So, what is the hold up on Beastmaster?

[Winterfang]

Why would you ever bring a black mage into savage if you could bring blue mage with that much party utility?

By making it so that BLU doesn't do as much damage as a BLM, so yes some heavy potency nerfs can be expected. Now I'm not so naive that I already don't know that people throw a fit over parsing, and I don't give a moogle's fluff about that all that pointless Drama. Even if BLU was at the bottom, you'd still have people main it either because of design, aesthetics, background lore, ect. So long as it can actually participate and clear content without needing to give up major factors as to what makes it a Blue Mage (Mainly using spells from Monsters), don't see why so many are quick to dismiss it as "Not their Blue Mage" even when, despite it being Limited, it has already needed to make compromises.

And from all those possible scenarios that you listed, yes you're setting up some possibilities of "oh sh--!" moments that they can potentially saved by them. But is, for example, a BLU casting White Wind going to really be needed so long as healers are up and able to use their CD's or other spells in their tool kits so that the Damage Dealing Job (Assuming it would be a DD Job and not something like a chad Magic Tank if it was a real Job) doesn't have to stop doing their role and making the boss cry. Is saving the party from a wipe by using Avail really going to be the make it or break it as to whether or not a group will comfortably beat a boss? Likely not. It could happen, and I'm not going to say it shouldn't happen, but it's not something that convinces me that it needs to be limited. If something like White Wind is such an issue, then make some changes like a very very small CD (So you can't entirely spam it during parts where the boss is away and just pounding on the arena, and other scenarios similar to it) or increase the mana costs.

[Ransu]

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.......

Pet classes are terrible in every MMO.

[aveyond-dreams]

Pet classes are terrible in every MMO.

An opinion which people are free to agree or disagree with.

[Blueyes]

The real hold up is that Yoshi-P isn't a fan of pet jobs. I believe he has stated or alluded to as much in the past. If the demand was high enough, he could probably make it work, but since he entertained the thought of adding Beastmaster and Puppetmaster as limited jobs, that isn't a good sign. If added, both BST and PUP should be full jobs.

I can see BST working almost like a combination of Summoner and Bard. You have one small pet by your side to start with, then you have three or so Call Beast actions with long cooldowns that summon a more powerful monster (like an adult griffin) that stays on the field for 20+ seconds. Perhaps each Call Beast action could be associated with different monster families and the specific monster called forth would be a cosmetic choice (along with the option to replace it with your small pet). This would give BST a reason to call a variety of monsters during an encounter instead of sticking with the specific one that is best for a given situation.

Your starting pet and the initial monster associated with each Call Beast action could be acquired as quest rewards, then any other monsters charmed out in the wild would be added to your collection as cosmetic choices.

This is just one example that is largely based on existing job mechanics. It most certainly could work, but at the end of the day, I think Yoshi-P would rather add non-pet jobs.

I'm almost more hopeful for PUP because I can easily imagine a take on the job that isn't pet centric by focusing on the magical aspect and borrowing inspiration from FFX's Lulu to drive home the idea of the puppet being the central focus of the job. The wind-up Lulu minion does refer to her as a "master of puppets" so I wouldn't call it a far fetched idea.

[Iscah]

This is so dumb.... Then don't add Lv5 Death? Also, no they're not. Just things you like about BLU, that wouldn't work here.

You're arguing in bad faith, moving on.

It's not automatically "bad faith" just because they see something as necessary for BLU when you consider it optional. Neither are they just talking about that one spell.

It's a question of how many of those "it won't work so we just won't use it" decisions the dev team could make before it stops feeling like their vision of what they want BLU to be.

[Winterfang]

I mean, it's not like level 5 death is actually dependable at all for anything serious. No need to stop putting in gimmicky fun spells that really aren't going to be seen with actual use anyway when they keep making stuff immune to it.

[Aluja89]

It's not automatically "bad faith" just because they see something as necessary for BLU when you consider it optional. Neither are they just talking about that one spell.

It's a question of how many of those "it won't work so we just won't use it" decisions the dev team could make before it stops feeling like their vision of what they want BLU to be.

Of course it is bad faith. Since when does Thunder apply a DOT? Since when does Blizzard recover mana? These are inherent to only FFXIV, just like XIV's BLU should be.

If it's not bad faith, it's dumb logic.

[Deveryn]

The real hold up is that Yoshi-P isn't a fan of pet jobs. I believe he has stated or alluded to as much in the past. If the demand was high enough, he could probably make it work, but since he entertained the thought of adding Beastmaster and Puppetmaster as limited jobs, that isn't a good sign. If added, both BST and PUP should be full jobs.

I can see BST working almost like a combination of Summoner and Bard. You have one small pet by your side to start with, then you have three or so Call Beast actions with long cooldowns that summon a more powerful monster (like an adult griffin) that stays on the field for 20+ seconds. Perhaps each Call Beast action could be associated with different monster families and the specific monster called forth would be a cosmetic choice (along with the option to replace it with your small pet). This would give BST a reason to call a variety of monsters during an encounter instead of sticking with the specific one that is best for a given situation.

Your starting pet and the initial monster associated with each Call Beast action could be acquired as quest rewards, then any other monsters charmed out in the wild would be added to your collection as cosmetic choices.

This is just one example that is largely based on existing job mechanics. It most certainly could work, but at the end of the day, I think Yoshi-P would rather add non-pet jobs.

I'm almost more hopeful for PUP because I can easily imagine a take on the job that isn't pet centric by focusing on the magical aspect and borrowing inspiration from FFX's Lulu to drive home the idea of the puppet being the central focus of the job. The wind-up Lulu minion does refer to her as a "master of puppets" so I wouldn't call it a far fetched idea.

Puppetmaster is more feasible in this environment, as you could have puppets you take control of similar to how you mount up in those Rival Wings mecha.

[Leukah]

I think BST would work extremely well as a limited job. It would open up a parallel gameplay style in the overworld (like BLU does), allow for completionist folks to have a checklist of monsters to capture, encourage map exploration (by having rarer or harder to charm monsters in remote areas), and introducing a monster arena/Pokemon-esque system would potentially draw in folks from the creature capture genre.

Conversely, I think it would work very poorly as a standard job, because - in my opinion - attractive pet classes allow for people to choose from a variety of different creatures to tame and use in combat. Standardizing that is difficult, and the dev team have made it clear that they prioritize standardization. I think that's awesome for the non-limited jobs, because it means you can play the ones you like without being punished for it, but it simply won't work for a class that's focused on taming and raising a variety of different creatures.

SMN barely counts as a pet class as is, and I wouldn't even count SCH as a pet class. The fairy is a lovely free heal, but she isn't a pet.

[RyuDragnier]

Of course it is bad faith. Since when does Thunder apply a DOT? Since when does Blizzard recover mana? These are inherent to only FFXIV, just like XIV's BLU should be.

If it's not bad faith, it's dumb logic.

It's not bad faith or dumb logic. Blue Magic is all about learning spells that monsters use and then throwing it back against them. Monster abilities work outside of what is considered normal, and has and will break the normal rules of a FF game. FF5 alone had numerous ways to where BLU could just completely destroy the difficulty, and turn very hard enemies into jokes, something that every iteration of FF since then has had, at least in spirit. Even Quistis in FF8 had Degenerator, which instantly killed any non-boss enemy in the game. The job has always been quirky and simultaneously weak and powerful at the same time for that reason. Conforming it to a normal caster job is completely counter to the spirit of BLU, and at that point it's not a Blue Mage anymore.

That is the point I'm making. BLU can never work within the normal rules of FFXIV because it has NEVER worked within the normal rules of a FF game. It has always been an outlier.