November 2019 FINAL FANTASY XI Digest

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Alhanelem

And 10 years later after they finally do that, maybe we can get a monstrosity update.

---

Based upon the 50 response Monstrosity thread, I think we need to get this thread to 51 pages for them to consider helping BST or PLD. Why should they listen to players about jobs they play extensively? I mean, players are just paying customers.....Nothing special....

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Beastorizer

Based upon the 50 response Monstrosity thread, I think we need to get this thread to 51 pages for them to consider helping BST or PLD. Why should they listen to players about jobs they play extensively? I mean, players are just paying customers.....Nothing special....

---

You think you're being sarcastic, but this is accurate. Paying means you're perfectly fine with whatever they do. Complaining here most of the time doesn't accomplish anything unless you're in the JP section.

You want an actual vote, your money voted yes already.

This is coming from a person (you) who said it's smart to pay for gil. I don't think anyone will listen to what you have to say anymore. You basically condone cheating.

I am still upset that after 3 years of no updates, Beastmaster's job adjustment is re-skinned pets and we're told that these changes are "not final" but also, that they won't do anything about our requests. This is a tremendous breach of trust for paying customers. All we want is Beastmaster abilities to consistently activate, 100% of the time and we can't do that today. :(

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Gwydion

I am still upset that after 3 years of no updates, Beastmaster's job adjustment is re-skinned pets and we're told that these changes are "not final" but also, that they won't do anything about our requests. This is a tremendous breach of trust for paying customers. All we want is Beastmaster abilities to consistently activate, 100% of the time and we can't do that today. :(

---

I know. I feel like if we need to fix the relationship with Square Enix. I know I already tried but they still don't like mean people and trolls. They just can't stand it. We are basically "Hopelessly addicted." :(

Japanese players usually get more official responses than we get.

Companies do indeed take advantage of an "Addiction." However, I have never been addicted to an mmo. As I mentioned before, I played FFXI on & off since like, 2003-ish. I came back from a 4 year hiatus; that is pretty much how I play mmo. I have no issue dropping them for other stuff. That is actually the plan with my CPA coming up.

I have not touched PS02 is like 6 months, DCUO is like 2-ish, FFXIV....I re-subbed, & played it like, twice (That was a waste of game-time...). Wanted to log into GW2, forgot my password...Been too long. Decided to try WoW again.....Forgot that password & email address........I just never been the addicted type.

When mmo shutdown, like Marvel Heroes, I was never sad about it. There were people in a grieving state, I could never relate. I may spend more time on mmo forums than the games. Being in business, I am a social interaction guy, so that may have something to do with it.

That may also have something to do with my passion against selling duplicate products to a fan-base but calling it new (Kind of a contradiction from a business person...I know lol...). In this case, it is jug pets. I see this stuff a lot, and it is kinda like LOL, this looks very "Familiar."

The closet I got was maybe Sonic the Hedgehog marble stages when I was a kid. I was just eager to beat it. To be the best. I never really cared about being the best in an mmo.

I like video games, I like weight lifting, I like TV. Being balance was always important to me. I do not like to bee too invested in something. I was that guy who would camp HNMs, etc...then I though to myself "What am I doing........?"

I died as BST today because my pet decided to take a tiny detour around a bump in the ground and moved out of range. This is ridiculous!

I may still be new to BST (which may be obvious from the anecdote above) but my experiences match up with a lot of the negative feedback here.

With regards to Mr. Yoji Fujito's response to feedback:

Some points may greatly differ from player opinion, but please give it a read.

I would suggest that such a great disparity between developer opinion and player opinion means that there's something going on that isn't right. It implies that perhaps some common ground needs to be found, or that one (or both) of the parties doesn't have all the information they need to form a solid conclusion. It means more work needs to be done, not that the matter is put to rest.

Monsters were now able to participate in skillchains and magic burst, making them an overwhelmingly powerful source of damage.

While I absolutely love being able to skillchain and magic burst alongside my pets, and I unreservedly thank the development team for introducing this mechanism, I feel that the use of the word "overwhelmingly" might be a tad excessive here.

