Beastmaster Job Concept

[Cabalabob]

I’m gonna say the same thing I say for SMN, if you’re going to limit the pets to just flashy animations then why even have a pet job? You could call it templar and make all your “pet” attacks into holy magic and it would play exactly the same. The people who like what you make for gameplay reasons would be just as happy with it as a templar and the people who want an actual BST will never be happy with it.

I’d rather they actually work on making a working pet system that pet job lovers will actually like than just shoehorn in a pet job in name alone.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

I’m gonna say the same thing I say for SMN, if you’re going to limit the pets to just flashy animations then why even have a pet job? You could call it templar and make all your “pet” attacks into holy magic and it would play exactly the same. The people who like what you make for gameplay reasons would be just as happy with it as a templar and the people who want an actual BST will never be happy with it.

I’d rather they actually work on making a working pet system that pet job lovers will actually like than just shoehorn in a pet job in name alone.

If this game was not a Holy Trinity MMORPG trying to preserve a balance between roles and within a role, I'd agree with your statement.

PSO2 for example had Summoner / Waker, but the game is also action-based combat with no clear roles to go from. A game like Aura Kingdom with the Necromancer class had up to 6 pets to choose from, which you used 3 of. They had various effects for each situation, but the game was also very limited on the Trinity.

Straying heavily from the Trinity formula is difficult if you try to preserve balance. Add a large amount of potential beasts / summons and the job is essentially a massive toolbelt job. Either each tool is just so watered down that it doesn't matter or the insane amount of tools at your disposal makes you have a near-guaranteed spot in each group.

The only way I can realistically see any summons / beasts not just be a different aesthetical flavour of doing damage is by making them a Limited Job, because otherwise they will not fit in FFXIV this late into the game's lifespan.

[Archwizard]

I’m gonna say the same thing I say for SMN, if you’re going to limit the pets to just flashy animations then why even have a pet job?

Thing is that ye olde SMN was the example of Square's honest attempt to make a pet job. It required micromanagement (like forcing the pet to hold specific cooldowns for when you actually wanted them executed, or managing their movements so their AoE would actually strike the target and not interrupt their casts), and because its "auto-attack" was internally programmed as a GCD (or even a cast) so you could see how your stats contributed to it, things like "Orders your pet to execute Y" was subject to annoying issues like "ghosting" (the pet failing to execute your order because it conflicted with its own filler attacks or other commands, consuming the cooldown but doing nothing). And that's before getting into things like latency affecting the pet's own actions; they were glorified DoTs but still used AI, which made them even laggier.

It's why players actively preferred the Demi-Bahamut system; before SMN's 6.0 rework, the big push was for Egis to attack synchronously with the SMN in the same way, so that the pet's own actions couldn't conflict in this manner. But as you said, at that point the pet is basically a glorified animation, some bonus damage on casts with zero autonomy.

"Well just fix those issues and make pets work then!" Yeah, I don't know what things are like on 14's back-end, but I'm pretty sure if it were that easy, it wouldn't have been a persistent problem for years. The rework we saw in EW was a result of them looking at the options and seeing that removing the summons' autonomy would be an easier solution to implement on their back-end and overall more practical and flexible for players.

So unless it ends up as a Limited Job with some minigame to managing it, this is probably the best way to go about BST, too. And since Bozja already showed BST as a melee job, I think the "synchronized attacks" implementation is a fantastic way about it.