Flawed Beastmaster Design???

[Metaphasic]

Beastmaster is fun in the open world. But I have a real question about its overall design.

To progress around the circle of colors, we need to continually cycle through our loaded beasts.

But each beast has an affinity. For example, you might use Pugil against a Fire Sprite. Each thing has a type, and you get an advantage against others. Kind of like a Pokémon.

Now, if you're in the open world and want to do a fate, you have a choice, stick with one beast the whole time, which hurts your overall DPS due to not being able to go around the circle guage, or progress normally by swapping pets.

Doesn't this break the whole reason for having affinities in the first place?

[Carighan]

Well, what deals more damage? Staying with the same pet, or cycling? That's the only question that matters, it's a damage dealer class, if it deals more damage you do that.

[Valence]

You can access the entire set of BST skills up to Universality with a single beast deployed and never changing it.
It's obviously a DPS loss if you never swap beasts since the entire job entices you to use Parting and Tempered for more DPS, but you can play it with a single beast perfectly fine.

But if you see a fate and want to use elemental damage like your fire sprites, then load up 3 beasts that do higher damage vs them? (do those overworld fates actually have elemental weaknesses? I don't think they do else BLM would have elemental plays around that and it doesn't)

[Zofian]

I find it beyond weird that blowing up our pet on the enemy is part of the rotation... And given the job is actually aether-based instead of actual-beast-based, the job should be called Neo-Beastmaster or something. It wouldn't be an issue if the concept of beastmaster was entirely new, but the general idea of a Beastmaster has been pre-existing in many IPs over time, and almost all have not been like this (assuming that some characters out there in literature probably do qualify as a beastmaster and not just a multi-creature-summon-character in a movie, and using magic to form and unform them).

As a job it's much better than I thought it would be, but it missing some flavour, the aetherpetness makes it a bit fake and plastic (but with the design of the artifact gear, they are clearly committed to this job build essence). The job icon could use also use a tweak, I just feel it's not quite right yet.

Perhaps using a battlehorn could result in a significantly lower cooldown being placed on the current battlehorn action, and the current cooldown will only be applied if you use Parting Blow. So for example you have your battlehorn3 pet summoned> using battlehorn1 then only puts a 60 second cooldown on battlehorn3- instead of 90 seconds that could apply (and currently do) only if using Parting Blow on the battlehorn3 pet. In other words you are 'rewarded' with a lower cooldown on a battlehorn for not sacrificing your pet (or using Parting Blow would be enacting a 30 second penalty on top of the 60 seconds, whichever way you want to look at it). Parting Blow thus becomes a more desperate move to do more damage, and switching horns without using Parting Blow becomes the strategic ideal. And especially since today's patch took away the ability to refresh Tempered Release out of battle by switching horns, we could use this lesser cooldown as a fair trade. Until today I was able to use the same pet and it's Tempered Release on each trash mob pack in a dungeon, and it was fun. Now because of the new cooldown applied to Tempered Release, you can only effectively use TR every second trash mob pack, regardless of which pet you have, as the 3 battlehorns don't have their own Tempered Release timers.

The traditional melee DPS role actions should be available and allowed for BST, just not in the Crucible. I would settle for having just Leg Sweep though.