Job Framework: Beastmaster

[Kozh]

Poor efforts towards one job is not a sufficient excuse to kill another in conception. Moreover, Pet AI/responsiveness will have to be addressed regardless of whether BST were limited or not, unless you literally want BST to do no more than have turn-based Pokemon battles.


What the devs will bother with is not the sole limit of what is possible.


XI Player 1: *Does quest.*
XI Player 2: "Look guys, he tamed a wyvern!!"

...

Oh yeah, they will address it for sure.... by removing it all together most likely. That's why summoner has been getting trance instead of egi.

I mean this is just a matter of logic. If they are already struggling with SMN, a proper job with 3 egi, how are they going to make Beastmaster that's known to have multiple pets without making it unbalanced or clunky like early SMN?

[Shurrikhan]

without making it unbalanced or clunky like early SMN?

Except modern SMN is no more responsive than when pets had their own HP bars and could be used as mob-gatherers and/or tanks.

[van_arn]

If the difference of having more than 60/90/120 second timers to hit occasionally outside of filling with damn near a single skill for the rest of the time in optimal play were actually entertaining, I might agree with you. But it's not, or certainly not nearly as entertaining as BLU could be with no cost to its unique acquisition systems.

Let me be clear: sometimes excessive grind aside, I love BLU's unique skill acquisition system. But none of that necessitates, nor excuses, a basic and dull playflow. You can build a fancy cake and still have it taste like a good cake. You don't need to deprive players of a fun or deep playflow just to make room for acquisition systems. The latter has absolutely no impact on the prior provided people intend to play BLU as a BLU (something that will take additional time to progress on, largely in compensation for its hyper-versatility). If they don't want to play BLU as BLU (and I don't mean just-another-caster-with-a-uniquely-shallow-playflow), they should not be the target audience of a BLU design.

There's plenty of things I'd like to change about the way blu skills work together when activated, but most discussion around that topic just try to shoebox them into the same old system everything else uses. As things stand, BLU excels at doing dumb things in dumb ways, and that's fantastic-- Basic Instinct especially takes that to the next level. I'd love for them to start locking out abilities based on elemental rather than cooldown, or perhaps set the player's element based on their active spells.

Sure you could just unsync spam things, but you could also get a little more creative and do things just because.

[Jeeqbit]

I think a Beastmaster should have a generic AoE and some generic single-target attacks all with fixed potencies, but the animation of those attacks should change depending on which beast you've decided to use.