Current State Of BST: August 2020 Update

The wsd bonus from /drg should apply to all hits of a ws if I'm not mistaken (not saying it would be optimal to do so).so should still work with decimation.

Totally agree. At this point, I'll take it as: "Make BST Pets learnable spells" ...either usable items or little stupid fights around vanadiel....put you know how precious development resources are

I was wrong yes. Corrected. Works across hits.

This is part of the problem. BST gear hardly enhances the pet itself in large amounts. It would have been nice to get some useful stats for the pets on their artifact and relic sets, since that gear basically is just minor macro pieces anyways. Having to carry valorous for MAB/burst and ta'liah is more inventory strain.

I like at least PUP got some pretty high stat pieces like pet MAB. It's niche, but convenient. Their relic body is also very good for the pet. I wish BST got some pieces like that.

emicho path c is pretty decent for pet augs while keeping a little for the master. it's about as close as it gets if you don't want to play the augment game.

FYI for those who want lower recast for call beast.
with gear and merits, the lowest possible recast time is 3:35 seconds. can swap pets 3x by the time rage wears off. Thats pretty good really.

I go for sic/ready recast and killer effects+ in group 1. Some might swap killer effects, but I don't think anyone would swap sic/ready recast merits.

if you are focused on master damage, using killer effects+ and killer instinct are really powerful.

I dont have bst finished, and am still needing a lot of gear. Im only a few % behind cors with R15 DPs on wave 3 before counting pet damage, with my WSs hitting for 30-45k damage/ws.

You can put a bst in the main DD party just fine.

Ok held off opinion until I had more time into it post update and have done a few things endgame after finishing Aymur. I like the job, I am kind of mad at myself for putting it off as long as I did for other jobs that I dont enjoy as much.

The way I see it BST is being taken in a proper direction, they are updating into the modern FFXI, which I think everyone can agree it needed. FFXI has 4 pet jobs and each one has a particular niche they fit uniquely. DRG is a heavy dd that gets a bosst from its bet, this is its role and its gotten very good at this, very little stats for pet on the relic, af, empy. SMN is very heavily pet focused where the focus is the avatars, thats where the SMN's power lays, and their JSE armors show this. PUP this is where I start saying a sort of middle ground, Heavily pet reliant but not exclusively. The auto is a huge deal for the pup and offers a wide array of advantages, closer to the smn side of the spectrum but more middle. Now we have this new BST that is getting its identity reworked. So using that whole spectrum idea, BST is leaning towards the drg side of things. So bst is more pet focused then drg but still seemingly weighted heavily on master focus. They use the pets as a tool, not the focus, and this is really cool. I do wish they would extend our distance a bit, maybe make it 10 yalms, but feel they are giving bst that identity that i kinda envisioned it having from the get go. I like it a lot, of course it needs improvements still but I actually like the direction they took it, them giving it a real identity. You (the player) are a melee dps that uses pets as tools to aid you in battle. Maybe im giving SE to much credit but ill say they are doing pretty well on bst and look forward to seeing some future tweaks.

Now, I need to get my dmg up and work on improving bc atm I am not impressed with myself at all in Dyna or omen really.

If we are going with that spectrum, id say bst is essentially drg that gets active benefits from its pet, instead of just passive benefits. The active benefits vary depending on pet. Its master focused while augmenting master playstyle via pet choice, whereas drg gets a larger change based off subjob choice.

Dynamis is such a long event that the differences between jobs are less significant than the differences in players, as far as getting on mobs quickly, getting WS off quickly, switching to the right mobs, and so on. You can easily put a BST into a DD party without losing much at all.

Even then, this was just for the bosses, not everything leading up to them. Wave 1 boss, bst wasnt the greatest, but reducing the mobs initial HP and att while absorbing damage via shadows made it faster. My magic ws set isnt up to par yet, only getting 10-13k.

Wave 2 was much, much easier with the att nuke. No one died, my pet didnt die til the last 5% hp, and i boosted everyones damage while not being that far behind everyone as well.

Wave 3 i managed to have my pet out for all but 2 fetters via CDs and familiar, which let us kill most of them rapidly. I ended up dying on the second to last one at the end as a whm died, but still got everything done quickly.

Last boss just melted. All physical DDs did significantly more damage, and this is including the fact that we run a 2+ cor, 2 geo, 2 brd, 1 rdm setup. The att and def down STILL significantly boosted damage.

I dunno man. I have to disagree. I don't think going 5/5 Call Beast recast + 4 pieces of old gear rates as pretty good. You give up Reward Recast where 5/5 Sic/ready is pretty mandatory.

I feel like that and the viability of Killer Instinct and Killer Effects is so situational that the only reason I'd switch to either that or Call Beast recast is for some specific scenario.


You're definitely giving them too much credit lol. And that's not meant to be mean to you. It's just they have no idea what they are doing. Their first update to last year since the distance nerf was giving us two jugs that no one uses and had worst stats than their equivalents.

