when to bring beast master in

[Shironeko_Narunyan]

I'm sorry, but where does this idea come from that Beastmaster *MUST* have pets collectable around the world to essentially just be "FFXIV Pokemon: Gotta catch em all!" when Summoner exists as a pet-type job with a certain selection of pets you unlock / obtain canonically in their story line?

SMN pets are stances at this point, not what people who like traditional pet classes mean when they say "pets".

Ultima Online had you go out and tame, then train your pets. They fought for you, and your job was to heal them, and if you had the build for that, do some additional damage. Your pet became a personal thing, you'd look for stronger ones, you'd name them, they had to be fed. There was a relationship between you and your pet.

Dark Age of Camelot had the Bonedancer, a class that had a team of pets. You could spec into casters, healers or whatever, then add ranged/caster/melee DPS, and you'd have your tank, so you'd basically micromanage your pet party. The whole party had the strength of one player, it killed more slowly that others, but had basically unlimited sustain.

These are just two examples of fun pet class designs from the past. The best the FFXIV Summoner ever got was the Titan tank pet, and that was so janky, it never got really fun to play with -- but it was still my main job in ARR and HW, because it came closest to what I liked in other games.

[Seraphor]

We have a pet job that's been squeezed into the narrow boxes this game has, and after 8 years of no direction and the first decent rework, it's still a clunky, lacklustre peice of gameplay.
Pet jobs just don't work in this systemn that's why Beastmaster needs to be something different to justify it's inclusion.

It should be a limited job that works to expand the companion system.
The Companion Chocobo is the best pet system in the game, if Beastmaster could add more to this system it would not only be a great limited job in it's own right, but it could expand gameplay options for all jobs by way of giving us additional companion creatures.
Beastmaster could tame them, and bring them into duties as it's unique selling point, while every other job could still use them in world zones just like the chocobo.

[BaconBits]

I'd rather not watch another job I'd like to play get shunted into Limited Job status like BLU did. When BLU first released back in SB it was 20 levels below cap, barred from doing PoTD, and was relegated to playing old content. It took until Shadowbringers for their level cap to get raised to 60 and later on 70.

Who's to say SE wouldn't do the same to BST and cap them at 50 on release and have them run the same ancient content that's been ingame for 8 years now when the current cap is 90 now?

[aveyond-dreams]

I'd rather not spend any resources adding pokemon style limited Beastmaster when after 8 years Summoners still don't have Ramuh, Leviathan, Shiva, or Alexander. I'd much rather it be a full job even if that means a smaller quantity of better monsters to call on. Hunter with animal pet is a pretty standard trope in many video games, there is no reason why that has to be so "special" as to be locked out of the most relevant and current content this game has to offer.

[ElizanderNorisse]

I’ll admit that I wouldn’t want it to be a limited job. Would love to have Lyon, Pagaga, and Clarricie in the job quest though.
With Lyon as our mentor perhaps.

[van_arn]

I'm all for another limited job option, so long as it's sufficiently weird to set itself apart from BLU.

[Kandraxx]

They should first concentrate on making the majority of dps jobs fun to play. Because when I need a special mouse+perfectly worked out keybinds + still an addon on top of it then there’s a problem.

WoW has learned that more buttons don’t equal more fun.

[Absurdity]

WoW has learned that more buttons don’t equal more fun.

Funny how the game actually became less fun around the same time they started to heavily prune abilities, also funny how they backpedalled on that stance with the last expansion and added a bunch of those removed abilities back into the game.

[Duskane]

I don't know why beast master has to be limited like its clearly not like Blue mage in any sense
and even if it was what would they do? copy paste blue mage formula making blue less unique?just lord of verminion 2?

[Seraphor]

I don't know why beast master has to be limited like its clearly not like Blue mage in any sense
and even if it was what would they do? copy paste blue mage formula making blue less unique?just lord of verminion 2?

The issue is how the pet would work.

Does the Beastmaster get one pet that functions as an integral part of a strict rotation? Fine, normal job.

But if as many expect, Beastmaster is about using multiple pets that do different things, or taming pets yourself in the wild, then that's not going to work outside a limited job.

There's a reason why SMN has been pruned back to what it is today, and why summons aren't real pets anymore, they're just an extension of you that visually appears as a separate entity.