So, what is the hold up on Beastmaster?

[kaynide]

If that's what people are envisaging for Beastmaster – summoning selected pets and having them use their signature attacks to fight for you – how is that any different in practice to BLU?

I think the only real way to keep it separate from BLU is to go the Pokémon route similar to FFXI. Certain mob families dealt more damage to certain others. Maybe even add in elemental weakness. Essentially it was Rock Paper Scissors.

The problem/question would need to be does the BST a) charm monsters on the fly or b) have a set of monsters it can pull from or c) a mix of both.

And then, what is the gameplay loop…? In FFXI BST was a solo powerhouse, but that just isn’t a thing in XIV. It would almost need to be a mini game…

[Boblawblah]

I assume Beastmaster would be another Blue Mage style of job.

[RyuDragnier]

Beastmaster as a playable job would definitely be that name only situation. I believe he's specifically thinking about that job when he makes that comment. Pet AI doesn't work well, especially in dungeons. There are versions of BST that would charm and nothing points to that even being possible here. Regardless of that, it would also be severely limited in many instances. What you're left with is just another melee job.

There's an iteration they can fall back on for Beastmaster. Final Fantasy 5's version. It had only 3 real abilities.

The first was controlling monsters to make them do attacks for you in battle (not likely here). The second was capturing a monster that was at low health, something we TECHNICALLY already have in this game due to the quests where you have to use Sacks on weakened enemies to capture them. The third was unleashing that monster for a very powerful attack, and if I recall you could only release that monster once and then it was gone.

BSM could use a similar system here, to where it captures low level enemies and then unleashes them on their foes like consumables. Hell, Octopath Traveler did something similar with H'aanit and her ability to capture monsters, though she always had one specific monster available for use infinitely.

[Winterfang]

remove Blue Mage or just rework it into a normal job

Going to digress a bit from the main topic but
I don't see why they just can't give BLU a second Job Stone so that they can essentially make a version that people can actually play it without removing the m̶i̶s̶t̶a̶k̶e̶ Limited version. Give them a different weapon if need like duel tomahawk or something closer to the Wheleqee theme

Can do the same for BST if the desire to have a version with the aspects that, for some reason, would chuck it into the Limited Job status is so great and have both versions wield different weapons.

Of course the big caveat of doing such a thing would very likely be expansions only having one new job, something that I'm not entirely against since the team are struggling making new jobs while also juggling trying to rework multiple old ones. And neither are really guaranteed to hit the mark anyway.

[Packetdancer]

The quote :
"Yoshida : Job names are especially tough. (laughs wryly) After all, there’s no point if a job is similar to its namesake in name only; its gameplay experience needs to match their pre-established design too. At this point, I’m thinking we have no choice but to come up with brand new jobs that haven’t appeared in the FF series before."

Thank you; I knew I'd read it in an interview somewhere but could not recall which/where. That is in fact the precise quote I was thinking of, though it comes across as less an absolute than I was remembering it as.

1) how to manage the pet in general. Do we get assigned a pet or do they let us catch em all per se.

I mean, if they were to do it, I think it would come down to whether it was a limited or full job.

If it's a full job, they'd just give you some assigned pets at specific levels; if you had to go catch specific pets, then you'd see people on BST getting punted from parties if they didn't have the 'optimal' pet captured and trained. (Just like if you had BLU as a full job, people would demand you have specific spells and would kick folks who didn't.)

If it's a limited job a'la BLU, I imagine they'd have you capture pets much like you learn BLU spells, and would give you BST-specific challenges and content a'la BLU.

I actually like the idea of limited jobs. We have, as a playerbase, demonstrated that if a job is not as optimal as another job, we will at best shun and at worst actively exclude it from participation in things; witness, among other instances, people excluding certain jobs from savage parties this tier initially. We actively incentivize SQEX to try to balance all the jobs so that everything is equally viable -- even if this means they start to lose their unique flavor.

BLU as a full job would almost have to be just another caster -- you get X spell at Y level, like BLM or SMN or RDM, etc. I mean, you think people get upset when someone doesn't have a job stone after level 30, can you imagine the vitriol over BLU joining an alliance raid and missing entire chunks of the spellbook that people had decided were "critical"? (Or conversely, since all BLU spells are level 1, can you imagine how broken it would be to let a BLU bring their entire spellbook into leveling roulette and end up in Sastasha?)

In contrast, limited jobs -- jobs that are inherently not balanced to play well with others, jobs that get to break all the rules and do weird stuff without worrying about game balance and whatnot -- are their chance to break free of those shackles we as players kind of put onto the job balance team. To do something really just... weird and interesting, and maybe broken, but to have 'broken' be okay because that job plays in its own sandbox.

