August 2020 FINAL FANTASY XI Digest

Beastmaster has a very large amount of equipment to carry for the master's abilities, for their pet's physical and magical abilities, to heal the pet, and lots of jugs.

There are about 29 jugs that give different types of pets at or near 119. Even if you aren't using them all. Just having several is a lot. Beast Affinity feels mandatory versus being an option.

Suggestion: Have 119 pets be learnable instead and use a new universal jug item to summon pets. Pet become 119 with weapon in main hand like Dragoon.

Right now it seems Beastmaster gets more use out of Dual Wielding weapons. Beastmaster doesn't have the multi-attack of Warrior or Red Mage to really make use of using a single weapon.

Suggestion 1: Give Job Ability Haste to Beastmaster with Fencer.
Suggestion 2: Give multi-attack to Beastmater with Fencer.
Suggestion 3: Give BST Weaponskill damage boost like Dragoon when pet and master on same target.

Shields are very lacking.

Suggestion 1: Add Beastmaster to Blurred Shield / Blurred Shield +1 / Nibiru Shield / Voluspa Shield (DI Shield) / Svalinn changed to WAR RDM PLD BST
Suggestion 2: Added Beastmaster only shields that add copious pet and master stats. Suggestion 3: Add more shields to existing content. Ambuscade Pulse option, Superior gear and Gaes Fete. Improve more in Unity upgrade shields.

The Tatami Shield is a very nice design that is sorely missed.

New pets are pretty nice (Crossthrash, Hoof Volley and Mega Scissors are bugged however, and TP does not increase their damage).

New traits are decent, but do little to address the main problems with beastmaster melee damage.

There is little point to the pet fighting. Base damage of pets is very low - at 139 base damage, this puts them on par with daggers, while having delays in the 240 to 320 range - the same as axes and swords. Compared to level 99, when pets had relatively high base damage for their delay, this is pretty disappointing and makes for rather pitiful auto-attack damage.

The extra TP from hits is also not very useful, as pet TP moves ignore any TP below 1000. It would be better to set the anchor points at 0, 1500 and 3000 TP, instead of 1000/2000/3000 as is the case now.

Meleeing with master still has its issues too. Most importantly, axe weapon skills are significantly weaker than most other weapon types. Beastmaster not having any native delay reduction is yet another problem.

Another problem is that pets are, on the whole, not sturdy enough. Reward was designed around level 75 play, and the game at this point is much more fast-paced. A 4000 HP heal every 52 seconds is not sufficient nowadays.

On top of that, there exists very few pieces of equipment that has both good defensive stats for pet, as well as offensive stats for master. Other melee jobs have plenty of access to equipment that give both good defensive and offensive stats simultaneously. For beastmaster however, if you want to equip gear with defensive stats for pet, you have to give up most offensive capability for the master.

Range on pet commands - no matter how much you say that this is meant to make beastmasters melee, the fact is that it impedes meleeing. Often, despite fighting the same target as pet, there are things that will cause the pet to be out of range, such as the target moving, the pet running off to fight something else due to being hit by an AoE, adjacent mobs moving in range and forcing pet and target to reposition.

Every time this happens the pet needs repositioning which means spending 4 seconds of job ability delay to use heel and fight. Constantly interrupting meleeing to do this means a drop in damage that should not have to exist. It also makes for a very clunky, frustrating and unenjoyable experience.

All in all the job has too many small things which, all added together, makes meleeing too ineffectual. Very disappointing since I want to melee alongside my pet, and used to do so back at 99 and before that - but between the updates to the job, and the general direction the game has been moving in over the last 5-6 years, it has grown increasingly inefficient and frustrating to do so.

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Originally Posted by Nadie

Range on pet commands - no matter how much you say that this is meant to make beastmasters melee, the fact is that it impedes meleeing. Often, despite fighting the same target as pet, there are things that will cause the pet to be out of range, such as the target moving, the pet running off to fight something else due to being hit by an AoE, adjacent mobs moving in range and forcing pet and target to reposition.

Every time this happens the pet needs repositioning which means spending 4 seconds of job ability delay to use heel and fight. Constantly interrupting meleeing to do this means a drop in damage that should not have to exist. It also makes for a very clunky, frustrating and unenjoyable experience.

