puppetmaster made me hopeful ;.;

8. Reduce recast on Feral Howl. 90s would be good in my opinion. OR keep the recast and such as it is, and make it AoE :D this would be a fun toy.

9. More Killer Effects + gear, 3% Killer effects + earring plz. increase killer effect+ on Totemic trousers +3

10. Shields with pet enhancing stats.

11. Put a low end limit on Ready charge recast (10 seconds is good). And add the trait to other pieces of gear. This opens a broader range of play styles and support job selection.

12. A corsair Trust that will give Beast Roll or Puppet roll, or Companion roll or Drachen roll

Just sorting the list of fixes and suggestions for Beastmaster.

I agree with you other than a few of your points.

1. Fully restoring JA range for all but Ready shouldn't be an issue. Ready range may be a sticking point though, and honestly, anything in the 10y+ range would be sufficient to eliminate the bugginess that we've been dealing with since the nerf.

5. Not sure why you are requesting a nerf. :/ The current system is there to be able to use Ready on demand, and the alternative would most likely be the way Sic works where you have to wait for the pet to gain 1k+ TP before it will actually go off.. This is definitely a nerf, would be a major change to the flow of combat and very much unwanted IMO.

6. I'd like to actually go farther than you are requesting. Charm needs to have it's minimum duration increased significantly for ilvl players. It wouldn't matter currently if they removed Charm immunity from all non-named NMs because duration is floored to something like 12sec IIRC. Charm+ from gear is a duration multiplier, so it really doesn't make it viable to use Charmed mobs even if you have every bit of gear possible due to the base being so absurdly low. In a similar vein, base Sic recast needs to be lowered to 60sec or less. There are enough demerits to using a charmed pet's randomly selected move instead of a jug pet's controllable move that the 90sec recast is not needed. TBH, Sic is actually bad enough that Charm will probably still go unused even if they did increase the minimum duration, until Sic was brought up to par with Ready in practice.

2./7. Rather than directly adjust or add jug pets, I'd prefer a rather major rework to how pet level is determined for us. My favorite idea is to change pet level dependency from main-hand weapon to new ranged slot equipment (just like PUP in other words.) Call it a "harness" or "leash". Ripping the pet level system from PUP should hopefully reduce the workload required from an admittedly huge task, allow the new item to stack with pet food items in the ammo slot, and probably allow our pets to benefit from the same Lvl+x that PUP/SMN/DRG get access to. So long as the new items set the pet level directly, jug pets could even be set to ignore their baked-in level caps and let us use all existing pets in current content. This would have your desired effect of allowing currently non-119ilvl pets to hit 119 with the bonus of giving us more skins to play with. :D

1. The range is especially troublesome because it varies depending on pet model size. I can stand usually about 12 away from an NM if I'm using Randy. but I can only stay maybe 6 away if I'm using Bertha. Its actually easier to manage when I'm NOT engaged on the master. If I'm engaged on master, my attention is split more. If I send pet only to a fight, then I am carefully gauging the distance to run in and give commands. I still do plenty of fights with only my pet. and I run in and out of command range. This is what I mean about not having the desired effect. it does not encourage engaging with the pet. It in fact makes being engaged more troublesome. 10 or 12 yalms would probably be fine. but why make it shorter than it was before? it was a silly reason to nerf it when they did.

5. Currently, Ready moves automatically boost up to 1000 tp when you use them. then they scale from 1000 tp to 3000 tp.
I could be wrong, but i don't think it does anything like this for summoner. I don't think it would be an issue to adjust the scale. This mainly impacts the use of pet tp bonus gear like Nukumi manoplas and Aymur. If the scaling were adjusted so that the min was 0 tp, then tp bonus gear would always be effective, unless pet tp were already at 3000. I don't think this is really a nerf, it would depend on how the scaling were to be changed. If the min and max effectiveness values were the same, I suppose it could be a nerf for non-aymur beastmasters. the current setup is expecially limiting to tp bonus from Aymur which is split in a strange way.

