November 2019 Update for Beastmaster
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November’s job adjustments are to beastmasters and scholars. Beastmasters will have some new pets to choose from, while scholars are seeing numerical changes to some of their spells and abilities.
New pets. Seriously? :rolleyes: October's update to monk and dragoon added job traits, a job ability for dragoon, and an across-the-board update to hand-to-hand weapon skills. It was a significant bump to both jobs, particularly to monk, and instantly resulted in that job being desirable for parties.
For beastmaster, we get new pets. Not a new job trait or job ability or changes to existing pet commands, not even changes to merits, which several other jobs have already gotten. New pets are not enough. The job needs fundamental changes to its design.
I want to revisit the 2015 post here:
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Originally Posted by
Grekumah
As we’ve mentioned before, the development team has no plans to change the range at which beastmasters can use commands. As Matsui previously stated, we want beastmasters to be close range battle jobs and bear the risk of taking damage in the front line. This change was made, because players were using beastmaster to attack from the back line, and this was against what the development team had intended for beastmaster.
Beastmaster bears the risk of being a close range battle job... for what reward, exactly? Puppetmaster is also a close range battle job, but it can use pet abilities at almost 18 yalms, and maneuvers are effective at almost any range! Not only do beastmaster pet commands need to be performed at close range, but they have to be performed at inconsistent, close range, which varies on the size of the in-game models of different players and pets. That makes BST so clumsy to play, even disregarding the risk of being on the front line.
Compared to summoner, beastmaster pets moves do not get significant stat scaling, and so our Familiar 1-hour is relatively worthless. Summoner also gets pets that provide direct player buffs and the Avatar's Favor aura, giving them broader options for party play.
Speaking of party play, BST as a front line job gets no direct damage dealing job traits except for Fencer (which isn't worthwhile for us, since there are no good damage dealing shields for BST) and no direct damage dealing job abilities that can apply to all mobs. Furthermore, player and pet buffs are totally separate. So as a close range battle job, we can act as a subpar melee damage dealer, but in that case, our pets are basically useless, unbuffed and unless we swap to Charmer's Merlin, at 15 seconds per Ready charge. In total BST, as a pure damage job, deals close range damage similar to support jobs like corsair, bard, or red mage, without those jobs' ability to provide buffs to the party.
Also, beastmasters have to swap weapons, losing TP in order for the pet to achieve its minimum Ready move timer. Like a back line job! If your intent is truly to have beastmaster play as a front line job, then remove the need for us to switch weapons to minimize our Ready timer, and buff the damage that we do, whether that means buffing Axe weaponskills, as you just did with hand-to-hand weapon skills, or buffing the damage that our pets do.
Please make meaningful changes to the beastmaster job, or don't bother doing anything at all. No matter how nice the new pets are, they cannot address the fundamental design flaws with beastmaster. The 2015 changes to pet commands were an absolute disaster, you ignored the warnings from the player base then, and here 4 years later our job continues to be ignored while other jobs have received attention.