November 2019 FINAL FANTASY XI Digest

[Ferth]

To be perfectly honest, I didn't expect a range increase for the ready ability. This response explains exactly why I wouldn't have expected one, but what it doesn't address how is insulting this update was. There are still things about beastmaster that need to be addressed, without changing the range for ready, and this "update" ignored all of them in favor of cosmetic changes to pets that already exist in the game. To even call this a "change" is disingenuous, nothing changed, and certainly nothing is better because of it.

As these updates roll out it becomes patently clear that the devs don't really understand what is going on with most of these jobs. The merit category spells being converted into scrolls and replaced with different merits is a noble goal, but in most cases the new merits being added aren't better than the ones that already existed and in some cases they are actively making the job worse *coughninjacough*.

I fully understand that the budget and development team for this game aren't even shadows of their former selves, but in fact are shadows of shadows... but rather than trying to crank out job specific updates every month, most of which that are paltry, some of which that are insultingly shallow, and even a few that needed to be reversed (or should be reversed, like ninja.) maybe you should take more time with these updates, and better consult the people who actually care about these jobs, since there is a clear disparity in the quality of these updates for certain jobs.

[Rwolf]

With all due respect, I'd like to provide a brief history of Beastmaster from a player perspective. This is a long post and may differ from your developer opinion but please give it a read.

▼Beastmaster's journey with parties.
BST always had trouble with parties in the beginning. Your pets level would ruin experience gained and that deterred players to invite them. This stigma was furthered by a few players who would charm and release higher level monsters onto parties.

This lead to players classifying it as a solo job. So for veteran BST players we struggled to get to level 75. As you've stated the game has made major changes over the years to remove that EXP penalty, to add Call Beast and other abilities.

▼Beastmaster's dance with enmity and backlining.
BST was always a dance of enmity. To melee and draw hate onto yourself to speed up fights or sit back and let the pet do damage. BST is the only pet job that can rest with pet attacking, so there was some design that BST would backline when necessary. Trying to charm an Incredibly Tough monster and lock them in with familiar was an amazing feeling. So while we meleed, we also backlined.

In Nov. 2007 at the beginning of Wings of the Goddess you gave us Snarl. Now we can just dump all of our enmity and pet commands were reduced to the same timers. This made it easier to melee but still risk-oriented so it's a good example of trying to encourage melee.

▼Abyssea and Charmer's Merlin...
Next comes the Abyssea era where Charmer's Merlin was introduced. Our melee prowess would be forever locked to this weapon as the -5 seconds to Ready was too valuable even then or now to dismiss.

BST power still remained too low and too stigmatized for players to include in group content. So BST continued to solo, duo or trios but finding a full party of them was very rare.

▼The first big Beastmaster update.
In comes the 2015 update where BST ready moves were revamped. There was no increased BST players yet. We continued to solo or lowman content to ourselves. Content became more and more difficult to stand in range. So groups relied on ranged damage in Ark Angel merit BCs and soon after Magic Burst setups.

▼The dreaded Beastmaster meta and bandwagoning.
Then came the era of where Sinister Reign, Escha and Omen began. Monsters were too difficult for melee still. Unable to reach accuracy caps and so dangerous. BST became the primary job to play because the pets higher stats was the only reasonably safe and reliable solution.

Then after a period of vitriol from a vocal minority, the very punishing distance nerf was implemented. This changed nothing, it didn't and doesn't increase any risk. As players just lined themselves up and ran in and out between TP moves and spells to use commands.

▼The end of Beastmasters in pick-up groups.
Then a series of updates changed everything. Monster evasion was lowered. AoE damage was lowered. Monster combat skills was lowered. Bard gained huge changes to accuracy and attack songs. Players received easy to obtain high combat and defense gear from Ambuscade. Higher JPs became more commonplace.

That's what changed things away from using BST backline only strategy from being commonplace. Power creep on enemies was so high, it took several updates to even the playing field. Jug pet damage without extreme support is lackluster and that same support with SMN, PUP, or melee DD will do far more so the general thought is BST is a solo class again so we party only in pet linkshells.

