January 2020 FINAL FANTASY XI Digest

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Originally Posted by Jerbob

I'm not going to lie - I won't be happy with anything but a full and complete reversion of the distance nerf. All these suggestions are good compromises, but the nerf is based on a flawed premise, and we shouldn't have to compromise. I am explicitly asking for a revert, because it's ridiculous.

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I wish I could thumbs up more than once. I won't either for the same reason. There hasn't been a reasonable explanation for the distance nerf. Monster attributes were heavily inflated at the time and doesn't exist any more. PUP is in a similar situation but doesn't have to deal with fallout because again the issue no longer exists.

It's not fun being in the heat of battle having to remind myself that I need to watch my pet like a toddler that likes to run off.

I don't like it either but with the devs digging their heels in an doubling down on this being the right way to fix BST even though the range was fine for the near decade-and-a-half before it, making the exact reason we're frustrated as clear as possible and aiming for a compromise my have a chance of getting them to listen. Then if/when they do that, they'll see players are happier and ppl won't be abusing the mechanics more.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

... ppl won't be abusing the mechanics more.

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I take issue with your phrasing :P
Manipulating the mechanics is exactly what you do when playing this game. I would hardly call it abuse.

Is it abuse when a solo RDM takes down Odin by silencing him, using 1 damage daggers and enspells to kill him while he cannot use magic or tp moves? its simply smart strategy. Why would you want to punish such a thing?

I understand if there are unintended consequences and scenarios in a complex system like ffxi. However, I hardly call it abuse unless a player is using a 3rd party app to manipulate the game.

Learning the limitations well, and finding a niche application of abilities or loophole is exactly what makes the fights in FFXI so much fun.

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Originally Posted by Xilk

I take issue with your phrasing :P
Manipulating the mechanics is exactly what you do when playing this game. I would hardly call it abuse.

Is it abuse when a solo RDM takes down Odin by silencing him, using 1 damage daggers and enspells to kill him while he cannot use magic or tp moves? its simply smart strategy. Why would you want to punish such a thing?

I understand if there are unintended consequences and scenarios in a complex system like ffxi. However, I hardly call it abuse unless a player is using a 3rd party app to manipulate the game.

Learning the limitations well, and finding a niche application of abilities or loophole is exactly what makes the fights in FFXI so much fun.

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I'm referring to what SE considers abuse, i.e. the reason they made this nerf in the first place.

Your example is different, and it's not something that there is any easy way to address (the only easy way would be to make enemies no longer follow the same rules as players and just use abilities whenever they want), even though it might not, strictly speaking, be specifically intended. They've always been pretty loose with red mage especially, since with various tactics they can solo virutally everything, it's just extremely time consuming / inefficient in many cases. In the case of BST, their changes were directed at discouraging a playstyle that has no downsides- both efficient and safe. This is understandable- it's their solution that isn't, because it punishes players who were already playing or trying to play the way SE wanted. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater, i believe is the right expression here.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

I'm referring to what SE considers abuse, i.e. the reason they made this nerf in the first place.

Your example is different, and it's not something that there is any easy way to address (the only easy way would be to make enemies no longer follow the same rules as players and just use abilities whenever they want), even though it might not, strictly speaking, be specifically intended. They've always been pretty loose with red mage especially, since with various tactics they can solo virutally everything, it's just extremely time consuming / inefficient in many cases. In the case of BST, their changes were directed at discouraging a playstyle that has no downsides- both efficient and safe. This is understandable- it's their solution that isn't, because it punishes players who were already playing or trying to play the way SE wanted. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater, i believe is the right expression here.

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The reason they nerfed us in the first place was because monster stats were overinflated (it was pre-GEO/macc/meva nerf/adjustment) and the non-BST players whined up a storm about how they could not beat Geas Fete NMs when middling-geared BST pets had higher baseline accuracy and attack than many melee players and were capable of defeating T1 NMs with pet Ready moves that dealt roughly as much damage as well geared melee WS, (even though doing so often risked timing out in the encounter. lol) The nerf to JA range had very little, if anything at all, to do with the actual complaints and problems at the time. Said complaints also quickly fizzled out after only a few months of gear creep and melees got access to Escha-Ru'aun gear, yet the unnecessary nerf to an entire job remains half a decade later..

The stubborn insistance that there is nothing wrong with the current implementation has finally convinced me, and I am converting camps from asking for compromise to demanding a full reversion of all BST JAs. There are quite literally zero reasonable, rational justifications for proclaiming that all is well while the city burns around us. Please explain how exactly a bugged implementation of an overreaching nerf that reduced an entire job's functionality to less than melee range is something worthy of being defended as staunchly as you have been doing? Restoring our JA ranges to what they were 6yrs ago will not result in BST suddenly becoming OP, and the only increase in DPS will be due to no longer seeing that accursed "out of range" error message. It will make the job far less frustrating and more fun to play however, since there will be no worries about our JAs failing to complete while playing the way you have told us to.