It's absolutely vital to remember that pets do not benefit from the majority of the support options available in this game. This includes absolutely fundamental things like healing. While I recognise (and appreciate!) the pet support options provided by Corsair, you can't use these effectively in mixed parties, or in situations where the master is intended to fight alongside the pet. I've rarely been offered them as a BST (or as a SMN for that matter) - and support buffs are one of the most essential aspects of the game. Have the developers seen heavy DD jobs solo skillchaining with support? Or just straight up spamming weaponskills? The damage is absolutely absurd, and far beyond the damage that beastmasters can deal. And while it's risky for player characters to be close to particularly nasty monsters, players can be healed extremely quickly in rapid succession by supporting players. My familiars can't.

Also please note that skillchains and magic bursts often can't happen. If people are spamming weaponskills on a monster, there is no way I can consistently make a skillchain, let alone magic burst.

I'm not asking for BST damage to be massively scaled here - I'm just trying to point out that assuming that BST is a dangerously high source of damage is invalid.

Pets also had decent survivability

This isn't true. Pets have a bucketload of hitpoints, and while there's some really useful gear to support their defences (thanks for this), there's only so much it can do - familiars cannot be frequently healed. This last point is the key. When you have monsters like caturae in Omen spamming Interference and Malign Invocation every 15 seconds, it's frequent healing that keeps players able to fight. In situations like this, defences like HP and MDT keep you from being oneshot - nothing more.

Pets also aren't benefitting from the ballooning increase in magic evasion gear that players have access to. The developers are "levelling up" player defences through gear, even though item level remains the same - but pet defences are not changing.

It's also worth noting that pet defence gear and master defence gear is not the same gear. We can't protect ourselves and our pets at the same time.

they could be called out again at full power after a five minute cooldown

Five minutes is an eternity in battlefield content. I understand (and agree) that pets shouldn't be functionally immortal, but Beastmasters should not be expected to go without a familiar for several minutes unless they've made a serious mistake.

Also bear in mind that some of our most powerful familiars are called from high-quality jugs that are not easy to make. There aren't enough in existence to call them out every 5 minutes.

At this point, beastmaster was capable of battling with almost no risk to themselves.

I really do not want to throw Summoners and Puppetmasters under the bus (particularly as I have counted the former as one of my main jobs since I started playing the game), but... they can do this. Summoner's pets are eminently disposible. Puppetmaster I understand less well, but from what I've heard and seen, automatons are basically invulnerable when set up correctly, and some of Deus Ex Automata's penalties are fairly easily overcome.

And I want to make it clear that I heartly endorse SMN, PUP, and formerly BST being able to do this - it's a different playstyle, and different is good. They don't deserve a range nerf any more than Beastmasters did. Astral Conduit/Unleash abuse is a different matter entirely, and not really relevant to this discussion.

Player skill was not involved in this version of beastmaster

Perhaps in some instances, but I'd challenge the developers to go for some of the challenging solo targets that Beastmasters (and other pet jobs) used to hunt while fighting at range. Going up against All-Seeing Onyx Eye in La Vaule [S] with just pugils and the tricky to charm sabretooths as pets was an absolute blast because it was so tricky to get right.

I really miss this sort of stuff. We need more of it - pet fights can be incredibly dangerous and risky too, given the right circumstances. Pet enmity is shocking. It's the role of the developers to give us more fights where this can be done, instead of tiny restrictive battlefields.

they could be defeated by endlessly sending out powerful pets.

This is absolutely not true. There's a five minute timer, and in battlefields there are no ambient monsters we can charm like we used to. And Summoners do this. Again, in an all pet job party, the risk is the enmity - pets can't hold hate, and that's fine. It's the risk we've always dealt with as pet jobs.

which created some extreme cases where pets did all the fighting

This can be fun, and valid. Keeping pets alive and able to fight, and managing enmity, can be really difficult against powerful monsters. Balancing a pet-based approach to fighting in battlefields is the responsibility of developers - it should be possible, but risky, just like any traditional strategy. Blanket denying it as an option isn't a good way of dealing with the problem, as it removes a whole playstyle from the game. Having lots of possible playstyles is really important.