So if they did ever add BST, I'd absolutely want to see it as a limited job because that would let them go crazy with it and do something interesting. Otherwise, you get just "SMN, but with physical damage instead of magical, and with animals instead of carbuncles/egis" or something else that can be shoehorned into a specific role ("physical ranged", we'll go with) and then balanced to be roughly equivalent to everything else in that role.

However, many people have been vehemently opposed to the idea of even BLU as a limited job -- and have outright said, including in threads on these forums, that they'd prefer it just be another caster with pre-defined spells that was themed like BLU -- so while I do think we'll continue to see updates for BLU late in an expansion's life, I'm not so convinced we'll ever see another limited job.

Which is a shame, because I like BLU. It's something different and unique and interesting, even if it's off in its own little corner.

[RyuDragnier]

However, many people have been vehemently opposed to the idea of even BLU as a limited job -- and have outright said, including in threads on these forums, that they'd prefer it just be another caster with pre-defined spells that was themed like BLU -- so while I do think we'll continue to see updates for BLU late in an expansion's life, I'm not so convinced we'll ever see another limited job.

Which is a shame, because I like BLU. It's something different and unique and interesting, even if it's off in its own little corner.

Those people are fools who have not played BLU in its other iterations in previous FF titles. You put a list of reoccuring BLU spells together, and you're going to find a lot of stuff that does not fit with FFXIV's style. Blue Mage cannot work with the normal system of FF14 simply because it was originally created with the mindset of doing things nothing else can do. And in an MMO where everybody needs to do similar things, it cannot function. It could function in FF11 because everybody was rather unique there. Here, not so much.

[MonsutaMan]

My thing is, if this team is as AMAZING as everyone claims they are, adding a standard MMO pet class should be no issue, right?

ESO did it, GW2 did it, WoW did it, XI did it.......

[RyuDragnier]

My thing is, if this team is as AMAZING as everyone claims they are, adding a standard MMO pet class should be no issue, right?

ESO did it, GW2 did it, WoW did it, XI did it.......

Uhh, keep in mind GW2's pet system is pretty bad. They had to do a lot of buffing of the pets just to get them at a usable level, and they used to die rather quickly during boss fights in raids (similar to summons here in FFXIV). They had to drop the AoE damage taken by pets by 95% just for them to function in raids, and had to make them immune to all environmental effects. Originally they could also aggro enemies just by existing.

[aveyond-dreams]

Blue Mage should’ve been a normal job - concessions have been made for each job like DRK, RDM, and SMN without making them limited like BLU was. Keeping the job in its current state comes across as little more than a show of stubbornness.

Adding a limited Beastmaster would be…an extension of that and other attitudes that have reared their heads since this game’s short term success following the fall of WoW. Some of us tire being subject to the whims of a certain individual, especially when certain classes are treated special while Blue Mage is left to flounder the way it has since it was added, while others have been ruined at multiple intervals.

[Packetdancer]

Those people are fools who have not played BLU in its other iterations in previous FF titles. You put a list of reoccuring BLU spells together, and you're going to find a lot of stuff that does not fit with FFXIV's style. Blue Mage cannot work with the normal system of FF14 simply because it was originally created with the mindset of doing things nothing else can do. And in an MMO where everybody needs to do similar things, it cannot function. It could function in FF11 because everybody was rather unique there. Here, not so much.

I mean, there's a lot of jobs throughout the FF franchise that I love which will not work here. Whether because they just don't work well in a real-time versus turn-based environment -- I have no clue how on earth you'd bring Arithmatician into FFXIV without it being functionally a job sharing only the name, for instance -- or whether because it's a job that you just can't balance well against other jobs, and we as a playerbase have demonstrated we need the job-balance equivalent of padded walls to keep from rampaging around weaponizing party meta-composition against 'non-optimal' jobs.

It's why I like the limited job concept; they can break the rules and do Weird Stuff without worrying about "how will this affect the savage raid scene" or whatnot.

My thing is, if this team is as AMAZING as everyone claims they are, adding a standard MMO pet class should be no issue, right?

ESO did it, GW2 did it, WoW did it, XI did it.......

I would argue that none of them did it particularly well.

I would also argue that even leaving aside the balance issues, all historical evidence suggests that this particular playerbase is not particularly inclined to be content with really any possible implementation of pet jobs. Either we complain that the pet AI is terrible, or we complain that we have to control the pets and they're just visuals on abilities and not really pets... and let's be honest, we'd probably complain that you just get pet Y at level Z and there's no 'going out to catch them', or we would complain that you do have to go catch pets and now people are queuing into duties without the pets they should have (and that you should be forbidden from using roulettes on the pet job unless you have pet composition Q unlocked at level R), or...