Quote Originally Posted by Zhronne View Post
That's a very very bad idea.
You can't force jobs to equip certain items to receive marginal boosts to their pets. What if Dragoons what to use another better Polearm? What if SMNs want to use another different grip?
What if BSTs want to use another pet and boost that instead of using one of the new ones?

Guess this doesn't apply to PUP since Animator is an unique equipment that they're forced to equip anyway.


In my opinion the only possible way to have a fair and balanced improvement of pets conditions is to have what we could call SCALING. Which is exactely the same as pet jobs are handled in 99% of the other MMOs.
You can't have the scaling be too big in a game like FFXI of course, it should be small, a small additional bonus that is calculated according to the master stats.
This way the stronger the stats of the master, the stronger the bonus the pets will receive.
Of course this bonus has to be small, so that "Pet: ..." gear will still be interesting to some extent, at least in certain slots, but that's where trial&error and a good balancement shows.
Imho it's the only possible solution, otherwise you'll be forced to develop more and more and more gear with every patch.

I mean... I like additional "Pet: ..." gear, I LOVE it, but you can't build the balancement of pet jobs around that. It should be a nice specific option, not the "key" to the balance of pet jobs.
You're jumping to conclusions. First off, they can balance it off that, because you're misthinking it. The wording implies that EVERY POLEARM henceforth will increase the petmoreso. So the drg won't have to give up a newer, better one, because it will improve their pet better. That's how the pet will improve via gear as well as the master. It's really that simple.

As for SMN, well.. Most grips, for 2h jobs and casters, aren't really superb anyway (far from as good as the stats you can get offhanding a dual-wielded one hander, to say the least) so it'll probably not be a hard slot to swap.