Killer Instinct: The Beastmaster Compendium

The problem is culture and convincing people of the benefits of BST vs the standard tried and true methods. This game is all about options and making this work feasibly with what you have available. You can make Skillchains with every job. You can buff, debuff, tank, heal, and deal damage with every job. Some better than others. It's just a matter of people accepting that s something ELSE actually works.

There was a time where asking people to use enmity - songs or gear in your sets was considered laughable "loltankbetter". Having a MEVA toggle "LOLGITBETTERBARSPELLS" "HEAL BETTER". Subtle blow setups "LOL THAT'S TO SLOW". But once people started seeing the real world value in them, reasonable people started paying attention. This game has just become a copycat fiasco and people will just do the coolest thing they've seen someone else hype up rather than be the one person to do it themselves. Once something gets exposure it will get popular.

Just wait until Rua does a video about BST and watch how many people pop up asking BST questions and price of stuff goes up xD. Might even start seeing groups asking for BST

Just wait, we're already talking about it. He's got a lot of stuff on this plate now though, so might be a bit.

There's been some really interesting conversation the past few pages. You can certainly see the divide of pre-2016 BSTs versus post 2016 update BSTs. In my opinion, I'm sure a lot of players didn't know what BST did or cared until suddenly they jumped from nowhere to the meta.

I'm sure if you're pressured to level a pet job you don't care about and are taught to do one sequence: Grind BST to 99, throw a tiger and push a button. I understand how the distaste for the job started but honestly no matter what facts you present like:

• How distance nerf wasn't necessary and accomplished nothing.

• How BST was always played as a mix of backline pet only and melee, (They are literally the only job that can rest while pet is attacking...)

• That the real problem was resolved by decreasing the massive stats gap between players and content 125+

• That even if distance was reverted that BST wouldn't be the meta because the whole reason it did no longer exists.

..they will always respond viscerally from their own experience. Their truth is BST was this meta job they were forced to play to get invites on anything and that broke the game. And any sort of trying to balance or fix issues about the job's current state is going to trigger visceral comments. It's interesting on some level of perspective.

Anyway, SE says no a lot and then does the opposite so I just shrug at that. I'll keep my whiny self providing feedback into the void. :) They literally encourage further feedback even when they disagree and look for increased feedback. After SE's "BST history", the reskin update and responding with the same rhetoric that got distance nerfed. I can only surmise they are taking player feedback to understand what BST does at all.

Definitely not trying to denigrate anyone who loves this update or passionate about job to making the changes work. I'd just be happier not having to superglue my pet to my hip or use it as a buff battery.

That's an interesting assumption.
Might be unpopular opinion among those who enjoyed their stint circumventing all mechanics and tearing through content using offensively powerful pets with no effort but: BST needed a nerf back then. While I was an advocate, I'm not going to argue the distance nerf was "necessary" per se but, something needed to be done.

Why talk in the past tense, when SMN has been doing that exact thing even more effectively ever since.

The reality is that in early Reisen days the main advantage that pets had was accuracy, and obviously the original full-potency revitalizers were huge.

That being said you still really needed to burn run wild to get good accuracy against T3's.

Long story short we got to farm a ***-load of Reisen-gear for people, but we never dominated content the way that SMN ended up doing.

Gear upgrades, aoe nerf, 2 evasion nerfs i think did the trick, and as said im pretty sure theres a job safely doing the same thing bst was doing, but at a much higher dmg potential. Bst coulda been unchanged and smn would still be the meta just due to the much higher dmg/speed of moves ACAF allows

It's the same argument the RNG's had immediately prior and after the RNG nerf. People don't like having their power taken away, especially since when the developers do it they tend to do so heavy handily. Going from Hero to Zero in one update feels like the end of the world, even if it's better overall for the community.

My unpopular opinion of BST killing things during that time is, so what? It was slow, nearly as slow as BSTs killing stuff with Ducal Guard in Abyssea god, that was tragic, but BSTs could win and that was the problem because for the first time, DDs IE SAM WAR DRK all got knocked on their *** and it was glorious, they couldn't grab a BRD COR GEO and stun lock, perfect defense or embrava their way to victory, like all the content before it.