▼No one is disagreeing that BST shouldn't be a frontline job. Our distaste is you can't effectively melee like other frontline jobs.

• You have to stand with the pet at all times. Harder to manage with multiple monsters on your pet's hate list.
• Fencer and Damage Limit is the only native damage traits. Fencer is weak compared to Dual Wield. Damage Limit is something all DD jobs mostly got.
• Charmer's Merlin is a pre-item level weapon and would serve better to just be implemented not tied to weapons.
• The Relic set is focused on outdated Charm.

You want BST to be frontline and have risk and we understand. I guarantee you if you give the master a considerable way to melee, players will do it. I don't think pets need to be rebalanced or penalized as they've fallen way behind damage dealers since 2015.

▼Closing Remarks
Alternative ideas to distance penalty:

• Better damage from master through traits and gear.
• Ready recast called at 10 through merits, JP gifts, or armor not weapons.
• Making it so master being in range increases pet survivability to discourage standing back in Pet damage reduction gear. Maybe a WS like Primal Rend can heal the pet as an added effect or provide a shield to the pet.
• Maybe BST can spend some TP on pet maintenance abilities. Similar to the mechanics of waltz and sambas.

There are fun ways to make players use melee and the distance nerf as a veteran BST player is very frustrating. Please consider this.

[Voidstorm]

Rwolf, you're reminding me of the times I actually loved playing BST.
Charm an IT mob, familiar. send it to fight my enemies and melee after it builds hate for a couple seconds.
or charm cycle 2~3 pets, so I can always have at least one EM pet at 100% to swap to while EXP'ing.

I have another idea in addition to your closing remarks. job traits for each pet job to transfer over some master boosts to the pet.
examples:
Familiar's Allowance: Master's current Haste, Store TP, PDT, MDT, BDT, & DT are copied to your pet. Accuracy is contverted to P.M.R. accuracy (physical, magic, ranged). Attack is converted to P.M.R. Attack.
Avatar's Guidance: Master's current Haste, PDT, MDT, BDT, & DT are copied to your pet. Magic Accuracy is converted to P.M.R. accuracy. Magic Atk. Bonus is converted to P.M.R. Attack. Conserve MP is converted to Store TP.

This would make buffs like March help pets as well which is half of why pet jobs are hated in the buff heavy system we currently find ourselves.
And run old gear through an algorithm to convert stats so hopefully pets don't take too big a hit.

[Smokenttp]

With all due respect, I'd like to provide a brief history of Beastmaster from a player perspective. This is a long post and may differ from your developer opinion but please give it a read.

▼Beastmaster's journey with parties.
BST always had trouble with parties in the beginning. Your pets level would ruin experience gained and that deterred players to invite them. This stigma was furthered by a few players who would charm and release higher level monsters onto parties.

This lead to players classifying it as a solo job. So for veteran BST players we struggled to get to level 75. As you've stated the game has made major changes over the years to remove that EXP penalty, to add Call Beast and other abilities.

▼Beastmaster's dance with enmity and backlining.
BST was always a dance of enmity. To melee and draw hate onto yourself to speed up fights or sit back and let the pet do damage. BST is the only pet job that can rest with pet attacking, so there was some design that BST would backline when necessary. Trying to charm an Incredibly Tough monster and lock them in with familiar was an amazing feeling. So while we meleed, we also backlined.

In Nov. 2007 at the beginning of Wings of the Goddess you gave us Snarl. Now we can just dump all of our enmity and pet commands were reduced to the same timers. This made it easier to melee but still risk-oriented so it's a good example of trying to encourage melee.

▼Abyssea and Charmer's Merlin...
Next comes the Abyssea era where Charmer's Merlin was introduced. Our melee prowess would be forever locked to this weapon as the -5 seconds to Ready was too valuable even then or now to dismiss.

BST power still remained too low and too stigmatized for players to include in group content. So BST continued to solo, duo or trios but finding a full party of them was very rare.