Again, I'd like to direct the developers to old-school pet job soloing techniques. It's risky, it's dangerous, and it is an absolute blast. You make a mistake, and the monster comes over and eats your face in 5 seconds. I loved it, and I miss it.

Battles were streamlined into a monotonous process, and enemy mechanics became meaningless.

There are other approaches to defeating dangerous monsters which match this description. Zergs and Astral Conduit fights are extremely boring. Battles with time limits are boring as they promote only one strategy. This is a whole different can of worms though.

making sure its equipment and traits were used to fulfill a frontline role

I accept and understand this new vision that Beastmasters should be able to be on the front line. I welcome any additional flexibility that this outlook brings. However, I'm not seeing this happening in practice.

I very much welcome equipment (like the Tali'ah set and most new pet job accessories) and food that include pet bonuses alongside master bonuses, but the options are still restrictive and limited. This gear means that both myself and my pet have enough accuracy to actually hit monsters, some of the time, but that's a low bar. I can't gear myself for offense without sacrificing my pet's powers, and vice versa.

And if I'm honest, I'm actually completely fine with that. I don't mind hitting more slowly and for less damage than other jobs, as long as my pet is beside me making up the difference. I would really love it if, together, a balance in gearing for the pet and master added up to one whole - that's the point of the job, after all. But it doesn't work like that; improving gear and stacking buffs often gives exponential gains, and there's no situation where both myself and my pet benefit simultaneously. It just doesn't work.

To reiterate: I'm fine with the model of Beastmaster and familiar fighting together, but you as developers need to recognise that, in practice, this is far, far weaker than it appears conceptually. If you want it to work (and I want it to work!) then it needs to be done properly. Dual-purpose gear is the first step. Fencer traits are okay, but of limited use for a whole host of reasons. Together, they don't add up to the vision you propose.

Please do not continue to work under the illusion that this aim has been realised. It hasn't. It is not something that currently counts in Beastmaster's favour.

Also bear in mind that Beastmasters are still using a level 89 axe. LEVEL 89. This needs to be fixed as soon as possible. An emergency maintenance tomorrow would not be soon enough.

and shortened the range of commands to bring back a sense of risk to the job

I hope I've successfully explained that this isn't the case.

The shortened range of commands also means that sometimes they JUST DO NOT WORK. A monster paths oddly, or does a knockback move, or is just big - these things shut down Beastmaster for a few seconds, every single time. I'm so bored of my pet commands not working when my pet was right there not even a second ago, or when I'm standing right next to it.

This is still broken. It's not fun. It doesn't work. It's horrible. I hate it. Find a way to fix it.

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.

I hope I've successfully demonstrated that gear and food don't quite add up the way they seem to add up.

The adjustments didn't just lower Beastmaster's capabilities. They stripped Beastmasters of a whole playstyle that we've been using and enjoying since Beastmaster was released as a job. Less playstyles is bad. I can't stress this enough. It was fun, and now it's impossible. That's not just a lowering of capabilities.

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.

I will reluctantly and grudgingly acknowledge that the development team is forcefully taking this stance and eliminating an entire playstyle from the job, but it's not working.

Bear in mind that this stance shuts down a really fun, exciting, dangerous way of playing the game by doing this. Pet job fights were so much fun, and it could all go wrong so quickly. I hate to see them misrepresented in this way.

As we’ve often mentioned, these job adjustments aren’t final, and we’ll continue making adjustments to improve its frontline capabilities

But this was a golden opportunity to realise this goal, and there was nothing in this update that helped beastmasters do anything.

Mr. Yoji Fujito's response to feedback also didn't address any Beastmaster concerns beyond the range nerf. To reiterate my previous point from page 3, there are a lot of things about Beastmaster that are still literally broken. The most important factors remain:

• BST still has to use a level 75 pair of trousers and a level 89 axe to reduce Ready recast time. These two items are essential to ensuring that our familiars can keep up - if they weren't people wouldn't still be using a level 89 axe against level 150 monsters. This is not compatible with your vision of a frontline BST.
  
• 40% of our non-merit job abilities - Charm, Tame, Gauge - are essentially unusable. Charm is iconic, but unusable. This feels very wrong.
  
