Beastmaster Job Concept

[AriaValkyrie]

Hey Tank Friends!

Beastmaster's been thrown around a lot, in a lot of different forms, usually being dismissed as a limited job. But we can for sure work with the concept to show how it might play without resorting to that.

We do know Beastmasters exist from the goings on in Bozja, namely with Lyon and Pagaga. Thus, we know that at least some variety of Beastmasters use a one-handed axe and a shield. It's possible to also include a Whip in the repertoire of the Beastmaster, since they have used those in other games.
A suggestion from another thread was to give them a chain for their off-hand, wrapping it around the wrist as a sort of makeshift shield, but would also allow it to be used as a whip, or even just to be a classic leather whip, and could be attached to their axe. It's an option, but I've been sticking with the axe and shield for this concept.


The general concept I have for Beastmaster's gameplay stems from them being a capable fighter in their own right, but adapting their fighting style to attack in tandem with their Beasts. Rather than being a pet job, the Beasts I've selected here function similar to how Reaper's Avatar attacks work, being a GCD that also commands their called Beast to perform an attack, but not persisting on the battlefield.

For reference, here's the Beastmaster's main weaponskills, with a couple abilities



These weaponskills are basic, meant to be used in between calling Beasts in, but they all change whenever the Beastmaster calls a Beast from their repertoire, changing form and function, and even combo actions.
Also, take the potencies with a grain of salt, I selected potencies mostly to give an idea of how it might feel, less to be actually balanced.

[AriaValkyrie]

I stuck Coeurl in pretty early in the process, though the order could easily be changed around. Coeurl's whole deal is attacking swift, with rapid gcds at lower potency.
For all of the Beast's Calls, the top line is the Beastmaster's actual actions, below are the actions the Beast takes.
The top left is a unique action to assign to call the Beast, with a longer recast time. The exact length of the recast timer, i'm not positive about since I can't exactly playtest it but there are several Beasts with which to choose from, so it might end up being about right.



I mostly chose Fenrir for the concept because a beast of the same type was used in Zadnor, and I thought it was fun to use here. Fenrir's weaponskills are a longer combo, that hits an area rather than being single target, and also grants a damage buff (for now). I have been working with making a few of the gapclosers as weaponskills that can get used anywhere in the rotation, mostly with how the animations might work. Could change very easily for most of the Beasts.



I placed Dawon at level 50, based on Lyon's pet, though smaller and younger. I couldn't find what species they are to put here but something akin to that.



Manticore is another beast I added because of Lyon in the fight with Dawon. Could also use something more like Gowrow, the Crocodile type of diresaur-like enemy.
Their whole deal is strong, heavy hits, but with cast times as a wind-up on a longer GCD.
These should be slightly above proportional for the increased cast time, so it's not a loss to actually use.



Malboros are pretty iconic so I wanted to include one here. Single target weaponskills with it do have a slightly increased range.



Behemoth's the last one I added for this concept because it would be fun to team up with a Behemoth. They have a longer, slower combo.

That would be all the Beasts themselves I added. Again, this is mostly to show how the general combat flow might work, to show how it could be implemented. The 6 Beasts I chose don't have to be the ones that actually get used, of course.

[AriaValkyrie]

There are a few other abilities to add to the rotation as well. The first two are simply ways to increase your Beast's damage. The third might be a DPS loss, but good in a pinch to get a personal shield.

There are two additional Beasts that aren't part of the main rotation, too.

First off, the short cooldown for Beastmaster is in the form of Beetle



Essentially, the Beetle is a half-shield, reducing damage taken by 50% until the Beetle's HP is reduced to 0. The level 74 trait simply lowers the damage taken specifically by the Beetle, letting it last a little longer. The % reduction may be too high, but you get the idea.



Mandragora I used for two abilities, one being the ranged attack for Beastmaster. If we went with a whip instead of a shield, we could use the whip for the ranged attack but for now this works.
Photosynthesis is a small heal at the radius of Leylines, also with a small damage mitigation. Anyone could use the heal, but the mitigation for now is just personal for now.


As for personal cooldowns:


Heart of Nature is simply the tank stance for Beastmaster.
Caged Heart is a longer cooldown, but can also be spent to heal and increase movement speed.
Apex Predator is their invuln, inspired by one of Lyon's abilities in his fights.
While similar to Living Dead from DRK, there's not a way to bene out of it. If they use it, they must Duel or Die. Bloody Victor may be a little too much, but its fun one way or another.
Wild Determination is simply a heal on a cooldown, meant to be used the lower your HP.
Break In is best used well before tankbusters, to give time for it to build up, if you know the fight well enough to know the timing.

That's mostly it for Beastmaster's skills. Heavily inspired by Lyon and other fun stuff from Bozja, but it is a proof of concept for how it could be implemented.

There's also this because there was a leftover capstone to fill.

[AriaValkyrie]

Lore wise, I do picture Beastmaster as someone who trains beasts for the purpose of protection, not for offense, conversely to how Lyon and Pagaga worked in Bozja.
There is room in the lore, too, for Lyon to return in their questlines, if you've read all of his field notes. Certainly, at least, we could do a lot with it.

I'm a bit mixed on what level would be best to start Beastmaster off. on one hand, making them start at level 80 in a new expansion would be good for the most part, but it would make a lot of sense for them to start early, as you could start 'training' with your Beasts from early on, and it could be something available early on for newbies. but that's another discussion.

My hope is that this concept seems fun to others, too. Of course there's room for improvement and balancing, but as a general overview, it works well.

If you liked this, I do also have a couple other job concepts over on the DPS forums! I've made a Green Mage as a hybrid melee/caster, Ranger as a melee with a crossbow off-hand, Sword Saint, and a Time Mage, but Beastmaster's definitely has the most stuff to it.

Let me know if you have any thoughts on this! There's always ways to improve on a concept, especially with fresh pairs of eyes. And if people have particular Beasts they'd like to have included, I'd love to see what folks would come up with for how they would fight!

[cjparmen]

Oky so hear me out what if you made the beast master play more like they did in ffta. Make it so you have a couple of big monsters, i.e coeurl, malbro and behemoth. And when you activate them the BM mimics there moves for say 30s. And it changes their combos and a few GCD and OGCDS to match the moves you made for said monster!!! Also they take on the traits of the monster. I.e the coeurl attacking faster etc.

[MonsutaMan]

There are BST in-game, who function like the standard BST from XI.

It makes no sense to release a job already in the game, which does not function as the job in the game.

BST is a layup; use the NPC such as Clarricie, Lyon and those Bozjan people I saw as a Blueprint, with monster taming....easy!!!!!!

Maybe that is why it is taking so long to release, it is already a made man/woman.

PUP should be fairly easy too.

The only job I kind of like....and actually play somewhat seriously is SMN, because it is the closest thing to a pet job. Really don't like any Job in this FF, BST may change that. I want to get into XIV, but I aint feeling the current jobs for the most part. I am a pet MMO gamer at heart.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

What the...

A good Beastmaster concept that DOESN'T shoehorn it into Limited Job because Yoshi-san mentioned it tongue-in-cheek? I'll have to read it for a while, but mad props!

Btw, do the skill templates have a source somewhere? I'd like to use those myself at some point.

[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.