2016 was in my opinion the last great update to BST. In that they cared to update BST with SC/MB elements and scaling the pets damage in the right direction. They got ultra negative feedback from a small amount of people kicking up dirt on all the forums about BST being OP.

And with most of the community not even playing BST (just look at the census). It was agreed in a community sense it must be true. Everyone wanted BST back in 2016-2017 to avoid how ridiculously overtuned content was so the job is OP. Without looking at the big picture. Then bam distance nerf and just getting left off subsequent updates while others continued to get massive buffs.

They still need to update BST into the modern FFXI. Most of the mechanics are broken. Inventory strained. Pet TP doesn't matter any more. In my opinion, slapping 120% WSD on an axe and giving us a couple pets that do attack up and defense down isn't a new identity. We don't need another DRG, even if it does things differently.

Oh you are exactly right, I probably am giving them way to much credit, and yes they have done some, lets say questionable things with their decisions in the past. Hell that may be an understatement lol. No the Doli axe isnt the new identity I was speaking of, I saying them nerfing the distance was. Look I know its a sore spot, it is, especially on a lot of mobs where im right across from my pet but it wont use the move LOL im sorry that is pretty damn funny in a way, but, and this is just my opinion of course on how i inerpret it, that now forced us to fight along side our pet, not just act like a smn. You can not deny that prior to that, at least on my server that i saw, were playing bst like a smn, at a distance. Thats def not how I envisioned bst when i heard about it launch. I wanted to be a bad as mofo up in a mobs face with my pet having my 6. Thats the direction they SEEM to be pushing it now, the pet is essentially support for you. And my god yes the inventory... holy ***. I still love my aymur and I love direction its going, now lets hope they continue to improve and for Altanas Sake give 10 yalms distance at least....

This is exactly what I did. I made a CB set for fodder stuff like Omen/Odyssey where it may come in handy, but keeping your current pet alive longer is better, so I went with Reward merits instead. To Xilkk's point, though, he was talking about swapping out pets for buffs like a midnight club DJ, so he had in mind master buffing scenarios to the max (probably in a tank party devoid of most buffs). I can see his point being something I would do in an uncommon scenario (like no support rolls/songs/bubble ambus etc), which puts the Killer Instinct merit choice along the same lines as "situational" max deeps. The main issue with KI is that it doesn't work for many things, so I have removed those merits besides just 1.

The thing was BST never needed to be forced to fight with their pet and the identity of it was close to SMN. SMN had party support and was better at healing. Where BST was better equipped to deal melee damage. Just look at how the abilities are laid out. BST and SMN are extremely similar to each other, down to how Job Point categories went. Fully invested into the pet.

For long time veterans of this job, a lot of players meleed where applicable and pushed the limits of this. In my opinion, that's how it should be. It's how the job is designed at its core and played from the very beginning until the distance nerf. Snarl was added because BSTs were meleeing and taking hate from our pets which have no enmity generators to get it back.

I don't think any of the jobs needs to be penalized for a particular strategy when you give up something for something else. Excluding the BST meta which had nothing to do with BST. Standing at a distance costs something, the master's contribution. Just like melee players use hybrid or full DT sets to survive. Ranged alternatives. Subtle Blow/TP control, enmity management. They are all valid ways of doing things that sacrifice things for survival.

I think your way of BST is great and I think the pet identity it has in line with SMN is great too. I don't think it has to be one or the other, just different playstyles that can co-exist with each other.

I understand. Definitely going master only focus is a way of doing things. I was viewing it from does Call Beast need to be adjusted or not point of view, which I think it does. But it is good advice. Sorry if that came off to anyone as diminishing a strategy.

And I totally agree, I see nothing wrong with either, but I kinda see why too sort of, im trying see the silver lining basically. I personally can see both options being viable and agree players should have thier choice a bit.

Any career bst was long ago geared to melee with your pet. You pet was pretty much your meat shield, and master did as much damage as possible without pulling hate much. it was a delicate dance.

There are 2 reasons this became less and less. The ready moves got buffed ALOT including skillchain properties, but most importantly, player buffs and pet buffs are separate.

These factors led to beastmaster finding its home in pet-centered parties. Melee parties wanted nothing to do with beastmaster. Even though we could get geared pretty decently, as in, the major bases were covered for haste, and multi attack and weaponskill sets, it was a gimp warrior. None of the inherent traits or job abilities helped the master or the party much. Melee parties did not want bst. This is only recently being questioned.

Once beastmaster started getting some abilities which did help parties, only beastmasters knew about them. It was a tall order to convince any non-bst players of what you were capable of. Gooey Gerard had Corrosive Ooze way before Generous Arthur was around.
But convincing DD's that Def down 33% was better than attack+ was excruciatingly difficult to do. With the advent of Geomancer, its not as hard to explain. but it was worse then than now.

The slow adaptation of traditional parties, and the separation of pet buffs meant that beastmaster's new home was in pet parties. We have an integral role there between puppetmaster and summoner. beastmaster is really best able to deal with crowds among the pet jobs.
It as never that beastmasters do not want to melee with their pets, it was always a choice of master or pet? (because you cannot buff both). Bst had alot to bring to the table for pet parties. but the effort of gearing and buffing for pets, makes the masters pretty feeble.

