Will Beastmaster appear in any Endwalker content patches?

[aveyond-dreams]

And I'm saying the effort to arbitrarily make such a change is not worth it.

And I, and many others, are saying that it is absolutely worth it because we have clearly stated that we want to play as a full version of Blue Mage-not restricted to a minigame and ancient fights.

This kind of "it's not worth it to fix blue mage!" really sounds a lot like the arguments made back in 2019 around male Viera, "who would want to play as a bunny boy?? This race that can't even change its hair without a fantasia is so much cooler!! You need to respect their *vision!*"

Talk about failing to read the room. In any case I absolutely did not respect the *vision* of gender locked races and I still do not agree with the decision to turn a mainline FF job into a minigame.

In any case, players spoke up, the devs realized that yeah, mistakes were made, and then they fixed them. So I'm telling them to please fix Blue Mage already. The class that has appeared in numerous numbered FF titles with cool monster magic. Not the cat mage class.

[Shurrikhan]

That instead of adding a completely unnecessary and watered down version to a piece of side content, you could add a caster to the slot that would fill the same niche of BLU without having to change anything of said content and its purpose.

The current version is the watered down one.

Look at the kit. How much of it substantiates real, remotely competitive choices? What actual contextual nuance do you engage with across various fights, relative to your SAMs, your PLDs, your SMNs, your DRGs, etc.? What is there to make its actual playflow fun outside of the fact that it's capable of broken cheese?

I'm trying to meet you halfway here. Catmancer, Animist or w/e that sorta plays

Again, though, unless the whole purpose is to have a mangled, half-assed kit, as in the current version, what possible reason is there to meet only half-way up from half an earnest effort? Either actually do it, or don't. Don't throw a pittance atop an already paltry gesture of a combat experience.

And I reject the entire premise that BLU needs any sort of "fixing" that you're demanding, it's working completely as intended.

Then its vision is, imo -- and, it would appear, many others' -- shite.

But, I'm sure Mahjong, early Diadem, gender-locked Viera, and the like are/were "working as intended", too. Is this form of "working as intended" supposed to be the barely-touched kind or the eventually changed kind, I wonder?

It is a mini-game and side content, it's best for everyone to just accept it.

I have, and am willing to leave it as such, so long as I don't have to lose yet another favorite job concept to be relegated to a damned mini-game.

Theorycrafting that subverts the entire concept that (general) you unconvincingly try pass off as easy to implement isn't constructive.

No one has called it easy, only worthwhile -- especially if it means getting an actual (not watered-down or relegated-to-a-mini-game) BLU.

[Archwizard]

so long as I don't have to lose yet another favorite job concept to be relegated to a damned mini-game.

That mindset is exactly the issue: you talk about "losing" jobs to becoming Limited Jobs, when the purpose and reality of Limited Jobs is that we're lucky to see those jobs represented at all.

As I said before, the fact that they've tried and failed to implement Chemist as a healer twice in a row now shows that some jobs simply aren't congruous with 14's existing systems. Evidently in the case of BLU, the devs agreed that it simply wouldn't do as a full job, and they created Limited Jobs as a compromise from scrapping one of their more popular asks entirely.
"But XI did it!" XI is a completely different game. What worked in one (like spamming debuffs on a boss, or having 6-8 versions of a buff for each element) isn't necessarily plausible in the other, and no job in 14 has ever been lifted 1:1 from XI.

Which is why I take such issue with the conceit involved in people in this thread complaining that they'd rather BLU hadn't been implemented at all. The ones who try to have their cake and eat it too, claiming to be on the side of BLU fans while also advocating removing the consolation specifically provided for BLU fans. Claiming it's an obstacle to something that was dead in the water well before it existed.
Because yes, the alternative was for BLU fans to simply die begging.

