Beastmaster: Can it work?

[Seraphor]

That being said, I cannot support the addition of new limited jobs that only see bursts of activity and work off of fomo as opposed to something I can play whenever I want.

How do you feel about PvP, Crafting/Gathering, or the Gold Saucer?
There are other modes of play in this game, it's not just a single avenue, and BLU finally gave us a pve battle based one.
BLU has seen more use than any of my non-main jobs. I never play MNK, SAM, PLD, BRD, DNC or SMN, so I play BLU far more than any of those.

Like it or not, Limited jobs fill a useful and interesting gameplay niche outside of the core grind, and bring life to older content. For months between patches in Shadowbringers, me and my FC would pretty much only play BLU or work on relics in Bozja, neither of which are the main focus of the game.
BLU was great content, but that doesn't mean I don't have my issues with the job. It gave us an entirely new mode of battle which was far more reactionary and dynamic, over the rigid rotations of 'non-limited' jobs, but that's not something that I really wanted on a caster. I want to see that sort of content on other roles, and Beastmaster could give us one of them.

Ideally, it would be great if Limited jobs could pull from a small selection, maybe a caster, a melee and a phys ranged, and could all run older content together for the same rewards.
Give us a 'limited roulette' just for limited jobs while they're at it.

In addition to expanding limited job content, Beastmaster could also provide an avenue to upgrade another area of the game. Companions.
What if, instead of being the same sort of pet job as SMN used to be, it instead simply served as an expansion of the Companion system?
Beastmaster could tame new companions that use the same system as the companion chocobo, and could bring them into duties and issue them commands to execute unique moves. Meanwhile outside of Beastmaster, you could summon any of those new companions in place of the chocobo, but have them act functionally the same as the chocobo, just with visually different movesets.
You're now enhancing your gameplay with all of your other jobs, by playing the limited job.


If we get Beastmaster as a regular job, I don't want it.
It'll have one preset 'pet' that it's identity is based around, either an awkward clunky rotation because pets don't work, or a simplified rotation that may as well be on any job without a pet, and I will never play it.

[aveyond-dreams]

snip

You can do PvP whenever you want as long as it's not the Feast, which remains the least-touched content in-game specifically because FFXIV players largely reject fomo and other limited content.

Crafting and gathering is also something that anyone can do at their leisure. However, the content drought in Shadowbringers was exacerbated by the frontloading of crafter/gatherer content towards the beginning as opposed to battle content which we were practically starved for until patch 5.35 gave us Bozja.

Nothing in Gold Saucer has ever been time-gated except for the Yokai Watch and FFXV events, both of which gave players ample time to complete and then went on to return.

This philosophy however cannot be applied to something like a job. Older content already has enough "life" in it given that roulettes reward people for going back and doing it to help sprouts, and if I want to grind for something with a lot less headache involved then the most obvious choice is to bring a max ilvl 90 job. Not a job that is permanently stuck 10-20 levels behind. All the "unique!" abilities in the world can't make up for the lack of practical things to do with Blue Mage and Beastmaster simply has no reason to suffer a similar fate. A limited job roulette would be pointless, only yet another source of poetics as if we didn't already have enough of those, or allied seals which have barely any use at all.

You claim to play Blue Mage more than any of the other regular jobs, but I have to tell you that outside the bubble that some Blue Mage fans seem to speak from, most people try and level a variety of the normal jobs in addition to whatever their main is. However, Blue Mage not only suffers from a bad levelling experience as the only viable way to do it is to have a max level character kill things for you, they also have over 100 hurdles to jump through learning spells locked behind instances. Waiting in party finder for 10 hours to learn primal spells does not a fun experience make. As for Bozja, relic content is intended to be widely approachable and was largely successful when compared to Eureka. However, the initial fate grind for it can be done on any job, and it would be an unreasonable waste of time to level Blue Mage and grind out their spells just for fate grinding.

As others have mentioned, pets in this game have largely been a waste of resources and more trouble than they were worth for the past 8 years. Pets as old SMN had them failed, while "pets" in the style of Reaper's avatar still capture a decent feel for the class and are functionally better overall. Reaper originally was going to have multiple avatars and instead settled on just the one, and so far it seems most people are ok with that. In any case, why should Beastmaster be added as a way to update the companion system when there's hardly anything to even do in the overworld with it in the first place? And if taken into dungeons, there is no way a companion would ever outclass a normal player, and I struggle to believe they would outclass trusts.

Like it or not, normal jobs appeal to and are more widely accessible to most people when compared to limited jobs. A normal job Beastmaster would likely go on to be embraced by a significantly larger amount of people and be used in more content than another chocobo trainer. With the only job remotely close to a "hunter" currently being Bard of all things, I do not believe that we should lose out on the real deal in exchange for a limited job with even more limited uses than Blue Mage, as far as I can tell.

[BaconBits]

Limited jobs bad mmkay.

[SeverianLyonesse]

In addition to expanding limited job content, Beastmaster could also provide an avenue to upgrade another area of the game. Companions.
What if, instead of being the same sort of pet job as SMN used to be, it instead simply served as an expansion of the Companion system?
Beastmaster could tame new companions that use the same system as the companion chocobo, and could bring them into duties and issue them commands to execute unique moves. Meanwhile outside of Beastmaster, you could summon any of those new companions in place of the chocobo, but have them act functionally the same as the chocobo, just with visually different movesets.
You're now enhancing your gameplay with all of your other jobs, by playing the limited job.

