Originally Posted by
Yoji_Fujito
...As stronger enemies were introduced over time, it became apparent that beastmaster and their pets weren’t keeping up.
Unlike other jobs, pet-based jobs had to be balanced around both the player character and pet, which in turn made it difficult to implement powerful new equipment or pets.
In order to resolve this situation, we made major changes in the very first version update in 2015.
Monsters were now able to participate in skillchains and magic burst, making them an overwhelmingly powerful source of damage.
While this method required some preparation, the changes allowed beastmaster to easily catch up and deal high damage more effectively than any other job.
Ultimately, this allowed beastmaster to issue commands from a safe distance, while pets that were far stronger than the beastmaster themselves would continuously fire off powerful abilities.
Pets also had decent survivability, and even if they were defeated, they could be called out again at full power after a five minute cooldown.
At this point, beastmaster was capable of battling with almost no risk to themselves.
Player skill was not involved in this version of beastmaster, since no matter what attacks enemies had, they could be defeated by endlessly sending out powerful pets.
This was even more effective in parties with multiple beastmasters, which created some extreme cases where pets did all the fighting and players didn’t battle at all.
Battles were streamlined into a monotonous process, and enemy mechanics became meaningless.
▼ Corrective Measures and the Future
To address this, we kept beastmaster’s strength while making sure its equipment and traits were used to fulfill a frontline role, and shortened the range of commands to bring back a sense of risk to the job.
While these adjustments lowered beastmaster’s capabilities, it was compensated for with the continued implementation of various meals and equipment, and that brings us to today.
With this history in mind, we don’t have plans to alter the job’s design as a frontline role and would like this source of damage to be accompanied by some risk.
As we’ve often mentioned, these job adjustments aren’t final, and we’ll continue making adjustments to improve its frontline capabilities.