So I will say again, if the devs manage to find a way to implement BST in a manner that satisfies both them and the players without making it a "damned mini-game", fine -- I'm not arguing for them to put "filling the next Limited Job slot" before trying to find a way to make its candidates Full Jobs. The primary reason BST even comes up in these discussions is purely for the beast-taming aspect, which the devs may simply eschew for practical reasons.
Frankly, I wouldn't be too shocked if the next highest candidate on their list was CHM instead now, precisely for the twice failure to make a Mix system before. Maybe some ungodly healer who brews completely overpowered buffs with a chance to blow up in their face and kill them or something.

The umbrage I take is with people coming out of the woodwork to spit venom when the words "Limited Job" even make an appearance on the page, as if a BLU personally pulled the life support on their grandparents.

[aveyond-dreams]

That mindset is exactly the issue: you talk about "losing" jobs to becoming Limited Jobs, when the purpose and reality of Limited Jobs is that we're lucky to see those jobs represented at all.

That exact same argument was used when Viera were revealed to actually be gender locked and when they announced Hrothgar out of nowhere. "You guys are lucky that they even added them!!"

Please.

I pay for and expect quality. They need to get creative just like how they did when they added the males. They even said they looked to people's fan art for inspiration. Maybe they should take a look at people's concepts of how a full Blue Mage job would work. Now we're asking them to come up with 20 or so core rotation spells so that we can do more stuff as Blue Mage. There were other avenues that they could have taken from the start with this and many other problems.

They could have added logos actions to Eureka from the start, but in deciding to "not overwhlem players" the result was that Eureka was an instant turn off for many. They could have added both genders of Hrothgar as they originally intended or done both genders of Viera and they could have avoided the backlash over reintroducing gender locked races in 2019.

And they could have avoided this drama over Blue Mage if they had envisioned it as a full job from the start, put the spells in the overworld instead of *ex trials* where the chances of getting the spell was so abysmally low that barely anyone got those spells at launch. Then, once you got the spells, you could queue for Duty Finder and have access to all the other content in the game.

If for some reason there actually is a lack of creativity as to how to introduce a hunter or beast master without it being limited, then they need to get some new people in. Goodness knows that the battle team has made several interesting blunders in the past like removing Energy Drain from Scholar and making it so that Bard can't even hear its own songs. Maybe if that's the problem they should hire some new people.



Or hey, would you look at that. They could also take a clue from how WoW's beast mastery hunter works. I'd love to a job like it added in game as opposed to limited beast master. Why? Because it can tame cool pets and do the same content as everyone else. It has the quirk of taming monsters but that is not all that the class is reduced to.

Nevertheless a quick glance at the ratio going on in the first page speaks for itself. Limited jobs are viewed as a waste of resources by many and people do not want cool jobs reduced to mini games. A hunter who tames monsters is a standard fantasy trope and if they cannot figure out how to make that a full job, that's a problem. Period.

[Archwizard]

Or hey, would you look at that. They could also take a clue from how WoW's beast mastery hunter works. I'd love to a job like it added in game as opposed to limited beast master. Why? Because it can tame cool pets and do the same content as everyone else. It has the quirk of taming monsters but that is not all that the class is reduced to.

At this point you're so deep in the weeds of marking out enemy camps in this discussion that you've completely missed the part where I already agreed with you on this point. Multiple times. But you keep bringing it up.

So I will say again, if the devs manage to find a way to implement BST in a manner that satisfies both them and the players without making it a "damned mini-game", fine -- I'm not arguing for them to put "filling the next Limited Job slot" before trying to find a way to make its candidates Full Jobs. The primary reason BST even comes up in these discussions is purely for the beast-taming aspect, which the devs may simply eschew for practical reasons.
Frankly, I wouldn't be too shocked if the next highest candidate on their list was CHM instead now...

Goodness knows that the battle team has made several interesting blunders in the past like removing Energy Drain from Scholar and making it so that Bard can't even hear its own songs.

