November 2019 FINAL FANTASY XI Digest

[Yoji_Fujito]

Thank you for the large number of feedback responses.
We understand that there are many requests to increase the range of beastmaster abilities, such as Ready.
However, upon careful discussion with the Lead Job Designer, we have decided that the range of these abilities will not be adjusted.

▼ Beastmaster is designed as a frontline job.
I’d like to provide a brief history of beastmaster from a developer perspective.
Some points may greatly differ from player opinion, but please give it a read.

The original concept of beastmaster was a frontline job based around Charming monsters to turn the tide of battle.
The process of Charming would sometimes result in direct combat with the monster, so beastmaster was given the equipment and damage output to thrive until they succeeded in gaining control over a monster.

As time went on, Battlefield content became the main focus of the game.
This was difficult to enjoy as a beastmaster as many BFs do not feature monsters that can be Charmed.
Our solution was the addition of Call Beast and broth items, which allowed players to call out monsters as obedient pets.
These pets always obeyed commands, providing a sort of consumable battle resource for beastmaster and stabilized the state of the job.
Things were good up until this point.

▼ Balance Issues caused by Pet Adjustments
As stronger enemies were introduced over time, it became apparent that beastmaster and their pets weren’t keeping up.
Unlike other jobs, pet-based jobs had to be balanced around both the player character and pet, which in turn made it difficult to implement powerful new equipment or pets.

In order to resolve this situation, we made major changes in the very first version update in 2015.
Monsters were now able to participate in skillchains and magic burst, making them an overwhelmingly powerful source of damage.
While this method required some preparation, the changes allowed beastmaster to easily catch up and deal high damage more effectively than any other job.

Ultimately, this allowed beastmaster to issue commands from a safe distance, while pets that were far stronger than the beastmaster themselves would continuously fire off powerful abilities.
Pets also had decent survivability, and even if they were defeated, they could be called out again at full power after a five minute cooldown.
At this point, beastmaster was capable of battling with almost no risk to themselves.

Player skill was not involved in this version of beastmaster, since no matter what attacks enemies had, they could be defeated by endlessly sending out powerful pets.
This was even more effective in parties with multiple beastmasters, which created some extreme cases where pets did all the fighting and players didn’t battle at all.
Battles were streamlined into a monotonous process, and enemy mechanics became meaningless.

▼ Corrective Measures and the Future
To address this, we kept beastmaster’s strength while making sure its equipment and traits were used to fulfill a frontline role, and shortened the range of commands to bring back a sense of risk to the job.
While these adjustments lowered beastmaster’s capabilities, it was compensated for with the continued implementation of various meals and equipment, and that brings us to today.

With this history in mind, we don’t have plans to alter the job’s design as a frontline role and would like this source of damage to be accompanied by some risk.

As we’ve often mentioned, these job adjustments aren’t final, and we’ll continue making adjustments to improve its frontline capabilities.

[Safiyyah]

Thank you for the large number of feedback responses.
We understand that there are many requests to increase the range of beastmaster abilities, such as Ready.
However, upon careful discussion with the Lead Job Designer, we have decided that the range of these abilities will not be adjusted.

▼ Beastmaster is designed as a frontline job.
I’d like to provide a brief history of beastmaster from a developer perspective.
Some points may greatly differ from player opinion, but please give it a read.

The original concept of beastmaster was a frontline job based around Charming monsters to turn the tide of battle.
The process of Charming would sometimes result in direct combat with the monster, so beastmaster was given the equipment and damage output to thrive until they succeeded in gaining control over a monster.

As time went on, Battlefield content became the main focus of the game.
This was difficult to enjoy as a beastmaster as many BFs do not feature monsters that can be Charmed.
Our solution was the addition of Call Beast and broth items, which allowed players to call out monsters as obedient pets.
These pets always obeyed commands, providing a sort of consumable battle resource for beastmaster and stabilized the state of the job.
Things were good up until this point.

▼ Balance Issues caused by Pet Adjustments
As stronger enemies were introduced over time, it became apparent that beastmaster and their pets weren’t keeping up.
Unlike other jobs, pet-based jobs had to be balanced around both the player character and pet, which in turn made it difficult to implement powerful new equipment or pets.

In order to resolve this situation, we made major changes in the very first version update in 2015.
Monsters were now able to participate in skillchains and magic burst, making them an overwhelmingly powerful source of damage.
While this method required some preparation, the changes allowed beastmaster to easily catch up and deal high damage more effectively than any other job.

Ultimately, this allowed beastmaster to issue commands from a safe distance, while pets that were far stronger than the beastmaster themselves would continuously fire off powerful abilities.
Pets also had decent survivability, and even if they were defeated, they could be called out again at full power after a five minute cooldown.
At this point, beastmaster was capable of battling with almost no risk to themselves.

