February 2020 FINAL FANTASY XI Digest

[Typral]

Thanks for all the posts, its appreciated.

[Spaitin]

The pet enhancement effects are mostly worthless UNLESS they affect the party. SMN already has access to better AOE enhancements with the ability to stack those enhacements. (crystal blessing hastega 2 etc.) Bsts pet enhancements are actually quite weak. Rage would be detrimental to a party, basically only the crab and faaz would have mildly useful enhancements. You need to make them enhance the party AND make better ones for bst to use. Making beast at least be able to back line would be a HUGE improvement to the job, currently the only use for bst is to BACKLINE in dynamis D wave three using the slug. The slugs debuffs are actually better than ANY of the enhancements of ANY of the pets. So your enhancements are mostly worthelss EVEN if they affect the party. Right now bst is a play by yourself job. You have said you want it to no longer be a lone wolf job. Well it is ONLY a lone wolf job right now. Add some synergy for the party. Currently people would rather use a trust than a fully geared master rema bst. I would be okay with completely removing the healing factor of reward and just having it remove status effects. As was failed to be addressed in your post, the pet is completely worthless in any fight with amnesia/para/petrify.

Also, please address the issues with Tame, Gauge, Charm. THey are completely useless. They have 0 fights they help on. I would be okay with just removing them from the game.

Diligently gathering gear is fine. Making an 119 piece of gear with ready recast is also fine. Currently we are encouraged to fight away from the pet when using ready because we are using non 119 gear.

Bst is still the overall worst job in the game. It has nothing that it does well. Judging by your response, you are not going to do much to improve the job. Please do as you said and make bst a party friendly job. It currently isnt for all but 1 fight in the entire game.

My last ditch request is to let us trade in the bst exclusive gear for vouchers to get other jobs gear. Our efforts on bst are mostly wasted, please let us salvage our diligent efforts in gathering gear. I get it, old game with limited resources. At a minimum bst would need ALL of it's gear overhauled. We need gear that boosts pet and master not either or. I see that you do not have the resources to do that. So please let us exchange our gear and go on to different projects.

One other possibility would be to change the pet magic haste enhancement to Job ability haste. That alone would make bst mostly feasible for front lining.

[Ozaii]

Beast Master

Would it be possible to give bst a job ability similar to empathy where the master shares it buffs with its pet. This would allow more front line melee bst to use the pet with reasonable results. If its plausible this along with some axe ws adjustments could help the job by a bit or at least make it more appealing.

Also to add my preference on the jug pets at 119 if you devs can, I would love to see the hippogriph faithful falcorr, as well as the adamantiose crude raphie.

Paladin

If you can reduce reprisal timers to a timer similar to foil and adjust its enmity to similar values that would help pld a bit with aoe enmity.

If you devs can also give pld a cover that is aoe and or affected aoe moves and spells so long as the pld is in front of the targetted players, this would help make up for the damage loss from bringing a pld over a run. If we can have dds go all out instead of turtling up due to the pld eating their damage as well.

Also if possible fealty having its timers reduced to be similar to either rampart/sentinal/pflug/other defensive buffs would greatly help the job become more of a wall if it could ignore many effects similar to how run can with runes and its high meva although fealty shouldnt be full time like runefencers runes.

Off Topic

Also as a last minute unrelated thought. Can we get drg call wyvern timer reduced by any chance. It really sucks to be put into such a weakened state if we lose it to doom or something else silly. This and/or give drg malignance cuz that stuff rocks.

Closing Regards

Thank you very much for taking the time to read this. And you devs have done great with pld so far. As well as the other jobs i know this takes time to fix and the code is very old but thank you for making a wonderful game and updating almost 20 years later.

[Gwydion]

The aspect of diligently gathering gear to attain a 10-second recast time on Ready will be maintained. Regarding the item level of leg gear, we didn’t see it as a problem as we understood that the general playstyle was based around changing gearsets through usage of macros. While it’s possible to add a recast reduction bonus to the new ILv119 gear, this would be done when a new beastmaster-specific equipment is to be implemented.

We aren’t considering allowing pets’ support effects to apply to the entire party. One reason behind this is that some of these support effects are extremely powerful and are only allowed because they are limited to be applied to the master. Second reason is that by making this an area of effect, we can foresee players requesting beastmaster to fulfill a backline supporting role in parties.

Due to the base parameter values of pets and production cost required, we currently aren’t considering raising all pets to Lv119. However, now that the support effects affect the master, if there are any specific pets you would like to see raised to Lv119, please let us know. Additionally, please also let us know if there are any pets that are already Lv119, but you’d like to have support abilities added to them as well.