6. Yeah, if they actually return charm to viability, that would ofcourse be better. However, i think it was too much of a design burden for them. They realized "Oh, every single charmable mob in a zone, is a weapon a beastmaster can pick up. How do we keep beastmaster in our balance rubric? Well we need to get rid of charm. Its too much work to consider bst balance in our level design. (monster power and player power designs are too different from each other to balance it out)." So they gradually replaced it. Which is sad and disappointing. So I don't expect them to change that. I don't' think there are any other jobs who's signature ability is so completely deprecated as Charm is for Beastmaster.

2./7. Fixing the pet level system is admirable. but again I just don't see it happening. having some pet level + gear would be really nice though. Again, like losing charm, its kinda rediculous that Beastmaster loses abilities while leveling up, in that the pets have level caps and are no longer viable because their level is too low.

1. The issue I have with asking for a full un-nerf is simply that the devs may consider it "too much" and take adjustment completely off the table. I'd rather ask for the minimum and have a chance of getting it, than asking for the maximum and have almost no chance of getting it.

5. My understanding of pet TP Bonus gear is that it already is always effective. Whether your jug pet uses a Ready move at 100/500/1000 TP, it should deal the same amount of damage (within the standard applicable rng range.) If you add in pet TP Bonus gear to those numbers, the damage will reflect the TP Bonus on top of the expected base damage. The baseline 1k is there most likely for system requirements since I believe that our pets are simply modified mobs.. and mobs can't use TP moves when they have less than 1k. I'm betting that Ready is most likely coded as a modified Sic, and Sic also can't go off if a charmed pet has less than 1k (other than hecteyes, which cast a nuke instead of using a TP move IIRC.) I think that it is both unlikely to be possible to remove the baseline 1k TP for Ready, as well as a job breaking nerf. What you are asking for is for Ready to be turned into Sic, and Sic strictly sucks. >_<;;

6. Sic is bad enough that it truly would not be any sort of playstyle changing improvement in any content if Charm were to be brought to merely above-pointless level. There is no design burden when you consider that, at the very best, a charmed pet will be able to use a RANDOM TP move once every ~60sec compared to a jug pet's on-demand/selectable TP moves every 10-30sec (depending on how many charges the CHOSEN move consumes.)

2./7. I think this actually should be possible to implement by modifying the code used for PUP automatons rather than trying to rebuild anything from scratch at least. The possibility of reusing existing code as a solid working base should be attractive enough to be something to be considered. At this point in time, it seems rather unfair that BST is the only pet job that has hard locked pets that are naturally going to struggle more on higher clvl content.

On a different note, how much does it say about the current state of the job that those who love it are asking not for damage buffs, but instead pleading for bug fixes and system corrections to bring us truly into the ilvl era? :(

5. Aymur's TP bonus is +1000. however it is strange in that it i applied in 2 steps. 1 gives 500 tp before the ready move is used. The other 500 comes at the same time as other tp bonus. The first 500 is always wasted unless pet already has 1000 TP. It is currently Possible to get a Total of 1800 TP Bonus for the pet from Gear. 40 from the 1200 JP Gift, and most pets are Warrior class with the fencer trait for another 500. Total TP Bonus can be 2340 for warrior pets. This is very good. if you are over 1000 TP on pet, you will always be capped TP. however, you will more likely be less than 1000 tp when using a ready move. if you are below 500, you only get an 1840 tp bonus. you total tp will be between 1840 and 2340. Between 500 TP and 1000 TP you get the difference between 1000 tp - current tp in a bonus from Aymur. This murkiness is tedious. I would rather get full value from Mythic Axe. I suggest Keeping the Max and min effect of pet tp ready moves the same, and adjusting the scale to fit those boundaries. I also Expect than Nukumi Manoplas +2/3 should have an increased Pet TP Bonus.

