November 2019 FINAL FANTASY XI Digest

[Alhanelem]

@ ^

I understand the developer perspective on this, the problem really is their solution to balance the job ended up hindering its usability even in the playstyle they were trying to promote. They need to come up with a solution to promote the play experience they want without frustrating the people who were already doing that to begin with.

The user experience for BST is just bad. Pets can vary in size and for the larger ones you actually have to move within their collision radius to get pet commands to work. When you can be visually next to your pet and still unable to execute commands, that really seems like a problem to me.

[Seish]

@^,

I agree and I think that they are in a bind. So what we should do honestly is figure out how to enhance a job without OPing it. I think in doing so, it will help them with augmenting a job. But I think the devs need to be more transparent of their plans. I have stressed this point by stating this in my previous post, where I state:

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...I've seen some significant overlap in the game with jobs having in some cases too much versatility. But I ask the devs [to] 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.

This is a two way street. Just informing us as a job is about to be adjusted one month prior isn't enough. We need a very broad roadmap so our input can be gathered. Only then will this community have enough information to help progress the game. They did this before and had a test servers to try new things out, but for whatever reason they stopped. Please bring it back devs.

[Alhanelem]

I already made two proposals in that regard:


1) either a trait or an ability (like avatar's favor but just for the master), which grants some form of enhanced combat capability to the master while they are within range of the pet.
2) adding more melee-centric job traits for the master to give them more motivation to be in melee range by raising their share of the damage potential of the job.

[Rwolf]

The distance doesn't make BST OP. I wish that word would stop being used as a descriptor for the distance nerfing. The change has had zero effect other than frustration to execute Ready moves even in melee range.

The goal of the developers has been made clear. They want BST to be on the front line with their pets. We hear them, we are ok with it. I don't think anyone has even contested being on the front lines ever.

The frustration is why does it have to be such a severe distance penalty and can't be something else to encourage melee. There has been countless feedback since it's inception that the range is broken. It's too close and nothing else in battle mechanics is that aggressively restrictive. So it is not an unreasonable stance.

They just stated job adjustments aren't final and they are open to feedback so that's what this is, feedback and clarity that it's not been fun. We're mostly all adults, it's constructive criticism and feedback concerning mechanics that don't work.

The answer isn't to go well they do lots of stuff for us so give them a break. No one is griefing the developers, we're passionate about the game they made. It's why we're still here. We're trying to get them to listen, don't need to white knight them by calling everyone wanting an easy button. It just derails from the topic where everyone has to say they appreciate the game versus explaining why this doesn't work well and provide alternate ideas.

[Seish]

They outlined why though and clearly state that they felt it was too overpowered being a backline job. Now maybe the community never abused this, but perhaps they saw instances in which people did. I do like the suggestion that Alhan made. The devs should respond to that. Though my general comment was to those complaining that the devs are out of place. I don't think that they are. But the way they handled this situation, as I've said in previous threads, is not right. They need to communicate better.

[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?

[Rwolf]

BST wasn't overpowered in backlining. The issue was how extreme the jump in stats was for monsters at the time and BST just happened to be how players dealt with it.

To state it's overpowered would suggest game imbalance, which isn't accurate. It's more accurate to say they would prefer BST be on the frontline.

What bothers me is how rigid they are being with BST despite countless examples of flexibility.

• WHM changes to Esuna/Sacrifice were changed back immediately after player protest despite devs wanting Misery used more.
• They didn't like NIN bring used to tank, but saw players did and added enmity tools and gear.
• SMN and PUP can backline the same way BST was doing but faster and with actual endless pets.

BST players will melee if encouraged. Imposing a severe penalty with no benefits just frustrates players versus us enjoying the playstyle the devs would like us to do.

It's especially horrible in groups of monsters. BST pets have their own enmity list. If a mob aggros my pet and it goes chasing after that mob. I have to now run after my pet to stand next to it to retrieve it.

Bind and Gravity now are essentially Amnesia for BST because the distance is that aggressive.

[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]

Again, people keep saying to not use it but SE strongly hints why. They specify that they could stand in the side and without penalty give commands and when their pet dies to easily be able to resummon the pet. That means in difficult fights that should require a team, they could sit there all day soloing. They were very clear about what they meant and I do not see what you all do not get. Now if you have a problem with anything I said, please bring that up with SE, because they not only put players straight with what the role of BST is, but as to their reasoning for the nerf. Now that aside, I will restress that they went too far. They could have done this more tactful and is why I think if they had the public test servers back up we would be able to test these adjustments and provide feedback. I also press the fact that they haven't given us a roadmap. Please SE, you owe us these two things.

[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?