Yes, and when people brought up constructive feedback about why those were poor and unpopular decisions, they were summarily addressed.
Hell, even gender-locking the races is being undone, because it's something that is adding to enjoyment of the game instead of being reductive. Granted, it will take time (but I expect if anything, the initial promise of gender-locking them was someone on the team's cheeky way of sliding an extra race in past their "no new races after Shadowbringers" line).

Unfortunately, "redo the entire job or just delete it because the loudest of us talking over the people who enjoy it as-is think the damned mini-game is a stupid waste of time" is not constructive, or something that can be quickly undone.

I pay for and expect quality. They need to get creative just like how they did when they added the males.

If for some reason there actually is a lack of creativity as to how to introduce a hunter or beast master without it being limited, then they need to get some new people in. Goodness knows that the battle team has made several interesting blunders in the past [...] Maybe if that's the problem they should hire some new people.

Gee, with the amount of respect you give them, I wonder why they haven't already snatched you up for the job.

[Shurrikhan]

As I said before, the fact that they've tried and failed to implement Chemist as a healer twice in a row now shows that some jobs simply aren't congruous with 14's existing systems.

Chemist itself didn't kill Chemist, according to the devs. Ninja and the tentative plans for Machinist did, for having effectively taken its core gimmick (the 'mix' mechanic, which they had trouble imagining in form sufficiently distinct from mudras) and its core weapon theme (a sidearm gun). By that point, Astrologian was simply the more apt fit for what remained.

Could we still see a Chemist nonetheless? Yes, but only if it sufficiently differentiates itself, which pretty much requires that the devs reverse their stance on homogeneity being the best thing since sliced bread.

[Archwizard]

Chemist itself didn't kill Chemist, according to the devs. Ninja and the tentative plans for Machinist did, for having effectively taken its core gimmick (the 'mix' mechanic, which they had trouble imagining in form sufficiently distinct from mudras) and its core weapon theme (a sidearm gun).

That's a semantic argument, and my point wasn't even about what specifically killed Chemist, only that for some reason or other, they didn't get it in for Heavensward or Endwalker, not for lack of trying each time.

only if it sufficiently differentiates itself, which pretty much requires that the devs reverse their stance on homogeneity being the best thing since sliced bread.

... you're complaining about homogeneity in the same breath you point out that they chose not to go with Chemist because its core mechanic would have been too similar to an existing job's?

[Shurrikhan]

... you're complaining about homogeneity in the same breath you point out that they chose not to go with Chemist because its core mechanic would have been too similar to an existing job's?

Yes. Because Mix and Ninjutsu need not have been "the same thing". Yet, to the devs, they were, just as Delirium and Inner Release have, to the devs, "necessarily" met at identical constructs with similarly near-zero interactions.

Meanwhile, if a grenadier-style toolkit and a machinist's were too similar in that they both used guns, the easy fix there would have simply been to share a base class, Gunner, and use split-exp jobs thereafter -- a correction they already should have applied to SMN and SCH. Alas...

That's a semantic argument

Not when your point was that Chemist was unfeasible regardless of context, when the devs themselves had said that, no, it was unfeasible primarily due to its context. That's not semantics; they're polar opposites.

[MellowMink]

There seems to be renewed interest in this possible limited job, so I thought bringing this thread up again after Endwalker’s launch would be a good idea. I still think expanding the companion system would be a good idea for it too, particularly for people who already fully leveled up their own chocobo companion.

[MagiusNecros]

Really depends on what they want to do. I see 3 possible futures for Beastmaster. Limited job, DPS, Tank.

I'm thinking Tank since I feel that they will want to add another Phys Ranged DPS.

I'm hoping they integrate FF5, FFT, FFXI, and Lyon Helsos in the mix if they decide to go through with Beastmaster.

A lot of people are thinking it'll go the SMN route but I think if they make it then Square Enix will do something they won't expect.

I'm hoping for Whips as a weapon. Or a meaty flail. But we will see. One handed axe would be more likely.