1. I'm not politicking with my recommendation. the pet command distance was 17~20' for over 15 years. There is no good reason why it couldn't and shoudn't change back. Trying to force a certain playstyle is foolish. The appeal that FFXI has over FFXIV is that there is so much more creativity in the battles. There is not a single path to victory, Different Job combinations, gear combinations and tactics make tremendous differences. They did not Elimniate the pet only playstyle at all with this change. In fact, they made it more cumbersome for bst to engage because its harder to gauge correct distance when splitting attention between pet and master.

6. The design burden of charm has nothing to do with Sic. It has everything to do with fights Like Hakutaku in the level 75 era. As a bst it was a wonderful challenge and a lot of fun. You could solo an NM that full alliances struggled with because you could juggle a constant flow of pets to fight Hakutaku while keeping the master completely away from the fight. Level Capped CoP zones were similiar in that a bst could charm a familiar a high level monster, and fight thru everything in the zone solo. It means if the Designers have challenges that they dont' want a solo bst to be able to take down, they would have to either NERF Charm (which they did) or specially consider mob and NM layout with regards to how a bst could use it every time they design a zone. I have used charmed bats in Ra'kaznar inner court. Its ridiculously slow, but having a meatshield pet with 200k hp is pretty handly.

editing #8 above.

Some of my suggestions:
1) allow all player buffs to also impact pets. Really no reason to leave them out. Then we can DD with other DDs as SE wants and in the same parties.
2) obviously, increase range of pet commands to match pup and smn. Ridiculous bst is range restricted
3) Ilvl replacement weapons and shields for Charmers Merlin. Double ridiculous we have to stand on top of mob and swap axes and lose tp in order to utilize our pet properly so there’s no point in being there at all
4) Remove and replace Charm, Tame, and Gauge. All are utterly useless or outright blocked in pretty much all content. Replace with pet buffs to acc, attack, mab and macc. Replace Gauge with something useful perhaps that tells us stats on our targets or something. Or just delete it, it has no point anymore
5) more jugs, more types of damage, and magic damage, ranged pets, and more debuffs

Or instead of ranged pets give us an equivalent to animators, let us choose to make pets ranged or not

I agree with all in the OP. I'd be happy just to remove the horror that is the distance nerf. Even if you're in melee range, you can still be out of range to execute commands. Example made back when it was changed. Link

I think that's a pretty minor change that more could be added. Top +1 suggestions.

• More 119+ pet variety. (Not a lot of work just increase the pet range of current jugs but given new attachments for PUP, wouldn't kill to ask for more jugs we don't have already.)
• Some +pet level like the other pet jobs got.
• Something done about pet recast.

Full overhaul on ability utility would be great but it would be fine if they need a second go round to address it.

Tame used to work with a pet out. It was reverted a few years ago with no explanation. I loved using tame to remove aggro from a mob....it was how I navigated Den of Rancor at level 75! I wish SE would reconsider this.

I agree with all of your points, OP. I hope SE listens.

One small note to add: In 2005, Spinning Axe used to be AOE...but SE made it single target. Why is MNK Spinning Attack AOE but BSTs Spinning Axe only single target?

Also, regarding Trust CORs using pet rolls, a community rep replied here ...but it was never followed up:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/th...l=1#post555175

Come on SE, help BSTs out!

I forgot to mention another QoL problem with the range nerf on pet commands.

I need to stop moving to use reward.

If I'm running, and kiting an enemy, In order to use Reward, I need to stop and let pet catch up with me. This is with normal speed pets, not just slow ones.

So, kiting is a problem, fighting large monsters is a problem. Its like being paralyzed sometimes trying to do normal commands.

Also, the pet only strategies for several fights still happen with only Summoner and Puppetmaster jobs.
Beastmaster just gets kicked out of the party from the ranged nerf.

I forgot to mention these QoL aspects before.

I really like alot of the changes being done for dancer, dragoon, Redmage and other jobs that have been adjusted. I really hope SE will consider the suggestions in this thread.

Oh, and thanks to Gwydion for the points about tame and spinning axe.

It would be really nice if spinning axe were AoE again. I always have to switch to dagger for AoE on master.