So it was funny, but it was also a problem not because BSTs could kill things, but because even the top echelon of DDs couldn't win without great difficulty and something did change, mob stats were nerfed across the board but because it took them too long to do that, and certain people screaming for BST to be nerfed IE that Bluemage, but the damage was done the meta was going into, okay how can we optimize pet burns to do this and ofcourse AF/AC was found out or atleast noticed because Papesse/Tachi obliterated Kirin/Kouryu in what 20 seconds? as a lone SMN with Windblade bursts.

I think it was Frod? who posted the first video of Ramuhs destroying Schah? Anyway it spiraled from there ofcourse no one was shrieking to nerf SMN instantly because they could carry people to Aeonics with relative ease and DDs could now win or atleast use SCH / BLM method to win, SMN wasn't the only way just the easiest and all the top end players got their relevant Aeonics and no longer cared to complain. But BST was the one who paid the price for being first to win, and not even T4s, just the lower end tiers.

Now we have useless pets, extremely minimal AF gear that boosts pets, and a range nerf that just makes the job so obnoxious to even do basic things like reward or issue readys unless directly beside your pet, even standing on opposite sides in Domain Invasion and you're out of range, and even this range nerf would be fine, if we atleast had the damage to back it up but pets even fully buffed do probably half of a single volt strike locked behind animation time, so there is no reward to the extra risk.

I don't know why you bolded certainly, seems like you just want to argue semantics lol. It's not meant to denigrate anyone, it's just very apparent with how people see BST when it comes to distance.


Something was done after the nerf had no effect on the meta. Only proving my point that some people think that had to do with BST and not the real issue with content scaling/gear choices. BST was still the go to strategy and it only changed as all those changes were made.

Players who do argue it was necessary just wanted to feel vindicated.

I agree.

the range nerf really only gradually excluded bst from the tougher pet style fights. It made it hard for bst to participate with Summoners and puppetmasters.

It took bst out of a strategy. It did not accomplish its purported goal at all. It simply reduced the number of people playing beastmaster.

Because the nerf happened in the past? During a time when BST was not only defensively overpowered but offensively too. The offensive power that BST had seems to be conveniently omitted by those attempting to make a counter argument to why the range nerf was implemented. At the time the range nerf made sense, because BST was still so powerful, though it did not age well with melee power creep. I find the mention of SMN to be irrelevant to the discussion, I agree that it should have been nerfed also.
I can appreciate that. Nothing wrong with not wanting your job nerfed. At the time though BST was really strong, I think people forget (evidently reading these responses) just how strong it was back then. I was a keen BST at the time and while I enjoyed the ranged style that BST had (when it had drawbacks/risk), it became ridiculously mindless and more than worthy of a nerf. I want my favourite job to be relevant and useful not overpowered to the point of steamrolling content absent any resistance.
I put things in bold to emphasise absurdity. What specifically is apparent?

Offensive power? You sound like someone who only played afew select jobs, because no one who played just BST would go, wow thats some strong damage output, theres BST, and then theres SMN, its not even a comparison, and your logic is just flat out flawed because DDs did everything they possible could to null mechanics/skip/ignore, this time they couldn't and everyone was like those 10k Razor fangs, my god alert the elders! Also as soon as mob stats were nerfed and support was buffed suddenly no one cared about BST damage anymore despite only a 'range nerf' then ofcourse the WS revamp happened and bst pets completely fell behind and they weren't even ahead.

What's apparent is how BST is viewed. I'm well aware of the BST meta. You say overpowered and really strong but it wasn't. Mobs were overpowered and we were underpowered. There's a big difference there.

So the counter is that broke the game? But if that was true why make any subsequent changes? Ilevel scaling was nerfed heavily (evasion, combat skills and AoE) and Ambuscade gear which had much easier method to obtain high stat gear. Does no one not remember how ridiculous the evasion and damage of mobs were then?

The changes after distance nerf were massive but still the propaganda is "Those BSTs were just OP and they want to return to that". No, we want to play the job how we played it for 13 years before you all decided you needed a scapegoat to the feel better about the broken scaling system.

I'm all for more melee. I've seen and requested myself updates to BST melee before this started. SE decided to buff pets instead in 2016 and ironically now are trying to say we were always supposed to not do that and play differently. None of it makes sense lol.