▼The first big Beastmaster update.
In comes the 2015 update where BST ready moves were revamped. There was no increased BST players yet. We continued to solo or lowman content to ourselves. Content became more and more difficult to stand in range. So groups relied on ranged damage in Ark Angel merit BCs and soon after Magic Burst setups.

▼The dreaded Beastmaster meta and bandwagoning.
Then came the era of where Sinister Reign, Escha and Omen began. Monsters were too difficult for melee still. Unable to reach accuracy caps and so dangerous. BST became the primary job to play because the pets higher stats was the only reasonably safe and reliable solution.

Then after a period of vitriol from a vocal minority, the very punishing distance nerf was implemented. This changed nothing, it didn't and doesn't increase any risk. As players just lined themselves up and ran in and out between TP moves and spells to use commands.

▼The end of Beastmasters in pick-up groups.
Then a series of updates changed everything. Monster evasion was lowered. AoE damage was lowered. Monster combat skills was lowered. Bard gained huge changes to accuracy and attack songs. Players received easy to obtain high combat and defense gear from Ambuscade. Higher JPs became more commonplace.

That's what changed things away from using BST backline only strategy from being commonplace. Power creep on enemies was so high, it took several updates to even the playing field. Jug pet damage without extreme support is lackluster and that same support with SMN, PUP, or melee DD will do far more so the general thought is BST is a solo class again so we party only in pet linkshells.

▼No one is disagreeing that BST shouldn't be a frontline job. Our distaste is you can't effectively melee like other frontline jobs.

• You have to stand with the pet at all times. Harder to manage with multiple monsters on your pet's hate list.
• Fencer and Damage Limit is the only native damage traits. Fencer is weak compared to Dual Wield. Damage Limit is something all DD jobs mostly got.
• Charmer's Merlin is a pre-item level weapon and would serve better to just be implemented not tied to weapons.
• The Relic set is focused on outdated Charm.

You want BST to be frontline and have risk and we understand. I guarantee you if you give the master a considerable way to melee, players will do it. I don't think pets need to be rebalanced or penalized as they've fallen way behind damage dealers since 2015.

▼Closing Remarks
Alternative ideas to distance penalty:

• Better damage from master through traits and gear.
• Ready recast called at 10 through merits, JP gifts, or armor not weapons.
• Making it so master being in range increases pet survivability to discourage standing back in Pet damage reduction gear. Maybe a WS like Primal Rend can heal the pet as an added effect or provide a shield to the pet.
• Maybe BST can spend some TP on pet maintenance abilities. Similar to the mechanics of waltz and sambas.

There are fun ways to make players use melee and the distance nerf as a veteran BST player is very frustrating. Please consider this.

Pretty much this, we do understand the risk reward part, however right now the risk part does not fit the reward... speaking of reward i specifically mentioned it because its not a damage ability, so while surviveability might be seen as an issue it is still very frustrating not being able to properly heal your pets (specially after a knock back, or if you out run a tp move and your pet eats a spell while you are trying to return to combat, or worst of then all if you are engaging an larger enemy like a tiger, scorpion, wyvern etc and need to manuver around it just to heal your pet), thats why i mentioned the new drg job ability as an creative alternate way to allow pet and master to be in range, bst is needing this kind of love right now. The player base is aware of the power of skill chains and we do realize the potential of its uses however as it is charmer merlin and issues we are mentioning before are preventing bst to fully captilize those.

[Beastorizer]

I feel like we have two sides here. One side firmly believes BST is a powerful functional DD (The devs).

The other sides are the players who feel otherwise.

The only way to solve is, imo, to Stream adjustments as other companies do. Other mmo devs stream adjustments in a party setting, showing players what was adjusted, & the result. I would like to propose devs to live-stream job adjustments.

When someone tells you they can bench press 400 pounds, we say "Show us."

When someone has a new invention, we want them to show us how it works.

When someone has new tech, they show us how it works.

When other companies make adjustments in their mmo, the devs show us how it works.

I am proposing that devs show us how it is done. Enlighten us. Someone is wrong here, we need to get down to the bottom of who it is....

