Killer Instinct: The Beastmaster Compendium

Update will be to ready. When used there is a small chance the pet becomes aggressive towards the master and their party.

The new ability is to eat the pet for a massive stoneskin. The effect will last for 1 minute and recast is 2 hours.

After the last update, I have literally 0 hopes for ***for BST. It's my favorite job but the devs really won't backpedal on the stupid idea they did by nerfing the Ready / Reward distance. That would be them admitting fault.

It'd be worse. It'd be admitting they have been lying... I mean we all know they are there is no way after 14 years you suddenly "realize" that the way you created something and they way it's been used the entire time isn't what you intended the "since the beginning"

It's like back when they'd say one thing and people would quote them previously saying the opposite and they'd double down saying nope they never said that and purge all reference to the original statements

Something comes to mind. Could it be... NINJA?!
Ninja was never supposed to be a tank. It was supposed to be a DD. But SE acquiesced to how players played the job and gave ninja tanking abilities.

I think SE's willingness to compromise on BST is a lot lower than Ninja. Making a Ninja a tank is one thing, but SE nerfed BST's capabilities because the job could render much of their stupid gimmicks useless. Rather than create unique content that adapted to the presence of a Beastmaster, they broke Beastmaster. (I won't listen to anyone who says they didn't because you cannot activate Beastmaster job abilities consistently (especially in Dynamis-D)).

This is my take on it too, 100%. In the 4 years since the Ready nerf, the XI team has, on the official forums, doubled and then tripled down on the mistake. They would have to eat a ton of crow to revert it now.

However.

There are obvious problems with how beastmaster job design is currently implemented in XI. Other jobs could use a dps buff or some balancing. Our job works and can do cool things but it's also rather broken. I'm not hopeful but it is possible that we'd see actual attention. Puppetmaster got a total revamp, which continued on for years, until now it's a powerful, unique job. Summoner got a revamp, to where it's in a great place. There's precedent, right? Even with the smaller team you could "fix" BST without much trouble.

ninja, blu spells, monstrosity probably other stuff too I forget

hmmm really im expecting there going to unlevel cap bst jugs

I would be fine if they just increased the range back by 50%. Decreasing the range while at the same time increasing the range to SMN was just a total what the *** for a lot of people.

BST used to have a place in end game but even with the huge damage that pets can do, It's not going to compete with a SMN's crazy #s.

{That's Interesting.}

Got a direct link to this?

The literal front page?


http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/56304-Announcing-the-January-Version-Update

I really hope they give us uncapped jugs via perma 5/5 Beast Affinity and well, 5/5 Beast Healer as an apology. These new merits better be good...

Basically, you get the job abilities from merits, and some timers are changed I'm guessing.
Don't get any high hopes....

My hopes are up - BST has fallen way behind all other classes in my opinion. Maybe SE listened to the last batch of people making statements on the official forum. The guy who dropped his Aymur should have got their attention.

Oh, lol, I missed that.

Even adjusting timers so we don't need Charmer's Merlin to cap -Ready timers would be a nice bonus. I expect very little so I'd be happy with this. Would be a decent bonus for BST in Dyna, since we melee and use GenerousArthur as a support there.

None of the job adjustments have turned merit job abilities into normal job abilities, so I wouldn't expect anything like that.

Merit points wise I'm wish it's adding more ready recast so we can drop Charmer's forever but I won't hold my breath.

They aren't doing distance changes so I'll just repeat it again during January digest thread. Just because they said no doesn't make it any less broken mechanically or that they can't change their minds. Reading their response showed how out of touch they are with BST and reliant on bad feedback to form their current opinion.

Regarding the pet ability change, I really hope they aren't just nerfing all BST jug buffs and making them AoE. The banner pic does look like pet abilities being used on the BST. And since there is no JA or traits in the list. I can only speculate it's turning them all AoE.

The whole Ready distance thing is so *** silly. If you just rolled it back to be the same as summoner, you could painlessly slot BST in on most any fight that we currently use SMNs on. Like, you want to fix the job, that's the easiest way. Do that, change the -Sic/Ready recast timer merit category to -2s for each, and you're done. It'd be balanced- SMN gets support/healing, BST gets the ability to do decent melee damage from the master.

I still think that Ready moves should have direct stat scaling like Blood Pacts do, so we'd get more mileage out of Familiar, but just reverting the distance and dropping our reliance on Charmer's Merlin would be a perfect adjustment.

I'm REALLY curious and Nervous about our merit points now.

These adjustments could be really good or really BAD. I know which way most are probably voting.


Killer Effects - I don't think they will change this
Reward Recast - No Change
Call Beast Recast - Probably no Change
Sic Recast - I'm afraid if they change this.
Tame Recast - Would be great if this was replaced

Feral Howl - A tweak might be good. lower recast
Killer Instinct - little nervous if this is changed, fulltime would be nice
Beast Affinity - Huge potential here. if it could raise levels higher, we could get some old pets back.
Beast Healer - This one seems almost useless to me presently since bst is not main tanking anything for enmity.

The adjustment for pet ready moves makes me hopeful for my recommended enmity adjustment on pet self buffing ready moves. probably just my fanciful thinking though.

They're going to change sic/ready recast to pet commands distance and make Charmers Merlin main hand only.

Draylo? is that you?

Draylo wishes he were me. Lol

What I stated falls perfectly inline with what SE would do. Oh, and they're giving us an HQ aheep.

I don't agree that BST pets should be able to gain more enmity by itself. I think BST pets should be able to gain enmity and TANK. Whether the DDs in a party are 1 (BST) or many, certain jug pets should be able to hold enmity and tank.

This is exactly what we did in beastmaster parties in cape terrigan with lizard pets against manticores. The pet with the most recent ready/sic move was the tank, until the next one did a sic move. I know it's not the same as our jug pet tanking/holding hate against real DDs....but one can dream.

Well, I can cap pdt and come very close with mdt on any pet. So all I'm lacking in the tanking needs are the enmity generation.

I don't think every pet should tank, but I want to be able to with the ones that are designed that way.


Even if pet cannot generate it's own enmity, master ould need a more reliable method then continue to rely on snarl.

Beast pet enmity is really bad, and snarl is unreliable at best, but serious doubts of any change on that end. They gave heyoka gear and said "good enough" (even though its not)

Feral Howl "adjustment" would be cool though. It's a neat concept but mostly unusable. Wouldn't count on that one either, unless they remove it and make it a natural ja to make room for ready damage+

Had a question for Falkirk or anyone else who might be able to give advice. Looking at the Primal Rend sets I see he's got Augury Cuisses +1 listed as a 2nd choice over valerous Legs. I have a pair of Taeon Tights with MAB+18/WS Damage +3%.

I'm gonna assume those are better?

Also I have Valerous Feet with STR+10, Accuracy+8, Attack +8, Magic Accuracy+19, Enmity+1, Weapon Skill Damage +10%.

Should I try and roll for a pair with MAB along with WS Damage or keep my Taeon Feet with MAB+19, WS Acc+20 WS Damage+2%?

You can get much better valorous feet than those taeon (e.g. was 4-5 and mab 20-30)