All this speaks to the incoherence of beastmaster's design, right? There is just this weirdness with abilities like Charm being orphaned, pet families lacking 119 jugs, the arbitrary Ready/Reward range nerfs which remove beast from many pet strats. We are supposed to be a melee class now but the axe weapon type is, like BST, just all over. We have two magical WS but the gear to support them isn't given to us. We have Mistral Axe/Calamity, which fall behind Savage Blade. And we have Decimation, which is tied to a certain weapon that WAR (and DRK, and probably even RUN) can make better use of. The pet/master buffs are a neat idea but they are too limited right now. And of course the Ready activation timer change broke something, lol.

It's frustrating too because Square-Enix was ultimately successful with puppetmaster's design. The master is pretty good. The pet is great, both powerful and it covers a broad range of roles. It's customizable and purposeful. There's lots of gear you can work into builds. When S-E cares they can make things work. They don't care about BST.

Not to mention all the pets that bst have no jugs of, or mobs bst should be perfectly able to charm, but cant. Whatever role se wants to push bst towards could be nudged by pets that support that role, but uh... have a 3rd(4th?) Mandy variation and a ladybug clone cause we took the stand out moves away.

Oh it most certainly was, on the level that early Ranger was. The core issue was recast on ready and how stupidly OP pets TP moves were. Letting pets spam TP moves at 0 TP, behaving as though they had over 1K TP, while the buffed master was out of range. If the pet dies it's a simple JA away from being re-summoned, complete with full buffs.

Imagine a fully buffed DD dieing, and being able to click a button and immediately be back at full HP with full buffs and no weakness. Group multiple BST's and they were unstoppable.

Now I think the distance nerf was far too harsh in that it requires the master to be within some semi-random ranges of the big bad. Instead they should of just made it within ~10 yalms of the pet and / or made all the ready recast gear not stack with each other. BST's being able to occasionally do something at a distance wasn't an issue, them massing and cheesing game mechanics was. It's the same issue Summoner has now, only worse since BST didn't require maze resets between each fight. Or to put another way, per-nerf BST was a SMN with a semi-permanent Astral Conduit effect.

Now here is the real deal, develops in MMO's tend to over-nerf when they get around to nerfing an abused mechanic. If the mechanic was being so blatantly abused they wouldn't bother with nerfing it in the first place. The people responsible for the nerf are the players abusing the mechanic in such large numbers.

I'm surprised at your stance, Saevel.

Sure, BST pets are 'immortal' You can endlessly keep a pet alive with Dawn mulsum should you choose to fill 100+ slots full of it, the dying and being to get right back into the fight is fine, because of one reason, pet damage output is -completely- inferior to melee WS damage always has been, the problem isn't and never was BST's perfomance, the problem was SE releasing mobs that were so grossly overtuned that melees were completely punished to even get near them and they had none of their standby tricks to get around it, Stun/PD/Regen/Embrava the fault lies more within DDs abusing such tactics that they had to rely on making mobs that strong.

Except back then it wasn't.

This was before the large WS update, before Bard got buffed into relevancy, before a multitude of gear upgrades and mechanical fixes. At this time BST was far ahead of everyone else and they could do that damage while standing 30 yalms away watching youtube videos and eating Cheetos.

I'm not kidding or exaggerating, I know many people who did exactly that. On Skype and then Discord they would comment frequently on how absolutely easy it was to farm all content with pets, to the tune of multiple mules at capped gil.

BST pets were effectively immortal because you could just re-summon them on death and with multiple ways of resetting JA's that timer wasn't an issue. A BST team had to be really incompetent to of exhausted all it's resets and not have the target dead. And these pets were summoned at full buff level because the master was chilling 30 yalms away with full buffs.

When a player dies, they suffer a crippling status debuff for 3~5 minutes and need all their buffs reapplied. Players had less defense, less offensive and a ton less HP. Ultimately Players, at that time, were inferior to Pets in practice for these reasons.

Pet jobs had been doing this for years though no one complained because of other means to accomplish the same task, I full on agree BST burns being what they were, was a problem but not the problem that was addressed, they needed to fix mobs, not BST, as soon as they tuned back the offense, buffed support, BST was once again completely forgotten about, and why they left SMN being able to do what they could do is really odd, I've played SMN as long as I did BST and I assumed it would've been nerfed immediately but wasn't.

In order words, the exact same answer the Rangers gave.

"SE I know we're really awesome and powerful and you should all worship us, but it's totally not our jobs fault, they should raise all the other power levels to be the same as ours".

Of course that just results in a massive ever increasing spiral of unplanned power creep.