[Xilk]

Fujito-san

Thank you very much for the lengthy perspective. Also thank the team for listening to the player community and taking another look at the pet command range for Beastmasters and for telling us about your thoughts.

I also appreciate the player perspectives shared in this thread about the beastmaster experience as a player.

I am, of course, a fan of the Beastmaster Job. I have always liked the challenge of charming creatures and using the terrain to manage a a battle.

I do think that the limited range actually makes it more difficult to play the Beastmaster job from up close. The difficulty is with medium to large model enemies. Positioning is incredibly difficult. Often pet commands fail because I am not in range of my pet even though we are both close and engaged on the enemy. also, when kiting an enemy, I cannot use reward on my pet. These are the issues that bother me most about the tiny range for pet commands. It would be great if the range increased only 2 or 3 yalms even from what it is currently.

However, the part I really don't understand from the developer perspective is how the concerns about Beastmaster fighting from a range do not also apply to Puppetmaster and Summoner? I think it is great that summoner and puppetmaster function the way they do. I do not understand why it is different for beastmasters from the developer perspective..

Is it because Beastmaster's pets have more HP? Most Avatars have around 1200 ~ 2000 HP I believe (though i'm really not sure), and puppetmaster will have between 1600 and 4000, while beastmaster pets at level 119 have between 3500 and 6000 hp. I don't understand why this would be such a large factor, but it is the largest discrepancy I can think of at present.

it is a common strategy to use a Puppetmaster as a party or alliance tank while the master stand far out of range. Also the summoners stand far back and simply issue commands with their Avatars.

The rationale for Enemy Mechanics breaking down under this strategy would *apparently* still exist for puppetmaster and summoner, but not for beastmaster.

However, It also appears to me, especially in the Dynamis Divergence event and the recent High-Tier Mission Battlefields for Odin, Alexander, Cait Sith, and Lilith, that new gimmicks completely counter the strategy of having the pet masters stand safely out of range. Or completely destroy the usefulness of Astral Conduit.

I think this also ignores the difficulty of protecting one's pet and master at the same time as a beastmaster. Because support players cannot cure the pets like they can cure other players, keeping one's pet alive often requires equipping only defensive equipment on Beastmaster. (Summoner can quickly and easily resummon pets without a significant cooldown time, while puppetmaster has more ways to cure the pet and adjust its defensive stats while sacrificing minimal offensive stats thru attachments). The beastmaster must often keep full pet defensive equipment on. This means that master and pet damage is severely limited while engaged.

the challenges in Gear for offensive and defensive gear for both master and pet make are a very large balancing factor for Beastmaster more than other pet jobs or any other job. Five Minutes, in many fights is a terribly long time to keep both master and pet alive when both are fully engaged.

Interestingly there are several ambuscade fights which showcase this as well.

I think it also ignores the fact that Beastmaster pets are FAR more susceptible to Enfeebling magic than summoner Avatars or Automatons.

I do not wish for Summoner and Automaton pet commands to be reduced at all. That would be far more damaging to those jobs than it has been to beastmaster, in my opinion. However, these jobs showcase a major contradiction to the position that Beastmaster is overpowered by having greater range for issuing pet commands.

[Alhanelem]

I legitimately want to see the data SE has that shows, *at any point in FFXI history,* when pet-kiting BSTs were doing more damage than SMN or any other popular DPS job for that matter. I really want to know because I've never seen that happen.


@ Yoji Fujito, how many BST players have to quit before you take their concerns seriously? That you (or the job designer, whoever) continue to ignore or legitimately not understand the real issues facing BST players is one thing, but that you didn't really put real effort into the changes you did make is another entirely. Players of the job are upset that not only did you not address their biggest issues (whatever they may be), you added "new" pets that are just direct copies of ones that already exist with slightly different stats (or something). If you say you're going to add new pets, at least add NEW pets- there's hundreds of monsters out there you could have chosen and you just duplicated pets that already exist and therefore don't fill any hole or need of any sort. That's the real insult to BST players. Some of them might have been able to overlook you not really fixing the job if they actually got something new to play with, but they didn't even get that.

