We currently know very little about Final Fantasy XIV’s Beastmaster. We know that it’s going to be coming at some point during the Dawntrail patch cycle, but almost certainly not in 7.1. It’s going to be a new limited job, and based on history and systems it is going to focus around capturing and training animals. Beyond that… well, really nothing! We haven’t been shown previews in any capacity, so at this point everything is highly speculative… except for the one major change from Blue Mage in that Beastmasters are already a thing within the game.
Obviously Blue Mages have been a thing in the franchise for ages, but there had been no whispers of the job in FFXIV until the quest introducing them (unless you count a tease in a minion description, which I do not). So today I want to speculate a little bit on Beastmaster, starting from the things that are easiest to draw upon and moving on to the biggest bits of guesswork still remaining.
So where are our Beastmasters? As it currently stands, we have two real examples of the art in the game. The first is in Bozja; we meet a number of Garlean Beastmasters, many of them trained by Lyon rem Helsos. Interestingly enough, there’s a bunch of character backstory implying that the art of beastmastery is also widespread in Ala Mhigo, which gives rise to the idea that this does not have a single point of origin akin to Blue Mage. All of these particular Beastmasters wield a one-handed axe with a shield, which is a rescaled model of the existing Warrior axes; this is pretty on-brand for the job, especially from Final Fantasy XI.
The other big group of Beastmasters we meet are the Doppro clan of Mamool Ja, who generally wield spears and are focused on their wivres (though they do handle other creatures). Curiously, the Doppro seem to have a very different style than the Garlean version we’ve fought, with their focus being upon mounted combat; however, this is also a style Lyon uses on occasion, so it’s clearly not somehow separate.
So what does this tell us? Well, it gives some hints about how the job might play, actually.
First and foremost, it remains a question what weapon the job will use, but there is a common thread between the weapons we’ve seen. In the base relaunched game, some gear was shared across Dragoon, Warrior, and Paladin; this has stopped being a thing as Maiming and Fending have been locked in as gear categories, but Maiming does most often share tanky models. I thus feel relatively confident that the job is going to use Maiming gear based on the examples we’ve seen.
Why not have it just be a limited job that’s a tank? Well… stats, primarily. Blue Mage can tank, heal, or DPS, but its role is DPS no matter what; that means that as a healer it does not have access to Piety melds, and as a tank it does not have access to Tenacity melds. This is not really a balance issue per se, since Tenacity is pretty weak, but it is an issue about making sure that you don’t need to meld one specific thing in order to be a viable tank or healer. So I expect this trend to continue.
One-handed axes with a shield would certainly make sense, considering that shields have so long gone unused by any job other than Paladin. At the same time, I suspect the developers don’t really like resizing models to serve as new weapons, although I imagine that Beastmaster will follow a similar pattern to Blue Mage in terms of its total weapon count. But that would also run into complications if it had a shield (just for stat values), so my gut instinct is that either shields will continue to be not used or we’ll get something more akin to other jobs that just have a main hand even if it is technically two weapons.
But my personal bet is honestly that we’ll get something new. A whip seems the obvious choice, although I wouldn’t be shocked by some sort of particular polearm-style weapon. I’ve definitely been a proponent of whips as a potential caster weapon for the future, but it’s hard to ignore the potential as something associated with animal taming. Or maybe we’ll get something truly unique for a main weapon and an offhand; heck, maybe you’ll just be wielding an axe one-handed, similar to how Blue Mage wields its cane.
So what about gameplay? The obvious thing to expect is that you capture beasts, each one teaches you new abilities or summons, and that’s how the job works. But I don’t think that’s going to be the case because that’s just Blue Mage again. Indeed, I think it’s going to be more complex than that, and my guess is that it’s still going to involve a similar sort of equipping of abilities, but I think you’ll be equipping abilities not to yourself but to your pets.
My core assumptions are that whatever the limited job allows you to do, it’s going to ultimately be in a similar spot to Blue Mage insofar as it can do anything. However, unlike with Blue Mage, with Beastmster your main mechanism is going to be capturing creatures, and while I’m sure there’s going to be some incentive for running dungeons as a Beastmaster (since that’s kind of a thing Blue Mage already leans on) it can’t just be capturing bosses. Otherwise no one would want to do this with other Beastmasters. So what if Beastmaster itself has a rather simple rotation of abilities, but you can also deploy your pets to act basically as tactical backup?
In other words, what if Beastmaster is closer in style to Masterminds from City of Heroes than to other jobs? You learn new abilities for your various pets based on their family and successfully leveling them up, and they work together in a fashion not unlike NPC allies but customizable. You could even learn new weaponskills and abilities from having certain creatures in your party at any given time, thus making your loadout not just about which skills you want but how your partners work together.
The biggest thing that at least I mentally keep coming back to is that no matter what, the thrust of mechanics for Beastmaster is going to need to encourage players to capture multiple animals even if you don’t want to use them all. And I have a feeling that the job is going to lean more heavily on areas like the Ala Mhigan tradition than the Doppro, since we already have one job that’s functionally an import straight from Tural. I could be wrong, of course; we’ve yet to have many previews, so I’m making a lot of assumptions and taking wild swings here.
I can say that I’m actually excited for the job, though, so that’s something Beastmaster hasn’t managed in any other context! Even in Final Fantasy X-2 the equivalent job was kind of meh.
Feedback, as always, is welcome via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com or down in the comments below. Next week, I want to talk about some of the mechanics around one of Dawntrail’s most mysterious objects at the moment, the interdimensional key, and associated elements.
The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizing Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.
