BST adjustment did not address the problem, Devs please read

[Nyarlko]

So now that smn can do physical bps significantly stronger than any ready move tell me again how strong physical pet moves are too strong to let master be at range

\o/ This is a valid reason to re-examine the BST JA ranges on it's own. If you tallied up all the of the steady nearly-monthly buffs that SMN has gotten since the BST nerf, it's a miracle that "nerfSMN" is not a thing. lol Would like to note that even before the nerf, I witnessed a SMN 3-shot an Escha-Ruaun T2 using Ifrit, which is something that is so amazingly beyond the capabilities of BST that I still don't understand why it was the one that got nerfed. The dev team is being stubborn about not reversing it due to their vision of how they want the job to function, while simultaneously failing to provide the equipment/systems/abilities/etc required to make that vision feasible. At the barebones minimum, Ready should be extended to 10' range, and all other pet related JAs to 20'. I mean, we put up with a TON of glitches with our pets, can't we get a pat on the head for being good kids? ^^;;

[Jakuk]

So now that smn can do physical bps significantly stronger than any ready move tell me again how strong physical pet moves are too strong to let master be at range

Don't forget while being able to repeatedly resummon with NO timer blocks like BST.

[Olor]

Don't forget while being able to repeatedly resummon with NO timer blocks like BST.

and to have their pet immediately come to their aid as soon as they are summoned, without even having to use a JA, that also has a timer...

BST pets only advantage over summons is a lot of HP... they don't follow orders, they don't automatically protect the master, and their ready moves are weaker than bloodpacts.

Unleash is good and all, but the design of the job should not be based on one JA on a one hour timer.

SMN is harder to gear well, but that's because they actually have more gear to allow them to do their job well and it's focussed on allowing them to do their job well. Look at how much gear SMN has to reduce bloodpact timers for instance. Meanwhile bsts have to use a non ilevel axe to get their timers down.

And a lot of the best BST gear for certain things - that *does* exist is augment roulette gear.

[Urmom]

Don't forget while being able to repeatedly resummon with NO timer blocks like BST.

Honestly I'd say that's a fair trade off for the hp difference and ability to heal them via ja. The repeated summons kind of compensates for the fact they die so much more

Unleash is good and all, but the design of the job should not be based on one JA on a one hour timer.

You think Unleash is good you should see smns Astral Conduit zerg T4 reisins lol. Can even get several in before with apogee and revit -1

[saevel]

So now that smn can do physical bps significantly stronger than any ready move tell me again how strong physical pet moves are too strong to let master be at range

Pet damage output was never the reason BST was broken in the first place. Buffed melee's could always do more damage then pets. The problem was BST's pets had such absurdly high HP, and so much pet -DT, that it wasn't difficult for the master to keep them alive while staying comfortably out of range of the nasty status ailment spam most NM's have these days. There were only a few other ways to deal with it but BST zerg was the simplest method with the least chance of error and thus the preferred strategy. Now people use the SCH + GEO + BLM strategy because it's the second least chance of error followed by RNG Decoy Shot spam and finally melees. RNG Decoy is slow and a bit complicated but if done right it's safe and effective. Melee zerg is effective but lots of things can go wrong and requires the most attention from support, meaning people can't multi-box it effectively.

To address the problem of BSTs SE had a few options. First they could nerf the content so that it didn't spam AoE status ailments and other cheap tactics that discourage people being close to it. They could of severely nerfed pet HP down to 2.5~3K while lowering the DT cap and defensive stats. They could of created some sort of gimmick that punished the pet for it's master being too far away, or they could of just reduced the range of the JA's. The best option would of been the first but SE instead chose to do the easiest way and just force BST's to stand in the same spot melee's have to stand. Thus while the pet, with it's 6K HP and super -DT, could easily eat the NM's super cheesy attack, the master with his/her 2.2K HP couldn't.

People need to first understand exactly what was unbalanced before they attempt a fix. I know BST's everywhere want to go back to the days of killing the hardest mobs while eating cheeto's and watching youtube cat videos, but that is extremely unbalanced and bad for the long term health of the community.

As for SMN, their pets are still super duper squishy. Avatars have the stats of a Black Mage without manawall. They have low HP and limited DT except against their strong elements. They now have some pretty powerful offensive moves but are still made of glass and the BP timer sucks. Unlike BST, SMN doesn't get a charge mechanic to enable them to spam, they need to burn a SP in order to do that for a limited time. To be perfectly honest pet jobs in FFXI have always been hit or miss. They are either Godlike broken powerful, or nearly useless, never something in between.

[Nyarlko]

There are really only two issues that the majority of us who are vocal about BST have with the nerf last year.

1. It was not just Ready. I think there would be far fewer against it if it had only affected Ready range. Reward was also reduced to the same painfully small (and variable) distance which makes it harder to deal with the frequent happy-puppy behavior of the AI that simply LOVES to poof off 20-30' away to smack a random mob and often times get itself killed before we can get it back into Reward range.

2. Because the range is so small, any variances that occur become glaring issues. The model size variance issue for example here.. When the range was large, it didn't really affect players that much. The differences that could occur based on Galka vs Hume/Mithra/Elvaan vs Taru, or small vs large vs huge mobs, were much more easily overlooked since the difference in range was a smaller percentage of your overall range AND the differences did not cause a noticeable difference in results. It is quite easy to tell the difference nowadays, and causes a racial imbalance for the job.
EX: A mob aoes while a "small" taru BST and "large" galka BST are each at their absolute max distance away > taru gets hit, galka does not.
EX2: If a taru stands the same distance as the above galka > taru's Ready/Reward will fail, galka's will not.

