Killer Instinct: The Beastmaster Compendium

Wait....WHAT?!?

Master Falkirk has come to Shiva?!?!?

**ninja edit** facts I don't like from Malthar. Shame on you, man! SHAME ON YOU!

Yeah but now who's going to believe you? You already yelled "FALKIRK" once. Next time, people won't believe you.

I have zero desire to go to Asura.

I'll say again that, if any dedicated beastmasters, puppetmasters, or summoners would like to have an ls I'd be happy to have y'all. I'd love to do petburn stuff, including BST HELMs, but we don't have enough beastmasters. Join Beaztmaster and I on Asura and I can find a place for you.

Thank you for the large number of feedback responses.
We understand that there are many requests to increase the range of beastmaster abilities, such as Ready.
However, upon careful discussion with the Lead Job Designer, we have decided that the range of these abilities will not be adjusted.

▼ Beastmaster is designed as a frontline job.
I’d like to provide a brief history of beastmaster from a developer perspective.
Some points may greatly differ from player opinion, but please give it a read.

The original concept of beastmaster was a frontline job based around Charming monsters to turn the tide of battle.
The process of Charming would sometimes result in direct combat with the monster, so beastmaster was given the equipment and damage output to thrive until they succeeded in gaining control over a monster.

As time went on, Battlefield content became the main focus of the game.
This was difficult to enjoy as a beastmaster as many BFs do not feature monsters that can be Charmed.
Our solution was the addition of Call Beast and broth items, which allowed players to call out monsters as obedient pets.
These pets always obeyed commands, providing a sort of consumable battle resource for beastmaster and stabilized the state of the job.
Things were good up until this point.

▼ Balance Issues caused by Pet Adjustments
As stronger enemies were introduced over time, it became apparent that beastmaster and their pets weren’t keeping up.
Unlike other jobs, pet-based jobs had to be balanced around both the player character and pet, which in turn made it difficult to implement powerful new equipment or pets.

In order to resolve this situation, we made major changes in the very first version update in 2015.
Monsters were now able to participate in skillchains and magic burst, making them an overwhelmingly powerful source of damage.
While this method required some preparation, the changes allowed beastmaster to easily catch up and deal high damage more effectively than any other job.

Ultimately, this allowed beastmaster to issue commands from a safe distance, while pets that were far stronger than the beastmaster themselves would continuously fire off powerful abilities.
Pets also had decent survivability, and even if they were defeated, they could be called out again at full power after a five minute cooldown.
At this point, beastmaster was capable of battling with almost no risk to themselves.

Player skill was not involved in this version of beastmaster, since no matter what attacks enemies had, they could be defeated by endlessly sending out powerful pets.
This was even more effective in parties with multiple beastmasters, which created some extreme cases where pets did all the fighting and players didn’t battle at all.
Battles were streamlined into a monotonous process, and enemy mechanics became meaningless.

▼ Corrective Measures and the Future
To address this, we kept beastmaster’s strength while making sure its equipment and traits were used to fulfill a frontline role, and shortened the range of commands to bring back a sense of risk to the job.
While these adjustments lowered beastmaster’s capabilities, it was compensated for with the continued implementation of various meals and equipment, and that brings us to today.

With this history in mind, we don’t have plans to alter the job’s design as a frontline role and would like this source of damage to be accompanied by some risk.

As we’ve often mentioned, these job adjustments aren’t final, and we’ll continue making adjustments to improve its frontline capabilities.

LOL. *** us, right?

LOL. *** us, right?

I blame Draylo for this. ALL OF THIS

Dear Director Yoji Fujito,
Thank you for providing a detailed response on the current status of Beastmaster. You have made it clear that for better or worse, Beastmaster simply is not a development priority and over the past 3 years, have made no new frontline capabilities or otherwise meaningful adjustments to the Beastmaster job. Similarly, adding new jug bets with only cosmetic differences and calling it a "job adjustment" is dishonest and dubious. It serves as an unfair disservice to the players with whom, Square-Enix has built a relationship with over the past 18 years. The sporadic updates and lack of meaningful change to the Beastmaster job have left me with no other choice but to retire. Due to limited inventory constraints, I have decided to remove Beastmaster-specific items from my inventory. Thank you for taking the time to reply.

Yes it's going to be a great all-round piece for us.

Justice has been served!

#BSTNerfReparations

The next version update is scheduled for early January 2020.

Enjoy the monthly updates to Ambuscade and job adjustments for beastmasters.