I wholeheartedly agree that neither bst nor pup should be nerfed. Both are respectible jobs that are shunned often in group play, where, only marginally summoner is more readily accepted. But as its been said, puppetmaster can fall back on its own skills in the event their pet died, as can beastmaster, and while neither is invincible, they certainly are a lot more frontline ready than summoner.

So the question comes down to this i guess. Will summoner recieve better front line capabilities? Or conversely, will their pet be made to overcompensate for the weakness as it is expected to do.

Im sure theres plenty summoners that would like to have more options and abilities to utilize say...Shattersoul, but I truly believe all summoners would willingly welcome more longevity to their pets, or harder hitting autoattacks, or perhaps both.

Pacts are great, and frankly if the avatar could match the average bst pet in longevity and damage, then it would be a pretty good position methinks. Especially when even though the avatar would become superior to the bst pet (argueably. In my head, the same toughness of the pet vs the jugpet and same relitive attack damages would put avatars ahead when comparing sic to bloodpact rages.) The beastmaster would still remain superior to the summoner and more evenly balance the job playing field between the two.

This ofcourse excludes things like beastmaster's pet traits, JA, gear selection, and native physical damage.

Ultimately I doubt this will be entertained by the development team, but id think the iconic powerhouses of finalfantasy being made to look foolish when measured up against a ladybug should rightly raise some eyebrows.

I mean... who here remembers all the times of using Ifrit, Shiva, Titan, Ramuh, Odin, and others in games like... FF3, Tactics, and still others and remembering how insanely powerful they were?!

Ah...Nostalgia.

Ahem! Now i suppose for ways to handle the auto-attack damage increase, if you dont want to have beastmasters barking up your tree about summoner getting such an enhancement, why not apply a double/triple attack or haste effect to the avatar rather than raise its base damage. Doing so would mean more TP feed for monsters, causing greater risk, not unlike comparing Ninja and Thief's autoattacking differences.

Or perhaps have the avatar's Attack/DMG scale with Summoning Magic skill, similer to hand to hand skill, where in a highly skilled up summoner would benefit more from the raised damage than one without. I think that would be fair atleast when you consider a beastmaster does not need a special skill leveled for their pets to output such impressive damage.

Conversely, the attack rate, or HP or whatnot could be managed in the same way. Though admittedly those summoners with low skill would suffer...