This is probably the best way they could implement the beastmaster fantasy. The companion system is already deeper on a per-beast basis than we would likely get from a BST job, limited or not. And by that I mean your Chocobo has an ability tree of some 30-ish nodes and four role settings, which is a sight better than capturing beasts with 2-4 abilities each. The companion system also already exists, is proven to work really well in open world content and is a very solid framework begging to be expanded and refined.

FF XIV has already shown me that I can have *any* job equipped and have a chocobo fighting alongside me. I can have *any* job equipped and enjoy the BST-adjacent fantasy of having any number of animals as a mount or minion. In XIV, our ability to befriend and team up with animals is *job-independent* and transcends the need for a particular job stone/weapon limitation. I would be peeved if they pulled that back and limited me to sitting on the sidelines spamming 1-2-3 axe/whip swings just to have any animal other than a chocobo, when prior to that *my character* could have been whatever job I wanted it to be. I would also be peeved at the design decision to make a *fourth* animal companion system on top of mounts, minions, and companions--instead of utilizing and consolidating what we already have (like, imagine being able to use some of the already existing mounts and minions in battle--give you more incentive to collect them). There is absolutely no reason why having beast companions should be tied down to a single job, with how XIV is already designed.

"BST job" is a dumb, outdated idea. I am all for something BST-like and expanding the options for animal companions. I am all for any amount of beast collection content similar to BLU. I want the companion system to be improved and better utilized *and* I want players to have the most comprehensive animal-companion fantasy. But I would rage if the devs wasted resources making an entire job with such a regressive design sensibility.

[ty_taurus]

A fringe idea I've been warming up to would be to introduce a Rinoa-inspired physical ranged Beastmaster into the game with her pinwheel as a weapon and a "Pet" that doesn't act on their own, but rather reacts to your actions or has specific actions that are ultimately stemming from you. You can see this in Angelo's gameplay a little in this trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-qrbXF-fKM

[Imoen]

Limited jobs bad mmkay.

I second this, I still weep for Blu every time I see it on my job list, I do a little inaudible grumble. lol

Edit: Oh right, and ya beast is cool, they could do it.

[Brixy]

Beastmaster could definitely work. How well it would work though depends on the chosen limitation they put on the job itself. Are we talking about a full blown pokemon master where we can tame everything as a pet? That would most likely have to be a limited job, which I honestly wouldn't like to see more of. Would that version of BST be fun to play? Absolutely! Limited jobs leave more to be desired though since they can't be used in relative content. What they could do is impliment a "base" set of skills that all pets could work off of and allow the BST to capture a chosen pet for those attacks to use their animations for. Basically all pets would do the same damage and same attacks, the only thing that would differ is how they looked. Option B would be something similar to SMN or RPR where you summon temp pets and they do their thing then disappear. Not exactly what a beastmaster should feel like, but it would give them options to add different pets into our attacks. Think of something like GNB's continuation string, but each one adds a different pet for a zoo barage lol.

BST is too big of an idea to get a justified version that we all want to see. Ideally, having multiple pets for different roles of play is probably what a lot of people want. The way FFXIV is balanced wouldn't really work with that sort of base without a ton of careful thought put into the job though. I'd love nothing more to have a job added with fun and flexability. Have 1 pet that works as a pure DPS with the BST alongside them, 1 pet that weakens your personal damage output but buffs someone else like a DNC for example, and maybe 1 pet that acts like a caster with slow attacks, but big damage. They could also try something similar to BRD where you have multiple pets for a set amount of time like song phases.

[Shurrikhan]

Absolutely. As Limited Job, that is.

That is, absolutely, how you make it no longer worth making.

[ty_taurus]

That is, absolutely, how you make it no longer worth making.

I'm in this camp of thought. BLU is fun for a hot minute until you've collected all the spells, but the rest of its content is just not very fun or engaging to me. It's basically a way to put a gimmicky spin on recycling content, and while there is a small community of players who were able to find entertainment in it, I feel there are far more people who are frustrated that they'll (as far as it seems currently) never be able to live out one of their favorite jobs because it's been demoted to a minigame. I just don't want that for anyone else.

[Exodus-E]

That is, absolutely, how you make it no longer worth making.

I'm in this camp of thought. BLU is fun for a hot minute until you've collected all the spells, but the rest of its content is just not very fun or engaging to me. It's basically a way to put a gimmicky spin on recycling content, and while there is a small community of players who were able to find entertainment in it, I feel there are far more people who are frustrated that they'll (as far as it seems currently) never be able to live out one of their favorite jobs because it's been demoted to a minigame. I just don't want that for anyone else.

You both forgot this bit from my original post:

Otherwise, it'd be "limited" (pun intended) to a select number of creatures, given how "regular" jobs work.

Beastmaster could very well be a "regular" job, but then they'd have to throw its "collectable" aspect out the window (because of the "rigid" structure/learn-set inherent to being a "regular" job).
Unless, of course, you could change its pets aesthetically (not mechanically) through a glamouring system, similar to how SMN's Egi glamour should be working.