Pet Classes /Personalization/?

[Tonkra]

nobody seems to listen to my suggestions ;XD

[Warlock]

~snip~

FFXI didn't invent puppets....
That said.. Automata are an extension of you and you have full control of them ..they are empty shells that follow the moves of your hands/fingers to execute attacks. The 2 automaton in FFXI had a soul/personality for the story line just like Jhonny Five

[Elexia]

can go either FFXI way of dumb pets been thrown endlessly at mobs till they die which you have 0 connection with your pet.
Or have just 1-3 pets with personality that grow with you

So like Puppetmaster (from XI too), where your pet grows in terms of how much work and effort you put into it.

[SodRansom]

I personally would LOVE to see beastmaster in ffxiv. I was a hardcore bst in ffxi, and eventually quit because they broke the job. There were some elements to that job that were really promising and they never fully developed that job to be as good as it could have been. It really just turned into a generic dd.

The direction that ffxi did not take is one that I hope to see in ffxiv one day. The bst job needed to focused around charm, not around Call Beast. We turned from beastmasters into magicians really, pulling rabbits out of a hat. I hope that in ffxiv we will actually get a class that needs to know the strengths and weaknesses of the wild enemy in order to use them to fight to our advantage. We would need to know the wild terrain better than the city streets. I hope that we actually have to tame the mobs that we see roaming the landscape instead of mobs that we pull from our pocket. And that's where our pets would come from, not some premade familiars that follow us around. If that were the case we wouldn't be bsts anymore, but smns.

[Jinrya-Geki]

Pretty Sure Tonberries were supposed to be among those options :P.

[KaiserDrill]

The mechanic of the automaton was heavy customization. You had heads and frames. It wasnt beneficial to mix and match head/frame combos, except when they introduced the whm and blm heads.

Where the customization comes from are the attachments. Think of them as gear for your auto that either provides a stat boost or grants an ability.

Each attachment has a cost to equip based on the elements. Different heads/frames have different thresholds in each element. For instance, the soulsoother has 7 light threshhold but only like 3? In fire.

Not to mention just like player characters in ffxi the automaton has skills. However it's limited to melee, ranged, and magic skills. Automatons learn ws just like players, by reaching a certain skill level in ranged or melee skill. They automatically learn new spells by skilling up the magic skill, no scroll needed.

This is why i liked pup. Im not knocking bst or smn players but i didnt feel either has near the customization options as pup. Avatars and charmed/jug mobs just seemed expendable with no soul or personality.

[SodRansom]

This is why i liked pup. Im not knocking bst or smn players but i didnt feel either has near the customization options as pup. Avatars and charmed/jug mobs just seemed expendable with no soul or personality.

Yeah I hear ya with the no soul or personality. And I agree with you as far as jug pets go. I guess with charmed mobs though I always felt like they did have a personality, albeit not the same kind as a puppet might. I can see how with pup it's nice because you have the same puppet that you can build up and customize, and you grow attached to as you go up in levels. But I think that the beastmaster charmed pets also had a personality, but a different kind. There's was more of a wild, untamed personality. As you start charming the same mobs over and over you start building up a connection with them, and you have memories about monsters that you killed together. For example, in the La Vaule zone of ffxi, I feel a huge affinity with those pugs down in the trenches. I killed so many of those La Vaule nms in that zone with those little dudes...and they got me killed more often than not too lol.

But that's another thing about bst that I hope they keep. That element of danger that accompanied the job. You never knew whether a charm was going to succeed or not. And while it was usually a reliable skill, the fact that it might fail made the job really exciting. True, you're going to bitch and moan when the charm fails right when you need it the most, but that danger element made the job really attractive to me. That's another reason I don't want a kind of beastmaster that just gets a pet familiar that follows him around. That seems like a cop out. There's no danger there, your pet will follow you around no matter what. There's nothing that separates a good beastmaster from a bad one really.

[Shougun]

Yeah I hear ya with the no soul or personality. And I agree with you as far as jug pets go. I guess with charmed mobs though I always felt like they did have a personality, albeit not the same kind as a puppet might. I can see how with pup it's nice because you have the same puppet that you can build up and customize, and you grow attached to as you go up in levels. But I think that the beastmaster charmed pets also had a personality, but a different kind. There's was more of a wild, untamed personality. As you start charming the same mobs over and over you start building up a connection with them, and you have memories about monsters that you killed together. For example, in the La Vaule zone of ffxi, I feel a huge affinity with those pugs down in the trenches. I killed so many of those La Vaule nms in that zone with those little dudes...and they got me killed more often than not too lol.

But that's another thing about bst that I hope they keep. That element of danger that accompanied the job. You never knew whether a charm was going to succeed or not. And while it was usually a reliable skill, the fact that it might fail made the job really exciting. True, you're going to bitch and moan when the charm fails right when you need it the most, but that danger element made the job really attractive to me. That's another reason I don't want a kind of beastmaster that just gets a pet familiar that follows him around. That seems like a cop out. There's no danger there, your pet will follow you around no matter what. There's nothing that separates a good beastmaster from a bad one really.

Thats interesting as well, the desire for the animals to actually remain in a sense wild. Never fully tamed?

I wonder if they would be willing to create some sort of aggro push system, where you try to balance using skills that restore the tamed state and skills that let out the wild state (so you are always juggling this resource in order to maximize output but stay in control of the pet), perhaps skill costs increase if used in short succession (assuming a low cooldown) so trying to face roll your keyboard would lose your animal. If you lose your animals state, or if he dies, is there a way to bring him back or the connection is only as long as he lives? So you would still be cycling pets just not as often?


Does it mean you wouldnt want to see raising a pet, or getting to a state were the pet is very loyal? Perhaps certain animal types can get to a certain height of loyalty, like a drake is almost always going to be on the brink of being lost- but a dodo you may actually fully tame with a sense of sanity left over.

Chocobo sort of counts as a pet to grow with but I'd like to go out and find an animal and start out fresh that way- would also like to see the process of loyalty come from weeks and months of training and not like 10 mins like in WoW.

Perhaps that can show the difference in beastmasters as well, all this would probably make beastmaster a really slow class though lol. BOB use more we need more help! "Hold on! I'm trimming my drakes nails and scrubbing under his scales!" NOW "NO I WORKED REALLY HARD TO GET HIM NOT TO HATE ME! ITS BEEN WEEKS!!" (Loyalty would basically buffer the aggro push system into a happy to unhappy state, where at a certain place in the unhappy-o-meter the pet goes back to being wild and for being a bad beastmaster you have to retame lol)

Thoughts? :P

[SodRansom]

Oh, and Warlock...multiple pets...yes please lol. I was always so jealous of the beastmaster npc's in Campaign when they pulled out more than one pet.

[Orophin]

It seems like the chocobo you raise is going to be the pet you make an attachment to. It's been said you can raise them to be damage dealers, tanks or healers and that they're supposed to have a gambit system.

As far as a class dedicated to pets, seems like Arcanist is going to be it for now with Carbuncle. Who knows what they have in store for the future, but Yoshi-P has already shown interest in Samurai and Ninja so it may be a while before we see another class like BST or PUP.