Regarding Reward, the main purpose of the ability is recovering HP. Therefore, greatly shortening its recast time is difficult to consider in terms of current balance. We could avoid the balancing issues, if for instance, we were to lower both healing potency and recast time to 1/3. However, this would mean it’d require three times the amount of items to achieve the same amount of healing, so then we’d have to consider things such as changing the quantity of items created in one synthesis to three, lowering the price to 1/3, and changing the stack size to 99.

Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions and for giving us the opportunity to provide you with feedback. Hopefully, we will have another NA-based event in the future!

Thank you for acknowledging the need for I-Level Ready Recast Legs armor, as well. Swapping into pre-I-Level armor hurts us, but I eagerly await Beastmaster + pet-friendly armor, with "same effect".

Regarding pets: Crude Raphie and Faithful Falcorr both NEED to be upgraded to ilvl 119, ideally without Beast Affinity. Please give us access to Fantod as well. My personal favorite pet is Pondering Peter, but he only caps at 118 with Beast Affinity.

Why does an SU5 Beastmaster need 5/5 Beast Affinity to keep a Pet at his current level? (At level 75, Call Beast+2 was sufficient to give us Even Match (equal level) pets!).

Regarding Reward, if you read my original question, I wasn't asking for 1/3rd scaling of Reward potency and Recast. Your example is a very drastic change and your players are not asking for that. We are merely asking for a 7-second reduction, which would bring us to 45-second most-frequent Reward recast. (This ensures we get the full (minus-34 second recast delay reduction) as described by both AF pieces, which has been currently capped at minus-25 seconds since inception in 2003). No change in potency should come with this 7-second reduction. Stacking Pet Food biscuits to 99 would be very helpful to our inventory problems.

There is so much to discuss with Beastmaster. Many parts of my favorite job, are left completely unfinished. Beastmaster should be a front-line support job, similar to the play-style of Blue Mage or melee Red Mage. The job traits, job abilities, group one/two merits should match your vision of front-line DD.

After 17 years of play, I am very weary of what feels like begging for moderate, fair changes. Please consider helping to make Beastmasters whole. Thank you for your time.

[Rwolf]

Losing the job's identity with new vision.
I feel that Beastmaster is losing its job identity with these changes and new vision. All except one job ability (Feral Howl) are pet focused and Beastmaster is the only job that can rest with their pet attacking. Yet we are told we are wrong. We can't backline support or pet focus because we should be attacking on master full-time. I don't understand why Puppetmaster is allowed to go between frontline and backline but Beastmaster is not.

Not understanding the new vision.
From what I understand, the new Beastmaster's vision is that the master should be standing right next to the pet and melee 100% of the time. Where the pet's damage is just supplemental. I don't understand this as Beastmaster has no native job traits to melee and all this pet focused gear and abilities.

Issues with new vision of Beastmaster.
▼ Axe WS are too weak.
Having access to multiple magic weapon skills needs better selection to magic gear.

• Mistral Axe: Similar to Savage Blade but only 1 attribute modifier where Savage has 2.
• Decimation: Overly increased by 1 weapon. Instead of +120% on weapon, why not boost the weapon skill itself by 100-110%? Then the Ambuscade axe can just be +10-20%.
• Primal Rend & Cloudsplitter: They should be as strong as Leaden Salute and Trueflight if not stronger for being in close range.
• Bora Axe: Please just make this Ice elemental damage. It doesn't get a lot of use.

▼ Distance is still an issue and jug pets have their own enmity list.
If we cannot have our old distance to activate abilities and that we can't use pet abilities outside of battle. Then just use Dragoon's wyvern AI. Pet fights what the master fights only. At least then the job no longer feels like the mechanics are broken. No one has to deal with being unable to access commands or worrying about pet running off and aggroing monsters.

▼ Job Abilities focus heavily on pets if master is supposed to always melee.
I don't agree with a change to melee only play style but the job abilities and traits don't support melee. Killer Instinct does but very limited use and doesn't work on magical damage ws.

▼ Currently limited to picking a pet for support effect, damage or monster affinity.
Currently Beastmaster can summon a pet every 5 minutes and 1 free every 20 minutes. This does not allow for Beastmaster to stack support effects from pets. To be balanced, either:

• Every pet gets support effects.
• Pets without support effects are stronger (but this steps on the vision of BST melee only).
• Change the support effect duration on master and/or Call Beast timer.

▼ Issues with inventory / limited in choices of pets to bring.
Unless you only play Beastmaster, jugs consume a lot of inventory. Please consider a new system where you don't need to carry so many individual jugs. Ninjas, Rangers, and Corsairs got universal tools, pouchs/quivers, and high amounts of recycle.

[Rwolf]

At the very least please give Reprisal the same enmity as Foil. I appreciate that you gave PLD Banishga to tag multiple monsters but the problem is gaining enmity quickly after tagging. It would be very useful, especially against monsters that repeatedly reset enmity.