This is where the sore point of the range nerf came in. SE nerfed the range of ready commands YEARS ago. and just said "melee w/ pet!" but we really didn't have good tools to do so effectively. Its a sore spot because it is a heavy-handed and ignorant approach. It also resembles the massive shift in play style when the marginalized charm (which was the ENTIRE point of the job!). SE has a long history of heavy-handed, ill-considered, and sweeping changes to beastmaster.

So they really lack credibility for trying to force playstyle.
In fact, playstyle is something I don't think they should try to regulate. Are they going to completely nerf Subtle blow strategies if they get too popular? Why haven't they nerfed the 3 support job party setup yet? (I'm not seriously reccomending it, but its parallel with what they do to pet styles).

The recent changes are better. Tandem Blow and Tandem Strike actually ENABLE master and pet to melee together. They incentivize the play style. Beastmaster has long fallen behind other jobs for accuracy and attack... so much that its really sad. The ready-buffs for master also helps address this. So the last couple updates had some good stuff for master melee.

The other side of the coin is that the community is talking about bst as a melee DD alot more. I'll throw a shout out that a fair chunk of that credit goes to Ruau for the youtube videos, I'll also include Icilies' NewDawn podcast.

I've been part of the bst and pet testing crowd for a long time, but as awesome as Falkirk's guide is, we aren't really the ones who spread the word. Falkirk wrote the book, I (and many others) helped a bit w/ research once upon a time, but its more like Ruau and others started reading the book and selling it.

I was stumping for bst in melee parties really big before Adoulin was released, but I'm still really hesitant to think SE will do it right. I don't think they needed to nerf range at all to do it... unless that was the only way they could figure out why bst DID NOT work well in melee parties.

The player vs pet buff issue still exists. It seems the approach most are advocating, is to relegate pet to support role rather than balanced with player. Tadem strike helps pet accuracy, but its still not nearly enough for high level content. I suspect the next phase of accuracy might have to do with gear. Although it is possible to get pet accuracy up in the 1600 range, you sacrifice so much from master, that its right back where we started.

I expect they will do more with gear to address this... maybe. More pets in line with the new ones would be great. We got 2 pets back from the lower level w/ some improvements attached.

I would still like to get Leach, Sabotender, Flytrap and Adamantoise back. I would also like it if pets like slime and crabs could generate ENMITY.

This is just way too much to read.

Being lazy and/or dumb is nothing to boast about.

I agree with a lot of your points!

I'm glad to see it's starting to change with conversations on BST and how useful it is. However, I do wish that pet strats weren't so abhorred. It is just another strategy and I agree they shouldn't force play styles. They don't like NIN used for tanking but they still gave NIN enmity tools. They don't like how WHM is played with Misery but they immediately changed it back.

I am staunchly against the changes they made to distance because it didn't make any positive impact on the game at all. The only think it did was make playing BST feel less intuitive. I don't even get the counterargument. It boils down to either:

A) SE said it's wrong so it's wrong.
B) BSTs were standing back breaking the game.

Both flimsy arguments that are debunked. It also boggles my mind how someone who feels this way about BST doesn't feel this passionately about PUP. It's like because PUP hasn't been changed it's fine and my brain melts trying to comprehend how that makes sense lol.

I do have to say while I respect some of contributions of YouTubers, they also helped create the BST pitchfork mob. There was a lot of fearmongering propaganda using mobs like Fu (a very special case scenario) to say how ridiculous BST damage was.

EDIT: They did say in the Digest they are still considering giving BST pets songs. I hope they will.

Then quit bragging.

is this Direct X new account?

No No.

Two major things they can do to help make Beastmaster a very useful job to have at any endgame event would be to:

1) Make pet buffs work not only on the Beastmaster but also on their party.
2) Eliminate distance command issues if the Beastmaster and his/her pet are attacking the same mob. Tie to Tandem Strike.

I think what bothers me most about distance is how they are going about it. Out of the 3 job that can issue direct commands to what the pet is fighting (SMN, PUP and BST). BST is the only one that needs to be penalized regarding multiple targets.

It would make more sense to just remove all functionality like DRG and make the pet automatically attack what you're attacking. It's not what I think should happen, but at least it would be mechanically sensible.

It would be better than adding all these penalties and restrictive bonuses that seem like it's more for the community as a whole. To feel better that they are safe from a resurgence of 2016. Not that it's going to happen even if they did, but a lot including SE doesn't seem to realize the perfect storm that was created then and can't be easily recreated.

Hypothetically, it's like if they decided WHM shouldn't melee and decided to restrict cures at close range and give you a bonus to healing while disengaged and standing back. Instead of just removing gear that makes them interested in doing it.

SE: You can send your pet to fight things but you're not allowed to benefit from it, we don't like that.
Me: >_> ?