Beastmaster Job Concept

[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.