All in all the job has too many small things which, all added together, makes meleeing too ineffectual. Very disappointing since I want to melee alongside my pet, and used to do so back at 99 and before that - but between the updates to the job, and the general direction the game has been moving in over the last 5-6 years, it has grown increasingly inefficient and frustrating to do so.

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Yep. Rewarding can be a complete nightmare too. Many times my pet has needed an emergency heal and it failed because my pet was apparently 'out of range'. Despite the fact my pet and I are fighting the same monster.

Puppetmaster and to a lesser extent Dragoon mechanically works better as a tandem pet/player combo way more than Beastmaster. Please, please make adjustments as you have for Puppetmaster and Dragoon.

• PUP has comfortable distance on commands but still melees just fine when applicable.
  
  
• PUP and DRG have better control of pet survival without sacrificing DPS.
  - Repair & Maintenance remove all types of effects, not just Silence, Weight, Slow, Paralysis, Poison, and Blind only.
  - PUP oils give double the Regen.
  - PUP has the ability to use defense and auto-regen attachments.
  - DRG can cover their pet, give stoneskin effect, heal and remove status ailments including Doom which BST cannot remove.
  
  
• PUP and DRG keep their pets when they zone.
  
  
• PUP can immediately resummon in weakened state.
  
  
• PUP can swap HP, TP or Enmity values with pet.
  
  
• PUP maneuvers have no JA delay to interrupt TP gain, give a ring's worth of attribute and can last up to 5 mins over time.
  
  
• PUP and DRG gets Job Point categories for the master.

The design of these two jobs is way more comfortable to play with the pet in tandem. It flows well at the core mechanics to say yeah this master and pet works together.

Increasing distance isn't about exploiting the system. Having a healthy amount of distance ensures abilities execute properly in a variety of situations. While some BST pets have major amounts of specific kinds of DT. With the 5 minute recast they have you can't swap around like you can with SMN or PUP.

Thank you for the update

I enjoyed the new mission line and quite like the pace. Previously there was always so much to do at once it felt quite stressful and harrying. This was very relaxing and fun and makes me look forward to the next bit instead of dreading the next update because I wasn't done with my missions yet. I have hope for another great two years.

Quite nice overall.
(Except for making me fail the cat when I was actually supposed to have a merry chat with Promathia.)

Thank you for the great work on this update. I'm really looking forward to the new storyline.

I'm also a long time Beastmaster fan. I really like the the tandem strike and tandem blow traits. They are a nice flavor of these buffs for beastmaster and they work well. I can notice the improvement without it being overwhelming. They are well developed and well-implemented updates.

I also really appreciate the new pets! I took extra effort to test them out to understand them as much as possible.

This is definitely a great way to design the beastmaster pets. They have clear strengths and weaknesses. Its exactly the spirit of playing beastmaster to find the right animal that works in in the right ecosystem! I especially notice that player feedback was taken into consideration when adding these pets. Having a lynx pet with thunder bursting and support abilities is great (and I specifically asked for this one). Players have long wanted a Slime-type pet and an ilvl 119 Hippogryph pet!. The skillchain properties are also great! I have wanted a good fragmentation ready move for a long time, and now there are 2! So thank you very much!

However, I do worry about the Beastmaster design as a whole. There are many good suggestions in this thread that I like, but some I don't really agree with either.
Moreso, I really cannot accept the way of forcing beastmaster to the frontline.

Do not misunderstand, I always wanted to play in the front line with my beastmaster from several years ago, and it has improved since then, so I am thankful. However, forcing the playstyle is a poor design choice in my opinion.

I think beastmaster has long struggled with its identity as a job.

Its identity was clear in the early game, in how the mechanics of charming monsters was used. However, this also alienated the job from party and alliance play, which was a complete conflict with the rest of the game design to work together.

Beastmasters eventually found a home in End-game by using a complete pet-style party or alliance.

However, the recent changes have nerfed this playstyle alot. If Identity as a charmer of wild beasts, and as a pet-focused job are gone... what is it now? Is beastmaster just another damage dealer? it doesn't really fit well or shine enough to be worth choosing over another job in the same roles.

I worry that making the play-styles more homogenous will have a negative effect on the enjoyability of the game. why have so many jobs if they become more and more the same?

Why are you necrobumping instead of making a new topic or posting in the current one that people are actually looking at?