Fan Job Design: Beastmaster

Hey all, I'm a games designer who likes to come up with jobs for XIV for some design practice. Been working on this recently with a friend of mine, saw the threads here about Beastmaster so thought I'd post: Beastmaster - recommend turning Print Layout off under View at the top.

There's some design notes at the bottom which should answer some questions, especially about number stuff which is all pretty arbitrary and needs balancing and iteration I wasn't able to do but the general feel is there.

Hope ya enjoy, looking forward to seeing what the XIV team come up with.

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Originally Posted by Isilud

Hey all, I'm a games designer who likes to come up with jobs for XIV for some design practice. Been working on this recently with a friend of mine, saw the threads here about Beastmaster so thought I'd post: Beastmaster - recommend turning Print Layout off under View at the top.

There's some design notes at the bottom which should answer some questions, especially about number stuff which is all pretty arbitrary and needs balancing and iteration I wasn't able to do but the general feel is there.

Hope ya enjoy, looking forward to seeing what the XIV team come up with.

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Really nice work on your document and your concept. I'm a big nerd for theorycrafting and do it all the time myself for XIV among other games as well. The document is clean, easy to read, and is well-organized in a way that makes understanding your idea very straightforward. There are a lot of great elements that build your concept, such as the paradigms that change your abilities similarly to Sage's Eukrasia, but on a more expansive scale.

Having said that, I feel like this is more of a "L'cie" job than anything else. It's very much a Fabula Nova Crystallis inspired job, and I'm not really sure if it's doing a lot of justice to the identity of the Beastmaster. Whips are a weapon that's become a hot topic recently in these types of discussions, and building something based on Type-0's Seven would be a fun and interesting place to build a new job from, but I think I'd personally prefer to keep the Beastmaster title open for other interpretations.

You did a really good job being concise and to the point of the concept. I've been a fan of whip-type weapons since FFVIII's Quistus, and Type-0's Seven.

I think it fits into the Scouting role nicely. I like your break system, which was my favorite thing about XIII's combat system along with paradigm shifts.

Despite it not really resembling a Beastmaster like in Tactics Advance, just like SGE, it doesn't have to be the exact replica and I think that this type of job would fit into the world of XIV.

That being said, I don't think the devs will do it though. People would be expecting a full on pet job and they've made it clear that pet jobs do not work in their engine. It's either too slow and unrespni or outright broken.

I guess for the devs with pets is that it's like they have to balance both pet and job and I suppose that's too difficult for the team (which begs the question of hiring new blood for the job design team).

It me! I'm the friend!

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

Really nice work on your document and your concept. I'm a big nerd for theorycrafting and do it all the time myself for XIV among other games as well. The document is clean, easy to read, and is well-organized in a way that makes understanding your idea very straightforward. There are a lot of great elements that build your concept, such as the paradigms that change your abilities similarly to Sage's Eukrasia, but on a more expansive scale.

Having said that, I feel like this is more of a "L'cie" job than anything else. It's very much a Fabula Nova Crystallis inspired job, and I'm not really sure if it's doing a lot of justice to the identity of the Beastmaster. Whips are a weapon that's become a hot topic recently in these types of discussions, and building something based on Type-0's Seven would be a fun and interesting place to build a new job from, but I think I'd personally prefer to keep the Beastmaster title open for other interpretations.

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Thanks! And thank you for taking the time to read it! This is the third one I've done of these now and a big part of it was practicing formatting for these kinds of documents. That and clarity, so appreciate the feedback.

It being a L'cie job or (Soldier potentially?) is also fair. Funnily enough Beastmaster was our starting point, but looking into references and inspirations from the series lead to it being so FFXIII inspired. Seven uses a transforming whip, can Break targets and one of her best weapons is called the Beastmaster. XIII-2 had the monster party member aspect so it all just started taking shape from there. The XI version of Beastmaster really didn't have much to it other than taming, which didn't feel like it'd work outside of a limited job context, so it took a backseat.

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Originally Posted by elioaiko

You did a really good job being concise and to the point of the concept. I've been a fan of whip-type weapons since FFVIII's Quistus, and Type-0's Seven.

I think it fits into the Scouting role nicely. I like your break system, which was my favorite thing about XIII's combat system along with paradigm shifts.

Despite it not really resembling a Beastmaster like in Tactics Advance, just like SGE, it doesn't have to be the exact replica and I think that this type of job would fit into the world of XIV.

That being said, I don't think the devs will do it though. People would be expecting a full on pet job and they've made it clear that pet jobs do not work in their engine. It's either too slow and unrespni or outright broken.

I guess for the devs with pets is that it's like they have to balance both pet and job and I suppose that's too difficult for the team (which begs the question of hiring new blood for the job design team).

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Cheers for reading and the feedback!

That's the tricky thing the XIV team has to navigate: people's personal ideas around Job fantasy. This design easily could've gone down a "pets, and lots of them" route, which would be interesting as it's own thing (maybe a Necromancer as another option). I'd love to see something really pet focussed but it's just the question of would that feel good in XIV. Hopefully it's something we see in future.

Not sure why the devs would make a Beastmaster design modeled after Lightning.

I see you went with the frustratingly inconsistent DoT pet ala DRK rather than the practically unnecessary support pet ala SMN.

All said, I do think that this miiiiiight be getting close to what we may probably see if BST is a limited job. I think a claw-whip/scourge thing is a very likely weapon, and try as I might to think of an original job design, it just keeps coming back to a sort of beast trainer concept. So perhaps there will be a BST whip job like this with a "Lobo" or fantastical beast companion. I think the major selling point of a non-limited BST job would have to be having a *single* pet companion from a sufficiently distinct and interesting fantasy species. We can't have a rotation of pets because that would feel too much like Summoner. And having a single pet would be better because it would have more personality/identity and emphasis the pet-trainer bond better. Pet would probably be some kind of horned cat-dog thing, maybe with wings...a kind of catch-all beast.

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Originally Posted by Isilud

Thanks! And thank you for taking the time to read it! This is the third one I've done of these now and a big part of it was practicing formatting for these kinds of documents. That and clarity, so appreciate the feedback.

It being a L'cie job or (Soldier potentially?) is also fair. Funnily enough Beastmaster was our starting point, but looking into references and inspirations from the series lead to it being so FFXIII inspired. Seven uses a transforming whip, can Break targets and one of her best weapons is called the Beastmaster. XIII-2 had the monster party member aspect so it all just started taking shape from there. The XI version of Beastmaster really didn't have much to it other than taming, which didn't feel like it'd work outside of a limited job context, so it took a backseat.

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I've said this elsewhere and it's probably getting obnoxious, but I've warmed up to the idea of using Rinoa as inspiration for Beastmaster being a ranged physical job. You can see what I'm referring to in the first half of this trailer for her in Dissidia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-qrbXF-fKM She is in part a magic-user also though, so it'd be more expanding on her "beastmaster" style gameplay with Angelo.