5.0 Beastmaster: keep it fierce please

[Satyagrahi]

Can't wait to have beastmaster

I want to see it be fierce, not too silly/wacky. I am looking forward to how players make it look cute, but I hope the development team also makes the job feel....aggressive.

To this end, I would like to see BST channel the spirit of one of my favorite mobs, the drake. Especially a drake with flaming scales Perhaps there is room for glamours, but I would very much like to see a drake theme to this job, where a BST unleashes a spirit animal transparent version of the animal he or she is aligned with.

Also, how about an ability that buffs every summon and pet in the party? This would make SMN and BST pair very nicely. It also might be the key for having a MT BST and OT BST in the same party--having some synergy like 2 MNK have in the same party.

[Tegernako]

Honestly there's not a lot of old FF classes left that could be re-imagined or are tanks.

Maybe sentinel from XIII.

[Xenosan]

I really like the idea of BST as a XIV tank, also.

I can imagine a BST tank in XIV meta something like so

1hander with a morning star main-hand, a off-hand padded cesti (like.. not a shield exactly, a monk weapon that covers the forearm - like some do), essentially a shield.

Charm 1 is their tank stance, Charm 2 is their DPS stance.

With a Charm I, a pet is summoned and 25% of the damage inflicted on the BST is redirected to that pet. The pet has an HP bar but cannot be healed by anyone other than the BST.

BST also has Command abilities that increase the percent of damage the pet will take (increase it from 25% to 45% [Rampart], increase it to 65% [Sentinel]).

Instead of waiting on Cooldown timers for defense moves like ShadowWall/Vengeance/Sentinel with DRK/WAR/PLD, the pet's HP bar acts as a pseudo recast for defense CDs. If you leave up BST's 'Sentinel' for too long, the pet could die or abandon you.

Also there are Loyalty stacks built under Charm 1, Feral stacks built under Charm 2. This incentives BST not to let their pet die also, as stacks are lost (similiar gauge mechanics of PLD/WAR).

The pet's HP being a sort of resource the BST can tap into, but throttle up the Pet's portion of damage intake for too long and he bails, he takes too much damage, he dies.. BST pulling a bit from DRK who uses MP to throttle productivity, but with BST it's based around the pet's HP. Of course BST still has traditional mitigation and role skills too to alleviate pressure off the pet mechanic. I think that would be a good resource mechanic for a pet tank job.

I started rambling on about a Job theorycraft. tl;dr BST tank would be awesome, and it's doable within the game meta.

Maybe not in the traditional 'pet job' way some people want. But we didn't get a trinity-breaking RDM either, the sky didn't fall.

[Azerhan]

Should be great.
We need more tanks in the game, and BM could be very awesome!

[Savagelf]

I rather see beastmaster as pet dps jobs tamed drake and puppetmaster as tank job

[MauvaisOeil]

Very interesting Concept, Xenosan.

Not sure they plan on it somehow, but it's at least, refreshing and quite unique.

[Tanathya]

Honestly there's not a lot of old FF classes left that could be re-imagined or are tanks.

Maybe sentinel from XIII.

FFXIII had no jobs, they were just generic roles.

They shoved the tank role into DRK, they can do that with any job. BLU would actually make sense.

[Duelle]

Someone in a thread a long time ago suggested the BST riding their pet, combining their HP pools and stats when going into tank stance. I also wrote this a while back, though it's very outdated seeing the design choices made by the devs.

The short of it would be BST as a tank that uses a whip, with abilities that change when tanking, as they are riding on the back of their pet. For this to work you'd need a "main" pet that is there to provide those tank aspects, and my suggestion would be a fenrir-style dire wolf (pet glamours could be implemented to change the wolf into a bear, boar or tortoise). Secondary pets would be stuff like wavekin, certain scalekin and cloudkin. So you'd have your main tank pet and maybe tame an apkallu or mandragora or tiger. You'd be able to take up to 5 pets in total (including your "main" pet), and certain skills would call on those secondary pets to help you. You'd also be able to call that pet in the event you're soloing or don't need to do any tanking.

[Kaldor]

Im not against the idea of bst becoming tank but i can see the problems with it.
1. Would need to rework the hud for pt so healers have an easier time healing pet.
2. It will be a huge pain the arse to do any real mechanics where the boss needs to be moved or dodge aoe. Just moving my chocobo out of hunts aoe is an ordeal.
3. If they were to fix said 2 issues above it would become essentially the most op tank job. And this is assuming the pet does the tanking. With a bst or 2x bst in a full pt its like your having 9-10 people instead of 8. So this is like having 1 crappy dps tank and 1 dps job that has to manage pet, because if the pet dies your still @ full pt. If soloing im sure its fine to have pet tank but when in pts it just seems a bit overpowered.
I can see bst being like brd but melee.

[Lyth]

Positioning is probably the most important part of our role. Remote-control tanking sounds like a novel idea, but I think that it would wear thin on your melee pretty fast on any fight requiring movement (especially given the level of responsiveness we get from this game's pet system).

It could work from a flavour standpoint if your pet jumps in to intercept attacks for you, as was suggested earlier, but I think that your character should be still the primary means of positioning things. Alternatively, if the goal is just to have something beast-themed, an alternative for either BLU or BST would be to shapeshift into the beast.