Devs, if you intend to hold to the hardline stance you've taken on this issue, please consider at least restoring non-Ready JA ranges to the old ranges. This would reduce aggravation by reducing otherwise preventable pet deaths.
As for Ready, could it be possible to implement race-based range extensions so everyone matches a "large" model Galka? Basically, measure the maximum ranges the Galka would have with each pet, then increase the range on Ready for the other races so that they match it. I think this would be the simplest, most elegant, solution to the model size issues without a significant impact on your stated vision for the job.

[Urmom]

Pet damage output was never the reason BST was broken in the first place. Buffed melee's could always do more damage then pets. The problem was BST's pets had such absurdly high HP, and so much pet -DT, that it wasn't difficult for the master to keep them alive while staying comfortably out of range of the nasty status ailment spam most NM's have these days.

See here's the thing though... avatars actually have access to plenty of dt and while less hp they can be very easily resummoned so that same argument held true with smn as well unless you trying to tank with them. But outside of doing the right set of buffs/debuffs or getting great MB (in which they could do crazy capped dmg) avatars tended to do less dmg move per move while at the same time having longer timers, that combined with the fact no one cared until they buffed ready and the fact no one still cares rng has the same benefits, or the fact automatons have been waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more durable for awhile makes it clear dmg output was clearly a huge component in it. If it truly was just about avoiding AoEs and durability then their is a clear argument to reduce the range of all pet commands, ranged attacks and casting distance by a good deal

As for SMN, their pets are still super duper squishy. Avatars have the stats of a Black Mage without manawall. They have low HP and limited DT except against their strong elements. They now have some pretty powerful offensive moves but are still made of glass and the BP timer sucks. Unlike BST, SMN doesn't get a charge mechanic to enable them to spam, they need to burn a SP in order to do that for a limited time. To be perfectly honest pet jobs in FFXI have always been hit or miss. They are either Godlike broken powerful, or nearly useless, never something in between.

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of jug pet dts. Almost all of it came from gear. The main exceptions being if you used the right pet against the right elements and even then only a small number of pets were strong against elements most of those pets being pretty bad and only about half the elements being covered. Only a couple of pets had any physical dts and all of them came with an extreme weakness to another physical dmg type. Meanwhile avatars all have a weird 50% pseudo pdt. As far as gear/trait dt perfectly geared bst including stout servant will have 58% pet dt I believe and 4 more pet pdt. While smn would have 46% dt with another 4 pdt. A difference for sure but not some a omg completely squishy vs the most durable thing in the world. Especially when factor in the weird pdt it actually gives them higher physical dmg reduction outside of again the pets that had reductions to specific types but weaknesses to others. Similarly if the mob focuses on a particular element you could gain even greater reduction to elemental dmg. Meanwhile my auto over here can get capped pdt and mdt over 50% bdt a bunch of mdb and a few weird separately factored dts while riding a permanent 200 regen <.<. Also will never come close to either bst or smns dps in a million years even if I didn't have to wait on tp and stupid pet AI

Not that it matters as much as you make it out to be because their is a huge fundamental difference between the need to keep the pet alive. You lose your avatar oh no summon it up again assuming you didn't ya know dismiss it on your own after the bp and maybe miss a couple of seconds off of riding your bp if you weren't paying attention... bst loses a pet well hope bestial loyalty is up. It isn't well call beast a possibly worse pet (or use up a really expensive hq jug). Oh that's not up too well shit just sit there and do nothing.

As far as system... spamming isn't all it's cracked up to be. A lot of the more powerful moves are 2 charges anyways and every single one with a lvl 2 element is except the ones that are 3 charges so even if they moved bps to a charge system you still wouldn't be spamming the most powerful if they went that same route. Regardless using 2 moves in 20 seconds for a top end of 20-30k dmg each doesn't beat out the now top end of 70k every 22 seconds. No one really cares if you can do smaller spikes more often if the dps is less. Especially given the sp2s of the 2 jobs. In fact with the range as it is right now it can actually be hard to ride your timers and not die at times especially in group play and it would probably be better for bst if our moves did a bunch more dmg but had longer timers.

Let's not forget it's more than just dding. Because while they have pretty much destroyed the entire debuff and magical section of jugs and made them into a hammer avatars have way more utility being able to do wards while still doing rage. Or just doing the debuffs. Heck how many of the fights with really bad dmg moves at least start out revolving around lullaby?

[Nyarlko]

I think none of this had much to do with the JA range nerf. SE probably didn't take anything like SMN being able to put out better dmg, or jug pet HP or DT- values, into account when they did what they did.
The nerf seemed to be a response to a vocal minority who were upset that BST was the only "melee" who could safely deal damage while avoiding the overkill AOEs (and attached debuffs) and the playerbase shift towards BST-centric strategies due to that mechanic and the lower gear thresholds needed to be able to perform adequately in 119+ content (which brought along a melee-job exclusionary stance.)

If the problem was that a pet job was able to deal too much damage from range, then why is it that SMN and PUP have received nothing but constant, nearly monthly for the past year, buffs?

..Don't get me started on jug pet selection >_>;; I could rant for pages about all the add'l issues that BST has to deal with, including limited pet options..

[Olor]

Yeah I am mad that we haven't gotten ilevel versions of every pet. Even being able to choose between more than grasshopper or grasshopper would be nice.

[Nyarlko]

Yeah I am mad that we haven't gotten ilevel versions of every pet. Even being able to choose between more than grasshopper or grasshopper would be nice.

I actually find Patrick to be more useful nearly all the time. Self-SC is a nice thing to have on tap. I do believe that we should have access to at least one ilvl jug pet of each family for correlation purposes tho. Killer Effects can be pretty fun to play around with, but we don't have access to all families iirc.. or it could be that some of the ones we have just suck to badly for my brain to permit retention of knowledge of them. :/