BST's were way more powerful then players, at that time. The jug pets desperately needed their power tuned down, mainly in the form of reduced Ready timers. Notice how long time BSTS's keep dancing around the ready timer issue, proposing everything else except that be adjusted. It was the stupid low ready timer that broke BST, being able to spam high powered TP move with impunity. It was a semi-permanent Astral Conduit effect.

As for SMN's, they are indeed OP, mostly because SE was so hell bent on making short BCNM like battles. Astral Conduit is like Mighty Strikes only better. Near infinite cosmic like power, itty bitty duration. Take away Astral Conduit , an 30s ability on a 45m timer, and SMN's power drops back down to lower then modern day BST's. The only thing that has probably saved them from a super nerf is SE designing newer content longer then a single 30s fight or with mechanics that prevent Volt Strike / Flaming Crush spam.

Anyhow this is the situation your in, either deal with it, play another job or play by yourself. Listening it seems most here do the latter two instead of the first.

I think people have rose glasses on when they think back on the damage BSTs were doing cause go back and watch any of Beaztmasters videos he did with Falkirk and the damage the pets are putting out is less then 10k on Escha T3 and even in Reisenjima fully buffed Razor Fang was doing 10kish to Erynis, and they were geared very well.

I guess the same stance should've been taken towards DDs then, stop whining and go play BST, or go solo.

15-20K per attack was what we saw pretty easily reachable. I know because I was the one running the parses and tracking the numbers. Also formulating the strategies and the plan for events. Again pets were playing off Monsters formulas, including the 4.0 pDiff SE gave them back when ours was much lower.

I was with BST teams demolishing everything, it really was that broken. Several of the BST's in our group would watch cat videos and eat cheetos as they crushed content because it was that easy.

Anyhow this has been beaten to death.

Currently BST has a lot of power in Axe WS selection along with some situational pet utility. Killer Instinct, against the right target, is still one of the most powerful effects BST has access to.

Its a dead horse and only talked about so much because DDs have been doing the whole braindead kills since Kirin was TP burned..Then Nyzul floor 100s were TP burned...And Legion TP burned ignoring all mechanics, and then Delve and then HTBFs and BST was used in Zitah and part of Ru'Aun as it was range nerfed before Sky gods were added.

But yes this isn't going to change and pointless to really keep talking about, can't wait for Ruaumoko's video to showcase how to WAR on BST and debuff while doing it, there might be a pet somewhere stay tuned.

And there is the fact that autos are a good 3-4 times more immortal and summoners can just resummons endless.

And yeah people who thought the damage was great apparently never were in pet burns. Yeah I remember burning thru say zitah nms with a bunch of bsts… I also saw where we still almost wiped on a couple because the damage from the ones that weren't well geared/supported was less than the hp they were adding by being there

Outside of ACAF, smns pretty decent, could use some improvements but overall pretty solid support/utility with the means to pop out a dmg bp as needed

I"ve been harping on Killer Instinct for years.

No one else ever seemed very interested though :P

Because it doesn't help the pet a whole lot, and BST player's refuse to drop the SMN style. +15% damage -15% damage taken +15% intimidation rate to the entire party.

The problem with killer instinct is that for any relevant content, you can hardly make use of it besides for maybe Apex and fodder. Most monsters in modern content are outside the realms of ecosystems 1&2, which BST killer instinct would work with. Unique monsters like beastmen, arcana, dragons, demons, undead, lumoria etc BST can't use killer instinct on. There's already bonuses awarded to certain jobs for the appropriate classes. So in ambuscade, omen, dynamis, domain invasion, and some of the monsters in Reisenjima/Escha, killer instinct can't be used sadly.

Can still use it for stuff like zerde onychophora erinys albumen, but the applications in real content is just limited.

I think bsts biggest issue is it doesnt fit into a party very well.

Heavy DD, bard, cor , geo , whm , tank. Who you taking out for a meh dd that has unneeded debuffs that dont help? Even the killer effect is usually not applicable. Most of the mobs killer effects help with can be killed in 2-3 WS total on most DD. Bst is okay for onchy i guess, but other otpions are much better. doesnt fit in an albumen party very well. Most ambu mobs are beastment. Killer doest help in any dynamis.

It fits even worse in a mage party.

Solution is to either increase the DPS somehow or increase the utility enough that it is able to replace one of those slots.

Killer effects for most content are literally worth nothing. Yeah it is great for .... soloing apex mobs?