At this point, a BST who is perfectly geared for the pet-only playstyle will perform far worse than any other DD job, even with a full reversion of the range nerf, barring fight-specific gimmicks which increase damage taken by the target. A BST who is perfectly geared for master-only playstyle will also perform far worse than any other DD job. Because of how our gear has been designed so far, it's not feasible for both master+pet to perform anywhere close to peak performance at the same time. (BST master-meleeing is also a very bland experience since we are also lacking any mainjob JA/JT that properly encourage meleeing, which results in doing literally nothing except WS and auto-attacks.)

I'm still pinning my hopes on everything being a mistake due to a flawed testing environment, btw. I really don't want to believe that the current dev team actually seriously expects their customers to enjoy any job that fails to function more reliably than it does succeeding to do... anything. I would much prefer to believe that your hearts and ideas are in the right place, and you are just mistakenly basing your judgements on a bad test build of the game's program, and/or failing to account for reasonable network latency due to using a locally hosted test system, or something else along those lines. Please take into account just how many YEARS that the entire game had the wrong stats for magic evasion and magic accuracy before dismissing this question. The change to readying time to 0.25sec feels supportive of a mismatch between the testing environment and live servers being a probable source of discontinuity between what the devs think is happening versus what players are experiencing during live gameplay (some of whom are playing from the other side of the planet and naturally have significantly more unavoidable latency than those playing while in the same geographical region as the servers.) It should not be all that difficult or time consuming to verify parity between testing/live builds, so I implore the dev team to do so periodically for the sake of knowing for absolute certain that the game actually plays the way you believe that it does.




Once again, my suggestions for further adjustments to allow the BST job to function more in-line with the proscribed playstyle:

* New JT: Pet gains a portion of ALL master stats from gear. To start with, +30% seems reasonable to test the waters and verify that it doesn't create any unexpected overwhelmingly powerful results, then adjust upwards as feasible without disrupting overall game balance. Let's start with naturally gaining this new JT at T1:lv25, T2:lv50, T3:lv75, (T4:lv99 could be added 1-3 months later once you're satisfied that it won't break the game,) with each tier giving +10% to the effect. This takes all stats that master gains from equipment into account, (though with this, I am assuming there would be no problems with not-applicable-to-pet stats from gear like Dual Wield, similar to how gear stats work for players.) My eyeballed estimate would be roughly around the +60% mark before the benefit from this trait while equipped in purely master-based gear would overtake purely pet-based gear, so it would still be optimal to use pet gear when wanting to focus purely on the pet. This would give us a means to properly melee as master without totally crippling our pets. It would also give the devs the bonus of having a "knob to turn" for the job that could be used to easily and directly affect pet damage output, by adding tiers gained thru leveling and/or gear that enhances the stat by a further percentage. I see this as a simple, yet fundamentally ideal, solution to the issues surrounding equipment for a pet job that is now intended to be equally focused on pet and master when equipment has absolutely not been implemented in a style that actually supports that playstyle in any way up until now, where the only questionable aspects are the percentage values involved.

* Do away with the current jug pet level system for ilvl players, including ignoring any/all level caps normally baked into each jug. Either simply set pet base level to master's average ilvl, (like trusts,) or steal the system used for PUP and have our pet's lvl determined by a new ranged slot item (that plays nice with pet foods being equipped into the ammo slot.) It is quite unbalanced that ours is the only job in-game that essentially is being forced to use underleveled "equipment" to gain access to what are effectively JAs. Unlocking all jugs to allow usage in higher level endgame content would also effectively give us a whole bunch of new pets to play with that most of us have probably never used before! Convert all existing effects that adjust pet level cap into "Pet: Lv+", adjusting values as needed after actually testing the new pet levels. (Given how ilvl was implemented for pets, I sincerely doubt that even an ilvl150 jug pet would actually be overpowered in practice since it'd just be gaining base attributes/stats and BST does not have anything equivalent to SMN's "Blood Pact Damage+" stat on gear for our Ready moves.) Although, I probably would not complain if the Pet: Lv+ range was reduced a bit more in-line with PUP/DRG/SMN. (I'm personally partial to stealing the PUP system as it would give another "knob to turn" by providing a new slot to pile pet stats onto as needed.)

* Consider allowing our new pet-based buff effects to affect party/alliance members. As others have mentioned, we don't exactly bring much utility or support to a group currently. This should probably wait until other factors like the current buff conflicts being resolved, but after that's addressed, this could be a nice way for us to contribute more in group settings than only personal damage output (which currently, is depressingly going to be lower than just about any other equivalently geared DD in the same party slot with near absolute certainty.)

