Beastmaster Class Lore

[MikkoAkure]

I wouldn't say that Dalriada or Bozja would be required. Pagaga's field records put Beastmasters in Ala Mhigo as well as Lyon's Landis.

The house of Vochstein is known in Ala Mhigo for producing many skilled beastmasters. They specialize in the breeding and training of griffins, and those they have raised were much beloved by members of the royal family. As griffins offer their riders an unrivaled degree of mobility and are stalwart allies on the battlefield, they had a central role in Ala Mhigo's beastmaster battalion.

It goes on to say that the head of the Vochstein family released the griffons so that they wouldn't be used by the Garleans and his son offered to join the Garlean legions so his dad wouldn't be executed. He went on to eventually meet Lyon and gained enough respect from him as a beastmaster to not be executed himself. He also went on to train an orphan Lalafell girl: Pagaga. Beastmaster would be easily learned in Ala Mhigo and it would be simple to bring up that whole story without needing to involve Bozja since it's not critical.

The main problem with Beastmaster is that it would definitely be a limited job and I believe Yoshi-P even said as such. Even if he didn't say it, he seems to have a bad opinion on pet classes and we've seen them all eventually whittled down to almost nothing.

[Cleretic]

The main problem with Beastmaster is that it would definitely be a limited job and I believe Yoshi-P even said as such. Even if he didn't say it, he seems to have a bad opinion on pet classes and we've seen them all eventually whittled down to almost nothing.

My next video touches on Beastmaster, so my recent research can confirm that Beastmaster is earmarked for 'the second limited job' if that ever happens. Which is fair; much like Blue Mage, Beastmaster is a job with a class fantasy that just fundamentally doesn't fit into standard MMO progression. So rather than make a shoehorned-in 'standard' version of the job that only captures the most superficial reasons people would want them, make a limited version that can use the freedom from that system to be exactly what people think of as 'Beastmaster'.

I'd also hardly characterize the developers as 'having a bad opinion on pet classes', so much as them just making the best of the fact that pet classes are really goddamn hard unless basically your entire game is designed around it. This is hardly the first time I've seen a similar problem: City of Heroes had a pet class added in City of Villains, the Mastermind, and over the years Mastermind got worse not because of actual nerfs but because the Mastermind pet implementation was a house of goddamn cards, and eventually the actual pet AI stopped responding to commands and nobody knew how to fix it. Summoner and Scholar aren't as bad, but they suffer from clear issues in pet implementation so big and unfixable that it's easier to just design the pet jobs to not hit those problems than it is to actually fix them. Remember that XIV's dev team isn't just Yoshi-P, Ishikawa and Soken sitting in a room riffing and then giving the results to Koji Fox to translate; there's an entire team that we just don't hear much about, who've had comings and goings over the years. It's entirely possible that nobody who originally implemented the pet functionality is still working there, which would make actually fixing the thing SO much harder.

All that said, I could see them implementing Beastmaster almost as a testing ground if they wanted to reinvent that squeaky wheel; since limited jobs don't necessarily have to stack up in the same ways, they could potentially use a limited pet job like Beastmaster as a 'beta' for potential new approaches to pets that could be ported over to Summoner and Scholar if they work.


As to the OP, though: One of the things we do know about Beastmaster is that it's not a ranged job! All three Beastmasters we've met (Lyon, Clarricie and Pagaga) use the same weapon style: a one-handed axe, and a shield. What equipment type that'd actually be, that's not clear; you could make decent arguments for Striking, Maiming or Fending.