A Suggestion From The Pet Job Community: Stop Ignoring Us and Listen To Our Plea.

[Draylo]

Buff SMN for sure, BST no ty!

[Damane]

i totally agree with the OP, they should let those things happen, thumbs up

[Alhanelem]

Spin it however you want, Ive personally seen 2 beast clean the clock of SKNM difficult.
I watched the voidwrought decontructer guy go down with ease to one.

Summoner & Pup, Sure I think they need a buff. But beast? A solo job in a MMO, and
everyone thinks its a great idea. Same as Trust, great idea make people not want to
play together Evenmore! Why party with a guy when you solo more? Why have a friend
help you beat a boss when you can solo? The term "chain of consequences" comes to mind.
It is'nt my fault if people do not see what they are infact creating. Then again people drive
off roads on cells phones after being spammed on tv, radio and online that its dangerous..
But guess what? that doesnt stop them. And just as I think of those people, I think of that
frame of thought here.

Grim~

There isn't any "spinning" going on here. All jobs should be "usable" in all content. Every other MMO with pets in existence does it this way. Why should pets be garbage just because they can be used to keep a monster at arm's length? These jobs should (and technically do but it is ignored due to pet fragility) bring more to the table than crowd control.

The point is, SE could have saved a lot of work coming up with special backwards ways of solving pet problems if they instead just let them be cured and buffed. My automaton can cure itself, why can't anyone else cure it? Why do I have to use special items to do it? Several abilities and effects have been added to pets over the years specifically to help deal with their inability to stay alive, but they are all bandaid solutions that required work to make when they could have taken a much simpler route to solve the problem.

[Kensagaku]

To an extent I agree with this idea; having enjoyed all of the pet jobs in the game, starting with Dragoon as my main job and slowly working around to experiencing them all, I certainly would love to see pets more relevant in current content. With the way they are right now, pets lack the ability to keep up with player characters in main combat. I'm fine with them not being able to be on complete par - if they were on par with players, and then you toss on the pet user as well, suddenly you're exceeding other jobs completely - but the gap should be smaller to the point where if your pet job is in the backline, letting their pet do the fighting, they're still keeping up to some extent, while being frontline along their pets puts them completely on even terms with other dds.

However, while I love pet jobs, I'm going to play devil's advocate here for a moment. With bard and corsair buffs, I have no strong argument, because they're general AoE and they should just hit pets without changing the tempo or attention of the buffer at all. My dislike would be for it to fall on your healer (WHM, RDM, or SCH, generally, though most likely WHM) to have an additional party slot to take care of in terms of debuff removal and healing. Can you imagine in content where you're already having a hard time, spamming -na spells on as many party members as you can while trying to keep up haste and cures, and then suddenly you've also got a pet that's not on the party list - <stpt> and <stal> say wut - that you have to manually target and heal? This would become frustrating and it would likely cause a pet to get ignored, because they are expendable and can be resummoned.

As a balancer to that, I would propose a job trait for the pet jobs that would allow THEM to perform these tasks on their pet. Bard and Corsair buffs could work in AoE and hit pets in that range, but healing/enhancing magic would not. For an example, on Beastmaster with your Reward timer down, you can go /WHM and cast Cure IV on your pet. If they get paralyzed and you don't want to waste your reward timer for one or two status ailments, you can cast the -na spells on them. Alternatively, go /DNC and use Curing/Healing Waltz on your pet. This would allow for more survivability and usefulness in pet jobs, giving them buffs and healing support without putting a heavier workload on your healer. Additionally, it would allow for a clever pet user to switch between front and backlines to either support their pet in combat or else get out of harm's way to focus on keeping their pet alive and doing their task. It may or may not make pet jobs more desirable, depending on how well the damage output keeps up, but with all of the hate resets, the large AoE damage spams, and status ailments, it would make pet jobs a safe alternative to standard melee damage dealing, much like Rangers are now.

The only disadvantage this offers is that for a pet job to make use of this trait, they would end up locked to specific jobs. In the case of BST, being locked to DNC or WHM isn't necessarily bad - used to do it all the time, after all, axe+shield /whm, or dual-axe /dnc - but for jobs like Puppetmaster and Dragoon, whose role is normally on the front line, it may be more of a burden. Fortunately, Dragoon has several tools to support their Wyvern in the form of Spirit Link and Steady Wing, while Puppetmaster can get a pet that can heal itself at the cost of a lower damage-dealing potential. It's something that would have to be carefully examined and looked at to make pet jobs more viable without completely limiting the way they can play.

[Alhanelem]

My dislike would be for it to fall on your healer (WHM, RDM, or SCH, generally, though most likely WHM) to have an additional party slot to take care of in terms of debuff removal and healing.

This is a balancing factor; you have to take the bad with the good. That being said, no healer is going to feel an obligation to heal a pet that can be replaced easily; it will simply offer a tactical advantage to do so if the pet is truly needed. One simple fact here is nobody ever uses the pet buffs. Why buff the pets only when you can buff the master which in most cases is more advantageous? Short of pet buffs not using up a buff slot, this can't be fixed. these spells/abilities will always go unused because the support jobs will naturally choose buffing the many over buffing the few.

In short, I understand your concern, but making pet jobs more viable in parties is worth the slight trouble to support jobs. Worse comes to worse, you can just ignore the pets as per usual. You'd only be doing it if you were specifically trying to take advantage of pet classes in your party.

Again, let me emphasize that this is the standard in virtually all MMOs. You may not be used to it from FFXI, but it's how it works everywhere else pretty much, and it works just ifne.

[Ravenmore]

Difficult isn't really that hard at all depending on which SKCNM fight you're doing some are sleep inducing easy and the VWNM could have used a couple of cheap displacers. I bet with a couple of those and and with all the 119 ilvl gear I have I could do it on my blu or at the very least I can duo it with a whm alt so again you don't really have a leg to stand on.

[Olor]

Oh I know, I actually think of beast as a great party member, not just a soloer. That's half of my frustraition right there. I think if they were treated like roles in a party
half these issues wouldnt be as bad.

Well I can agree that spending 100k on a beast is very easy to do. muslums, pots, treats etc. However 100k is nothing. My friend and I do 700-900 currency duo in dynamis every day.
Our server avg of currency is 6k each. 6k x 800avg= 4.8mil. Maybe you can do half of that, maybe you can do more. But 100k is surely nothing when you think of the income u get from these. We do roughly 15 mil each in currency every week. Unless you're spending 75% you should be gaining income and not losing it. Barring you arent spending an arm and a leg to 119 like me

Grim~

Almost every job can make money in Dynamis, and they don't have to spend tons of money to do it. Several (DNC and THF come to mind) are MUCH BETTER at making money in dynamis.

And you thinking that BST is a good party member does not make it so. The math doesn't lie - BST is a subpar DD because pets do not get buffs. In current content we aren't even very good at what we used to be somewhat good at - being a distance DD - because our pets get chewed into little itty bitty pieces unless you're constantly spamming mulsim and reward - which costs a lot of gil, and even then we are barely scratching the mob.

[Blah]

Well, from a technical standpoint I can see why puppets don't get heals or regeneration, they're not alive so it "shouldn't" work on them but honestly they could just have the master learn an "oil spell" or "oil regen" (why call me a puppetmaster if I can't learn a puppet spell such as that?) They could even give it to the mages so they can help it too. Now the other pet jobs I don't see why they or puppets are left out of the buff equation...really is confounding.

[Brightshadow]

Puppets can cast cure on themselves ........ and they have souls

[Peepiopi]

If anything, Pets just need a flat 90% indirect damage reduction. They die too easily in relevant content.