Wisdom of Nym: Reacting to the big job reveal and Beastmaster in Final Fantasy

As I was more or less guessing, the second part of the MSQ revealed what the new job for Final Fantasy XIV’s next expansion is going to be. Obviously, it did not announce to us the name of the job or give us a whole lot of details to go off of, but we know what it is with reasonable certainty. This is honestly one of the biggest takeaways from this half of the MSQ, which also explains why the first half gave so much away – a reasonable decision, I think! It makes this one interesting before we go into the Beastmastery half of the patch.

It’s also obvious that I have plenty to talk about all around, so I don’t want to stretch this introduction out. Beastmaster plus lore plus the next job reveal? That’s bulky. So I’m going to work through this as best I can and probably wind up going over some parts in greater detail moving forward. There is too much, let me sum up. (There will be minor spoilers, but I will try my best to write around them.)

As it turns out, my predictions about crossbows as a potential weapon? Right on the money. I shan’t pretend that this was the job I was most hoping for personally, but I also think that this nicely handles the natural problem of crossbows being somewhat less interesting as weapons compared to guns by giving us something else novel to focus on as a gameplay mechanic. It’d certainly be easy for the falcon to ultimately have a similar role to the Machinist’s automaton, but I’m hoping it is different from that; indeed, the jobs with companions (Machinist, Summoner, and Reaper all spring to mind) have slightly different ways of handling them, so I imagine this job will be similar.

My primary reasons for skepticism in the face of the evidence we had – as I stated at the time – was that it seemed unlikely for us to get two pet jobs more or less back-to-back, we’d have to understand why this job that could be called Ranger wasn’t called Ranger (since that wouldn’t be original as a job), and that there was no existing hint of it within the game. The first and the third seem to be answered now, as this is less a pet job than a companion job from what we see, and it definitely has now appeared in-game. As for why it’s not Ranger… well, it’s not. That one is a little more arbitrary, although I suppose arguing that the “Animals” command from Ranger in Final Fantasy V is materially different is a matter of personal preference.

We’ve also got a clearer picture of at least two of our companions in the Fourth and some tidbits about the lore; as I predicted way back when (so far back I can’t quickly find it in my search through older columns), our trip is very different from our trip to the First. I will admit that a part of me had hoped both of the twins would wind up on the Fourth and we’d be playing with some time effects, but that seems unlikely in the extreme at this point.

As for what we’ve learned of the Fourth thus far… I think it’s easy to be surprised that we got a full introduction to what’s happening, but I also think it covers far less than we might think. A friend was curious about one mechanic that our new miqo’te friend introduces us to right from the start, but I also think it’s something that we have heard enough about to know it exists without hearing enough about it to know all of the details. It’s enough to feel like a whole introduction, but also leaves some major question marks ahead of where we’re going next.

Not to mention… that last little teaser scene doesn’t say much, but it sure implies a bunch. More awaits to be seen once we land in the expansion, let’s leave that there.

Beastmaster, I have to admit, had me more excited. And I can’t say why; I’ve gone on record as not being a big fan of pet classes in general, and this is as pet class as possible. It’s a limited job, and that means it was always going to be about finding an entirely new skin to layer on top of the game. And I think it works… for the most part. It has its ups and downs, but the centerpiece is how the job feels when you’re playing it in the Crucible, and that is a mostly positive experience. It’s basically a series of dungeon challenges very specifically tuned for a single companion, and in that regard it works.

The biggest drawback is just how thin it is in terms of other content to do, which I think is partly a natural function of how this is a first pass and partly just the limits of the world as it exists. You have a number of creatures to capture (albeit with some odd omissions) and that’s about it for novel open-world content; I can’t complain about that fact. The fact that BST is really not well-suited to dungeons but there are creatures in there seems unfortunate, but since every one of those can easily be learned through other means, it’s irrelevant.

What is perhaps less of a “whatever” is the system for leveling your companions. The fact that the only way to do so is via the Crucible is understandable in the broad sense of “there has to be a method,” but it also means that there’s a very weird split between boards and this content that exists only in one space. This is exacerbated by the fact that the Crucible has literally exactly enough boards to level up everything coupled with rather unforgiving fights, so it’s easy to wind up in a space where you need stronger companions but have no efficient way to level them up.

And, frankly, the Crucible’s guidance on mechanics kinda sucks. Yeah, it works in the broadest sense, but you have a whole lot of abilities that the bosses are then rarely actually vulnerable to, if ever. Oh, the summoned adds can die to Doom? I suppose it’s good that none of them take any time to kill, then, since only one companion can actually inflict it. Some of this, as mentioned, is more about this being a first pass for future development, but the fact that it’s set up in a way where you have to brute-force your way through some relatively tricky fights to find out how they’re supposed to work can be obnoxious.

This isn’t to say I don’t like the job – I do! I think it’s a really good first pass, and I think the Crucible is currently a better-developed mode than the Masked Carnivale was at implementation (especially since the Carnivale has been functionally abandoned for new content, it seems; at this point BLU is much more about taking on existing content in a new style). It’s not a perfect version, but I think it definitely has proven worth the development time, and I look forward to seeing future limited jobs in different styles now that BST has laid the foundation for how the system can work.

Feedback, like always, is welcome in the comments down below or by mail to [email protected]. Next week, I’m going to finish off the potential weapon list with ranged weaponry, since we no longer have the question mark of the next job hanging over our heads.

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.