Player skill was not involved in this version of beastmaster, since no matter what attacks enemies had, they could be defeated by endlessly sending out powerful pets.
This was even more effective in parties with multiple beastmasters, which created some extreme cases where pets did all the fighting and players didn’t battle at all.
Battles were streamlined into a monotonous process, and enemy mechanics became meaningless.

▼ Corrective Measures and the Future
To address this, we kept beastmaster’s strength while making sure its equipment and traits were used to fulfill a frontline role, and shortened the range of commands to bring back a sense of risk to the job.
While these adjustments lowered beastmaster’s capabilities, it was compensated for with the continued implementation of various meals and equipment, and that brings us to today.

With this history in mind, we don’t have plans to alter the job’s design as a frontline role and would like this source of damage to be accompanied by some risk.

As we’ve often mentioned, these job adjustments aren’t final, and we’ll continue making adjustments to improve its frontline capabilities.

This is a terrible response. Terrible.

Summoner avatars can skillchain. From a safe distance. And do powerful abilities, stronger than beastmaster while under the effects of Astral Flow and Astral Conduit. Their pets don't have a recast cooldown and are totally disposable. And parties of summoners can take down powerful enemies faster than a balanced party, trivializing Reisenjima HELMs and Warder of Courage.

The logic of this does not follow. Not at all.


The result of your design decisions for beastmaster is that we can't be easily used in fights where summoner and puppetmaster flourish, like the new Odin high-tier battlefield, or any of the many Ambuscade fights where SMN can burst it down from distance. And we do not have strong melee damage, either. We do less melee damage with the master than support jobs like corsair or bard.

Please rethink beastmaster's current design. It is not working in the current game environment.

Some points may greatly differ from player opinion, but please give it a read.

What I just said is not player opinion. It's fact. Stacking Astral Flow and Astral Conduit, summoners can outdamage beastmaster, safely from a distance, and the effect is that fights which should be challenging are trivialized. So that's balanced, and beastmaster doing a lesser version of the same thing is imbalanced?

[Gwydion]

Thank you for the large number of feedback responses.
We understand that there are many requests to increase the range of beastmaster abilities, such as Ready.
However, upon careful discussion with the Lead Job Designer, we have decided that the range of these abilities will not be adjusted.
....
As we’ve often mentioned, these job adjustments aren’t final, and we’ll continue making adjustments to improve its frontline capabilities.

"Not final"?!...but Beastmasters have waited almost 4 years for an adjustment! To receive duplicate pets is very insulting!

[Gwydion]

Thank you for the large number of feedback responses.
We understand that there are many requests to increase the range of beastmaster abilities, such as Ready.
However, upon careful discussion with the Lead Job Designer, we have decided that the range of these abilities will not be adjusted.
...
▼ Corrective Measures and the Future
To address this, we kept beastmaster’s strength while making sure its equipment and traits were used to fulfill a frontline role, and shortened the range of commands to bring back a sense of risk to the job.
While these adjustments lowered beastmaster’s capabilities, it was compensated for with the continued implementation of various meals and equipment, and that brings us to today.

With this history in mind, we don’t have plans to alter the job’s design as a frontline role and would like this source of damage to be accompanied by some risk.

As we’ve often mentioned, these job adjustments aren’t final, and we’ll continue making adjustments to improve its frontline capabilities.

Dear Director Yoji Fujito,
Thank you for providing a detailed response on the current status of Beastmaster. You have made it clear that for better or worse, Beastmaster simply is not a development priority and over the past 3 years, have made no new frontline capabilities or otherwise meaningful adjustments to the Beastmaster job. Similarly, adding new jug pets with only cosmetic differences and calling it a "job adjustment" is dishonest and dubious. It serves as an unfair disservice to the players with whom, Square-Enix has built a relationship with over the past 18 years. The sporadic updates and lack of meaningful change to the Beastmaster job have left me with no other choice but to retire. Due to limited inventory constraints, I have decided to remove Beastmaster-specific items from my inventory. Thank you for taking the time to reply.

[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.

[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.

[Reain]

I’d like to provide a brief history of beastmaster from a developer perspective.
Some points may greatly differ from player opinion, but please give it a read.

The problem is in 2015, after 12 years you basically said "You are playing Beastmaster wrong" and nerfed it in a way that drastically reduced the enjoyment of playing the job. There were better ways to encourage the master onto the front line. People are never gonna agree with you after playing a job a certain way for over a decade. Especially after already losing charmable monsters in nearly all content through no fault of their own.

And then when the player base said if you want us to be able to play on the front line we need you to move the "Sic" and "Ready" recast delay -5 from Charmer's Merlin from a level 89 Axe you just ignored them. Would it have been that hard to make it a level 87 trait instead? or moved it to another piece of equipment?

I think the 1hr abilities Unleash/Astral Conduit were/are unbalanced and instead of changing them you changed everything else instead and don't want to admit it.

Announcing the November version update as Beastmaster job adjustments was insanity. You can't possibly have thought that 2 mostly reskinned pets would have been well received?

