Please adjust the All-but-deprecated-currently-worthless Ja: Tame!

[Xilk]

Surprisingly, I was reading the recent announcement about upgrading relic armor to +2 and it got me looking at our JSE (artifact, relic, empyrean) and the job abilities that they improve.

What stuck out the most to me was Tame.
We actually have merits for this... completely worthless Job ability.
The specific mechanics are what make it worthless, while the ability itself is quite interesting.

It used to have 2 useful purposes:
Improve Charm success
Drop hate on aggressive mob.

I see 2 details that make it currently worthless (and have always made it mostly worthless)

This JA, which took up a slot when we reached the landmark level 30..., was mainly to support the charm ability. This made sense when charm was so central and vital to the bst role. However, when we depend mostly on Call Beast for pets now, We cannot even use the ja, let alone have a use for it. there have always been 2 aspects that make it very poor:

10 minute recast timer. This always meant that it was an only sometimes save, when it was marginally useful.
The other problem is that it is completely ineffective when you already have a pet.

I have a few suggestions/requests to modify this job ability.

1. Let the ability be used even when you already have a pet. It will never be useful at all if this is not changed. Beastmasters do not run around without called beasts spawned anymore. We just don't.

2. Let tame be effective to clear hate for anyone in party. currently it only works if the beast master is the only one on the hate list. This means if a party member simply gets aggro'd by a mob, you can't tame it. Its unnecessarily tedious to have

3. Shorten the recast. 5 minutes would be much more useful and I don't think it would be too short. Frankly a 10 min recast means you forget about it unless you are in a really dire charming situation.. and right now that means you have completely forgotten about it. Even w/ merits.. even 8 minutes is pretty useless recast time.

4. Let tame be effective for more mobs, not only the charmable ones. Actually, expanding charmable mobs would resolve this also. Even if it was only expanded to the "Beastmaster"-ecosystems, it would be very good. (ie: beasts, lizards, vermin, plantoids, aquans, avians, and amorphs)

Until now, tame has always been a charm support ability like gauge. However, charm is really not very useful now. We didn't only lose charm as the ability has been more and more marginalized. We also lost the JA slots for levels 10 and 30 completely.
Tame could actually be a really fantastic crowd control tool and job ability.

[Tsukino_Kaji]

I used tame all the time with a gear swap macro. It's been one of the more usefull JAs over the years.

[Olor]

I used tame all the time with a gear swap macro. It's been one of the more usefull JAs over the years.

This thread isn't about how useful tame used to be, it is about ideas to make it less useless TODAY

[Dreamin]

OP is being kind when he said Charm is being marginized. Charm is completely useless now for BST for doing any of the new(er) contents - VW and WoE. Jug timer on top make BST even more useless for these events. BST without charm just isn't a BEASTMASTER anymore. SE should just renamed the job JUG master.

SE, give us reasons (events/zones) to use Charm!

[Olor]

Eh, I like jugs. Honestly though, the reason they sidelined charm (I believe) was because it is harder to balance and control than jugs.

[Luvbunny]

Agree with OP, unfortunately, it's like beating down a dead horse. They will give us more useless jug pets, make the one that are useful even more expensive, and ignore revision to job abilities and useful merits. If it improving the job or gameplay, they will choose to ignore and plead "not have enough time for that now" - BUT if it useless, stupid and retarded idea, they will focus on this and make sure that every pet jobs are nerfed beyond oblivion. Dear Developer, you created the forum to hear, listen, and communicate with your players, please actually LEARN to listen?

[Tsukino_Kaji]

This thread isn't about how useful tame used to be, it is about ideas to make it less useless TODAY

I still use it TODAY. It hasn't changed.

[Zhronne]

Eh, I like jugs. Honestly though, the reason they sidelined charm (I believe) was because it is harder to balance and control than jugs.

Lol
Don't say it like you have doubts about it :P It's clearly 101% that way.
Charm was harder (and hence: more expensive in terms of time and human resources for them) to keep up to date.

It still saddens me Charm is the reason why I loved BST in the first place first, and always considered Jugs a replacements for when you couldn't charm stuff.
But in the end I guess it's better this way than seeing BST become completely useless, no?
Still, they should have revamped BST much more, deeper in its core mechanics, because atm if you look at the job's JAs it's still pretty clear how it's a job that's been designed around Charm for 75 levels, and then suddenly got all focused on Jugs.
For instance, I think that had they planned to go the Jug way from the beginning, Charm wouldn't even have been there and probably we would hve had infinite Jugs, that is... harder to obtain jugs but that never expire, they simply have big cooldowns. Kinda like the "hunter" or "beast tamer" jobs work in many other MMOs, where you have a "menu" with tamed/collected pets and you decide which one to call.

Really... it's annoying that what's supposed to be the main distinctive element of our job is something that expires even if you zone, despite of the price that item costs... It might be the penny-pincher in me talking but really, I don't like this kind of mechanic and can understand it (obviously) only for ammo.
And no, I don't really see the "Jugs = ammo" comparison particularly fitting.

[SpankWustler]

Still, they should have revamped BST much more, deeper in its core mechanics, because atm if you look at the job's JAs it's still pretty clear how it's a job that's been designed around Charm for 75 levels, and then suddenly got all focused on Jugs.

I feel the same way. Half of my job abilities on Beastmaster hang like a dead limb waiting to either be treated or amputated, at present, and that's weird.

The Development Bros's recent work on overhauling Puppetmaster due to it's pet's mental failings and the Beastmaster Relic Sheep Suite +2 actually making sense gave me hope for something cool in the future. Of course, this hope was prompted squashed by the report about the new jug pets.