Let's talk about Beastmaster

[Zyph]

Probably because BST was not designed well. It was designed around an idea the players never took to and thus the job was sentenced to several years of leveling on their own. Charm as it was in XI should never repeat itself, because then it gives way to the foolish fears Tanaka and Matsui had for pet classes.

My suggestion for BST would be to have a stable of permanent pets (these can be charmed and kept in stable afterwards) with abilities that require both BST and pet to be active. Pets should have their own stat scaling independent of how open world mobs scale, this way we don't run into the excuse the devs in XI used for BST.

I actually liked the way BST worked in XI, aside from the whole "aggro-after-charm" thing. I liked the idea of being able to go out in the wild and steal a beast for your own use, it required a good sense of situational awareness. Keeping track of ecosystems helped too.

To me, having a stable full of pets will mean that by level 50 everyone will be using the same pet because it's the best and blah blah blah. And that's something that I'd rather see avoided, I like having options and situational considerations.

Also the real reason that BST fell into obscurity was that for a while the BST's pet would count as the equivalent of a 7th player in an exp party as far as exp distribution went, bringing down everyone's overall exp. Also as a truly "advanced" job, many players didn't know what they were doing and essentially became gimp warriors by not managing their pets correctly.