* Also in-line with the new buff-type Ready adjustment, please drastically reduce the cooldown on Call Beast and Bestial Loyalty. Including all possible reductions, the lower bounds on each should be 10sec and 5min, respectively, to allow us to use multiple pet buff effects simultaneously and/or swap to our preferred pet after buffing ourselves with other pets. Alternatively, reset Call Beast and reduce the cooldown remaining on Bestial Loyalty by 10min when Leave is used on a pet that has 100% HP, again similar to PUP's system. This may sound extreme, but the increased usage would be already offset by the inherent costs involved with using more jugs. Unlike all other pet jobs: BST has to use paid-for consumable jug items each time they call a pet, our pets despawn on zoning, and have a time limit on duration. We should be allowed to take full advantage of our new toolbox of abilities if we are willing to pay the increased combat time and gil cost to do so. If this were to be implemented, I would also like to ask to have all NQ jugs stack-size changed to 99 to facilitate more frequent usage, and NPC price for jugs substantially reduced so that a stack costs around the cost of quivers from the Curio Moogle. Even with the proposed NPC cost reduction, I would still expect BST to quickly climb to the dubious position of being the most expensive job to play.. But at least our Cooking friends would get a nice new stream of income! lol (Actually might want to increase crafting/synergy yield per synth for jugs to reduce complaints about increased cost to play the job as well.)

* Convert "Pet Roboront" to an on-use item like medicines, with a 1sec use time. Reward simply can not keep up with how frequently pets get debuffed, and the current usage of roboront requires the sacrifice of using Reward to actually heal our pet, which oftentimes negates the benefit of clearing debuffs. As an on-use item, we'd be able to use it on demand as frequently as required while the 1sec usage timer includes the cost of losing master damage output during that time spent. We also need a method to clear Petrify, Amnesia, etc. from pets, so please tack those onto the new-style roboront or additionally add another type of on-use roboront which covers other debuffs which can be removed from players normally via -na spells.


tl;dr: Please fix the bugs in my favorite job and enable me to play it the way you keep telling me to play it. :(

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Originally Posted by Nyarlko

The stubborn insistance that there is nothing wrong with the current implementation has finally convinced me, and I am converting camps from asking for compromise to demanding a full reversion of all BST JAs.

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How about getting some video footage up to illustrate the points that you are trying to make, and the bugs you are concerned about? A few visual examples.

maybe reward recast NOT being Capped at 25% (23 seconds) would be a good tweak.

I actually already have 34 seconds of recast reduction from gear.. both of which I need to hit the 23 second cap, while one is 19 seconds and the other is 15 seconds. its kinda a silly cap.

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Originally Posted by Xilk

maybe reward recast NOT being Capped at 25% (23 seconds) would be a good tweak.

I actually already have 34 seconds of recast reduction from gear.. both of which I need to hit the 23 second cap, while one is 19 seconds and the other is 15 seconds. its kinda a silly cap.

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I agree so much with this. I wish we had more options to increase reward recast reduction so that we Group 1 merits are not necessary and I can use Killer Effects and Ready Recast to fight alongside my pet. While we're at it, double the potency of killer merits and allowed reward recast reduction and reward potency to be increased further.

I can't agree more with most of the things that have been said lately on this thread.

Beastmaster range really, really needs a full range revert..... I know the devs want Bst to melee, but that's just historically been the less popular way to play, it's very odd, doesn't anyone remember that some of the most popular mobs were bombs to exp on as pet jobs were bombs because they self destructed and you could stay in a safe range? Snarl didn't exist for a long time, either, and jug pets weren't really a thing, often you tended to stay far back so you had time to react when a mob lost charm/killed your pet... it's really weird and unfortunate that this late in the game they've decided to force us out of our traditional playstyle, and for reasons that have not aged well. (Yes Bst was strong at the time of the nerf, but even with a full range revert, I highly doubt our popularity would be anywhere close to Smn's) And worse yet that they continue to insist on a playstyle that most people don't wish to participate in, most of the few Bsts that I see still just stand as far back as they can (which isn't far).

IIRC the original vision of Samurai was to be more tank than DD, and Ninja to be a DD not a tank. Imagine if SE had continually nerfed Sam's damage potential again and again while people tried to use it to DD. Imagine if in response to Ninjas tanking they nerfed Utsusemi into the ground, (less shadows, longer recast, etc), while they might have resisted at first, (Utsusemi hate nerf comes to mind.) at some point, SE eventually embraced the community's vision of these jobs, they gave Sam DD gear, they gave Ninja tanking gear, and tried to balance around it, they realized the players found a more applicable/fun way to play the job, and made allowances for that, rather than just dictating that we must play the way the developers initially intended, why is that not possible now?

I think BST should be meleeing, I just thing this is the complete wrong way to do it. THe right way to do it is to make their WS better, give them traits that support melee DPS, maybe stat bonuses for being near the pet, etc.

Players shouldn't be strongarmed into a play style- If you want them to do it, make it attractive, make it the obviously more effective option.

My summoner is almost better at it. Easy level 3 skillchains, a surprising amount of attack/accuracy available, etc. But they're not forcing me to do it, I have that choice. Changes like this have me wondering if SE is going to some day force me to be at range somehow. o.O