• New pets are not a fix. They are nice, if they're truly new (or even if they're reintroduced old pets that have been below level cap for a while), but they are not a job update.

Please, please understand that the developer's vision for BST is not working. We understand the motivations - they don't need to be reiterated - but here on the ground, it's not working.

Some ideas that could make a real difference to Beastmasters:

FUNDAMENTAL

• Add a job trait "Ferocity" with two tiers at 75 and 90. Each reduces Sic and Ready recast by 5 seconds, and doesn't stack with equipment. Don't just add new axes/gear with this effect - they'll be obsolete one day, and we'll be right back here again.
  
• Remove the range nerf.

Pet healing and defence

• Add a Reward pet food (stackable to 99, 33 made per synth) that grants a hefty stoneskin effect that is enhanced by Reward potency and MND, just like Pet Food X.
  
• Have the regen potency of Pet Poultice scale with level, make it affected by Reward potency and MND, and make it stack with Pet Food X.
  
• Allow Pet Roborant to remove Petrification.
  
• Double the effectiveness of Reward recast gear when applying Pet Poultice and Pet Roborant.
  
• Add a new job ability toggle that gradually trickles HP between the Beastmaster and the familiar. HP should trickle from whichever has the highest HP% to the lowest, and the potency should increase proportionally to the difference (within reason). The familiar should receive a bonus to the HP trickle it receives.

Charm

• Add a new trait that lets us Charm a single monster even when we already have one. Have it mimic our main pet as much as possible, grant our main pet their matching Killer effect (or increase it), and enhance our own matching Killer trait. I'm not asking for "double the pet power" - our jugs are already stronger than charmable pets - but this adds some damage, some utility, some flexibility, and most importantly, some FUN.
  
• Refactor the Charm duration equation above level 99 so we aren't hugely penalised when charming mobs that are stronger than Even Match. The /check system isn't accurate any longer; Tough and Very Tough monsters are no longer too terrifying to even approach solo, and Even Match pets can't do anything against the targets we fight these days. Charm+ gear can only do so much - I'm pretty sure it's applied before the heavily level penalties reduce everything.
  
• If we're going to continue "levelling up" with overpowered gear, make sure Charm takes this into account so it can scale and stay relevant.
  
• Fix Gauge so that it works in an item level environment.
  
• Allow us to Charm new monster families once we hit a certain level (maybe Tulfaire, Hippogryph, Bugard, etc etc etc). If some of these would be broken due to special moves, restrict just those moves, but only if it's absolutely necessary.

Charm in Battlefields

• Reduce Tame's recast time and let us use Tame while we already have a pet. Let us Tame the pets belonging to enemy Beastmasters so they go idle for a while. Let us Charm those idle pets!
  
• Make sure monsters from Charmable families are charmable in as much content as possible.
  
• Find a way to exclude Charmed pets from objectives in content like Omen (or some other work-around).

Of course, it's not going to be possible to have Charm work in all battlefields, but having it work in as many as possible would be really fun.

Combat

• Increase Beastmaster's Shield rank to at least C and consider us for new shields as they are released.
  
• Let us use Ready move that don't target monsters even when our pets aren't engaged.
  
• When our Ready moves fail to activate (stun, sleep, petrification, targetted monster dies), refund us the charges.

I'm sure veteran and career Beastmasters (if there are any left :() will have more/better ideas, given the chance to express them.

Well, I am out.

My sub ends soon, thus, an active account is required to post on the forums. Therefore, being unsubbed, I will no longer be able to post. Not going to make one of those "Goodbye" threads, because the nature of mmos allow players to come back at will.

I returned to FFXI in June, after years of not playing. Yep, I am checking out mere months later. When I was away, I was really away from the game. I did not even know what the latest jugs were. To my surprise, they were much of the same.

I may be back, if something changes with Monstrosity or BST. However, I doubt I will be aware. Like I said, when I was away from XI, I was AWAY from XI lol. I discover updates super late lol. Anyway, peace, for now....Maybe.....

Jan patch bringing more BST focus. I believe they're incrementally proofing changes in very small amounts as to not overwhelmingly disrupt balances or difficulty pertaining to NMs.