[Alhanelem]

The problem is in 2015, after 12 years you basically said "You are playing Beastmaster wrong" and nerfed it in a way that drastically reduced the enjoyment of playing the job. There were better ways to encourage the master onto the front line. People are never gonna agree with you after playing a job a certain way for over a decade. Especially after already losing charmable monsters in nearly all content through no fault of their own.

And then when the player base said if you want us to be able to play on the front line we need you to move the "Sic" and "Ready" recast delay -5 from Charmer's Merlin from a level 89 Axe you just ignored them. Would it have been that hard to make it a level 87 trait instead? or moved it to another piece of equipment?

I think the 1hr abilities Unleash/Astral Conduit were/are unbalanced and instead of changing them you changed everything else instead and don't want to admit it.

Announcing the November version update as Beastmaster job adjustments was insanity. You can't possibly have thought that 2 mostly reskinned pets would have been well received?

Stop bringing up summoner, the last thing we need is for them to ruin yet another job., even if the one in question (BST, for clarity) may never have been that amazing in the first place, seeing as all they've done for any job in all these updates is either changes that sound nice but don't really do anything or nerfs. The hand to hand / PUP tweaks might be the only exception all this year.

It is better to draw the line between both PUP and SMN with BST, whom is inferior to both. Bring BST up to their level, not the other way around. We're going to need a united front to effect any change.

Seriously though, I want to know and see what the "overwhelmingly powerful source of damage" from BST was. with the right buffs, BLM can magic burst a SC for the maximum possible 99999 damage. Has BST ever been able to do anything like that, even with multiple supports? SMN is also capable of that (once an hour) and some other jobs are just as sick in terms of ovealll DPS over time, but I've never seen anyone talk about how overpowered BST is. I'm just not seeing it, so as I've said before, I want the devs to show us what exactly the BST did that was so "overwhelmingly powerful."

[Seish]

...As stronger enemies were introduced over time, it became apparent that beastmaster and their pets weren’t keeping up.
Unlike other jobs, pet-based jobs had to be balanced around both the player character and pet, which in turn made it difficult to implement powerful new equipment or pets.

In order to resolve this situation, we made major changes in the very first version update in 2015.
Monsters were now able to participate in skillchains and magic burst, making them an overwhelmingly powerful source of damage.
While this method required some preparation, the changes allowed beastmaster to easily catch up and deal high damage more effectively than any other job.

Ultimately, this allowed beastmaster to issue commands from a safe distance, while pets that were far stronger than the beastmaster themselves would continuously fire off powerful abilities.
Pets also had decent survivability, and even if they were defeated, they could be called out again at full power after a five minute cooldown.
At this point, beastmaster was capable of battling with almost no risk to themselves.

Player skill was not involved in this version of beastmaster, since no matter what attacks enemies had, they could be defeated by endlessly sending out powerful pets.
This was even more effective in parties with multiple beastmasters, which created some extreme cases where pets did all the fighting and players didn’t battle at all.
Battles were streamlined into a monotonous process, and enemy mechanics became meaningless.

▼ Corrective Measures and the Future
To address this, we kept beastmaster’s strength while making sure its equipment and traits were used to fulfill a frontline role, and shortened the range of commands to bring back a sense of risk to the job.
While these adjustments lowered beastmaster’s capabilities, it was compensated for with the continued implementation of various meals and equipment, and that brings us to today.

With this history in mind, we don’t have plans to alter the job’s design as a frontline role and would like this source of damage to be accompanied by some risk.

As we’ve often mentioned, these job adjustments aren’t final, and we’ll continue making adjustments to improve its frontline capabilities.

Tell me, what did they say wrong about any of this? And is this an example of overpowered?

[Alhanelem]

Tell me, what did they say wrong about any of this? And is this an example of overpowered?

I mean, SMN has been kiting monsters as long as it has existed, and more easily than BST and it wasn't consdiered overpowered (I suppose because it is very slow compared to doing things the normal way and some enemies were strong enough that you couldn't get enough distance to recast). BST has a lengthy cooldown on call beast, and while its pets do have more HP it's not so much more that they could kill 5 minutes to resummon every time. SMN was *always* better at pet kiting, although PUP can (sort of) do it too with deus ex automata.

I also honestly don't know whch monster attacks do so much damage that BST could be seen as overpowered in general. I rarely ever had a BST in a party, but I don't remember the damage from their pet's special attacks being remarkable.

What you said aligned with what I quoted earlier, stating they did not want BSTS to stand back when times got difficult.

If you're trying to refute something here, I don't think it's working. He listed off multiple reasons why many BST players didn't find fighting alongside pet to be attractive or worthwhile (limited gear options, more dangerous for them than other melee jobs, having to sacrifice TP to get the most out of pet attacks). SE's solution didn't address any of that. All it did was tell people you have to melee whether it's actually any good or not."

They had a problem that needed careful sculpting and tweaking to address and instead of doing that, they just slammed a sledgehammer over it and called it a day.