Quote Originally Posted by Azurarok View Post
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I need to preface this with the fact that the pet jobs had more things working against them than anything else seen then or now. They were shockingly janky, and I theorize that's why Beast Master is a limited job.


SMN had most of their DPS come from their many DOTs that simply don't exist anymore. Off the top of my head, they had Bio 1, Bio 2, Miasma, and a ground AoE one called Shadowflare. You also had a different version of the Fester skill, an aetherflow with a long recast, that was specifically more powerful the more DoTs an enemy had. I think cross-classing Thunder was a thing to have Fester hit harder, but that may have been something I assumed because tooltips were worse.

The three Egi were all different beasts. For starters, they had HP bars. They could die and would need a lot more positional management in difficult content, and some regular healer spells would hit them just like they still do for Chocobo. You had a skill that was just a regen for your Egi.

Titan was designed entirely for solo play as a tank, high defense, a mitigation skill, builds aggro, does trash damage. Players did some hilarious things with Titans, as you mention.

Garuda was a caster. She would be backline consistently flinging spells, but her attacks were weaker than Ifrit's, who was a melee. The big arguments were always about Ifrit being in constant danger, needing to move into range, but hitting very hard, while Garuda was far easier to keep alive and consistent. Both also had a unique skill, but for the life of me I can't recall which was which because they were negligible in all but Coils. I think is was another DoT for Garuda and a DPS buff for Ifrit.

Essentially, the whole idea was that the player would be rolling out their DoT skills for constant, passive damage while the pet AI would be attacking, while you also maintained their health. Dreadwyrm trance fixed the issue of SMN lacking a substantial burst, and it was what current SMN really grew from in gameplay.


The problems were; pet AI sucked, the reaction time for a player to command a specific thing took an entire real life second or two for the pet respond and were clunky, the pets were made of tissue paper, and enemies had a hard upper limit on how many DoTs it would have, so in FATES or other larger scale fights, most of your kit just didn't function.

These issues also applied to Scholar, who probably had it worse. Eos was ALWAYS preferable do to her having Whispering Dawn, while Selene had an interrupt. It almost never worked in time and the other fairy having an AoE heal was just no contest.

It was insanely important to manually place the fairy as she only cast anything if perfectly still. This, most importantly, included Embrace. She would otherwise stay directly next to you and trying to would usually prevent her casts as she would interrupt herself to stay within player range.

And Scholar had those flipping DoTs, too!