You seriously need to consider coming up with a compromise that will ease the frustration for BST players without making them as overpowered as you apparently think they are (Again though, I'd really like to see the data on BST pet DPS, because I don't really know of a time when BST pets were ever as overpowered as you suggest).

[Xilk]

Oh, Also, recent updates make pup do alot more damage than bst.

I'm not complaining that pup can do damage, I like pup. but it just does not make sense calling these balance issues for bst when pup can do it.

[Alhanelem]

Oh, Also, recent updates make pup do alot more damage than bst.

I'm not complaining that pup can do damage, I like pup. but it just does not make sense calling these balance issues for bst when pup can do it.

Careful lol... PUP was seen as mostly useless for the LONGEST time, I'm happy to see them wanted for stuff these days. But you're completely right. Also, PUP does commonly fight with their pet- they didn't need to be forced to do this, so SE's logic about why they needed to force BST to be at close range doesn't hold much water to me- Most BST I ever saw did that as much as they reasonably could already.

[Seish]

I will go out on a limb and defend the developers. You have two types of people in this game; those that want a restoration to hard content and real battle mechanics and those that want an easy button. What you all are saying is because this job has X, I need something to be just as powerful. They can do that--and they have for quite a while--until it eventually dulls out the job and makes the fights mindless. They keep telling us again and again that they want to retain the original idea of team building and player cooperation. Yet you all continue to cry about what you all want. This is why I suggested my classic server, so those that enjoy the easy content can get exactly what they want. You want to do things solo, or play to enjoy the game. But as someone said, and I've said before, this game is about the adventure. The road to endgame the road to the perfection of your character. It's about joining others in that difficult quest to actually have a meaningful experience and being able to reflect on all your accomplishments. As a vet that played back in 2003, I can tell you this game has aged well. I can recall my first time going to Sky, doing Dynamis, all the times I wiped. The cutscenes that were sad and moving, to really down right trying to help my friends and failing badly. But all wrapped in that, was a well thought out game that the developers detaild out for us.

Now there were some things I didn't like back then. I didn't like that the devs wouldn't talk to us. I didn't like that they made content that was in 2 occasions that were not reasonably beatable in the manner they saw fit. I didn't like their "hints" in handling difficult content but really didn't tell us much. And I didn't like that in some cases, the game had unreasonable barriers to enjoy the adventures with other friends. In a lot of ways, they fixed everything I mentioned. They talk more, they had a public test server--which they need to bring back. They are transparent with us, though I could use a roadmap that breaks down their plans. And most of all, they are interactive. Very few games has this level of involvement between the developers and the player base. First before you complain and rant, understand that they are doing more than most online game in this level of interaction and should be praised.

You don't have to like their response and I see you all are very passionate about it. Embrace that passion and don't be disparaged in trying to get what you want. But also remember that there are a lot of people on the forums asking for harder content and more challenges. To do that requires adjusting all the jobs and bringing back in mechanics that existed back in the day. I eventually expect a lot more jobs to be adjusted--in many cases, unfavorably. Understand that if they don't do this, then what will happen is the game won't evolve and change. It will continue to be easy.

So going forward, the arguments in my opinion, should be shaped to how we can enhance a job without changing what the devs are trying to do. Someone in this thread asked about SCH and I replied how would you enhance it without intruding on other jobs? Her reply was that she didn't know. Same with BST; how would you enhance it without it impeding on other jobs? Because since I came back, I've seen some significant overlap in the game with jobs having in some cases too much versatility. But I ask the devs with respect to be more transparent like they have in the past and give us a roadmap. If we can have that, we can see what they plan to do with the game, and be able to make adequate feedback with respect to their goals and help make change.

With that stated, I think the time of us wanting an easy button should be over. I can't speak for you all, but for me and what I've been reading, I feel that this is what everyone is asking for. IMHO, I personally want the current content to be more challenging. While I am interested in a classic server, I too have had my characters since 2003 and would love to continue playing on it on existing content. But I would like to see a better party dynamic that utilizes advanced mechanics and mastery of a job. And from what I've been reading, SE is trying to restore the balance that made this game beautiful.