[Nyarlko]

The aspect of diligently gathering gear to attain a 10-second recast time on Ready will be maintained. Regarding the item level of leg gear, we didn’t see it as a problem as we understood that the general playstyle was based around changing gearsets through usage of macros. While it’s possible to add a recast reduction bonus to the new ILv119 gear, this would be done when a new beastmaster-specific equipment is to be implemented.

We aren’t considering allowing pets’ support effects to apply to the entire party. One reason behind this is that some of these support effects are extremely powerful and are only allowed because they are limited to be applied to the master. Second reason is that by making this an area of effect, we can foresee players requesting beastmaster to fulfill a backline supporting role in parties.

Due to the base parameter values of pets and production cost required, we currently aren’t considering raising all pets to Lv119. However, now that the support effects affect the master, if there are any specific pets you would like to see raised to Lv119, please let us know. Additionally, please also let us know if there are any pets that are already Lv119, but you’d like to have support abilities added to them as well.

Regarding Reward, the main purpose of the ability is recovering HP. Therefore, greatly shortening its recast time is difficult to consider in terms of current balance. We could avoid the balancing issues, if for instance, we were to lower both healing potency and recast time to 1/3. However, this would mean it’d require three times the amount of items to achieve the same amount of healing, so then we’d have to consider things such as changing the quantity of items created in one synthesis to three, lowering the price to 1/3, and changing the stack size to 99.

Regarding area of effect pet support effects: If making our pet's support effects would be enough to encourage others to ask us to move to a backline support role all by itself, then that just means that master melee is far too weak for players to consider it as a loss to do so. Please give us more reason to want to be up front swinging away, and for others to want that too. As many have pointed out before, there is just far too little in the actual design of the job itself to encourage us to hit things with axes.

Regarding Reward: I don't believe that anyone is asking for a drastic reduction in base recast for the ability. It has been brought up that Reward is subject to a bizarre cap on recast reduction, which is less than the reduction available from the 3 pieces of gear currently implemented which have been available for years. What reasoning is there to prevent the full application of available recast reduction from gear, especially since neither piece reaches the current cap on it's own and one piece required to hit the current cap is non-ilvl? By the way, the recipes for lower tier pet food already create a full stack of 12 per synthesis, with no improved results from HQ results, while even the highest tier (Pet Food Theta) is 4/6/8/10 per synthesis depending on HQ result.. There are no pet foods which have single results. ^^;;

Regarding ilv119 pets: Would it really be that heavy a task to change jug usage to ignore the innate level caps and override with ilv119 for lv99 players? Is it not possible to simply skip the check of the jug's settings and directly set the cap according to main hand weapon ilvl? This would be the simplest to implement solution most likely. The majority of naturally ilvl pets' stats are based off of job templates, so is your reluctance to allow all jugs to hit ilvl 119 because old jugs are coded differently? Personally, while that would be an acceptable solution, I am actually partial to the idea of stealing the pet ilvl system from PUP/SMN instead. It would help simplify our pets' mechanically if their ilvl was directly set by a new ranged slot piece of gear (which can stack with Pet Food in the Ammo slot,) and provide a balancing option development-wise for scaling pets beyond ilvl119 just like PUP/SMN. I imagine this would be a much larger task than the earlier suggested solution, so I don't have much hope that it will be considered as a viable option, but I do hope that you understand that there are alternative solutions if the current model is no longer within the capabilities of the dev team to continue development on.

[Ferth]

Seems like if you want Atonement to be used in situations where paladins cant deal a lot of damage, it should have it's skillchain resonances removed to function like Spirits Within or Sanguine Blade.

[Sirmarki]

I've noticed a lot of references relating to why this or that hasn't been changed due to game balance.

However, at this stage (on Asura at least) - Game balance has well and truly left the building.

1. Mercs sell everything. They offer the ability for people to 'buy' equipment from battles that they never even drew their weapon in. Any new content added just gets merced/sold. In fact merc yells selling said content probably out numbers genuine yells for said battles 30-1.

For example: A merc selling an item from the likes of Tenzen where you would need merits to be able to qualify in order to even get into the battle: The mercs just yell in the zone, said buyer joins the party, pays and lots on the item. The ridiculous thing here is that they don't even need merits to do so - they have completely by-passed that system.

2. The sheer amount of automated botting. It only takes a short walk around pretty much any zone, and you will find some kind of bot. /yell and job point sellers yells are relentless and if anything boil down to spam.

So, let's address these issues which are core game balance issues.

[Typral]

How do you address #1? How do you even consider that a core game balance issue? People are free to start parties or join parties whenever they want. If people are buying wins, it means theres a demand for purchasing content. It doesn't matter if they are forced to enter, people still sell wins that way too (Dynamis, Master trials.) It's sad but its what happens when we have an overabundance of gil via people selling and creating it from thin air with GAIN EXP sparks.