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.