Beastmaster

Starter Quest

Save My Son

Quest works as per retail.

Unleash the Beast!

What were our goals?

• Create a viable Beastmaster job, keeping true to the player-and-pet relationship while making the job useful both solo and in small group play.
• Address the issue that Charm, Tame, and other abilities are not useful at high levels as charmed pets cannot not scale properly.
• Add a uniqueness that aligns to our faster paced battle system.
• Add a bit of our own custom flair to the job to make it unique to the NocSouls ecosystem.

What’s been done?

• Beastmaster is now fully functional… plus some!
• All missing traits have been added, such as various family “killer” effects, Fencer III, and Resist Amnesia I-V. BST is the most Amnesia resistant class out there!
• All retail jugs have been added, wired up, and have fully functional ready commands and charges.
• Aymur, Farsha, and the Totemic, Ankusa, and Nukumi armor sets, and many more gear pieces have been updated to have their missing beastmaster modifiers.

What’s custom?

Numerous “NocSouls” specific features have also been added to make the play style more aligned to the fast paced game play on our server.

• Beneficial effects provided by jugs are provided in AOE to the entire party, not just the Beastmaster.
  • Raaz’s Zealous Snort now provides its benefit via “Potency” to stack with standard Haste effects. While Potency’s tool tip says it grants crit, this effect does not grant anything beyond what Zealous Snort normally grants.
  • Crab’s Bubble Curtain provides BLU-esque Magic Shield (-20% MDT, +150 MEVA, no magic “stoneskin” immunity).
• 40 custom high-quality jugs have been added for pets that had no corresponding HQ jugs. Players can activate those pets by equipping the non-quality jug and using Bestial Loyalty.
• Jugs now automatically engage (“Fight”) when the player engage a target. Similar to automatons and avatars, the player can switch targets and the pet will remain on the initial target.
• Jugs now scale similar to how Avatars and Wyverns scale based on master level. Beastmasters also gain additional scaling and enhancements for pets over level 99.
• Jugs now gain buffs from Heroic Empowerments and New Game+ ranks.
• Jugs’ magical ready moves now vary on TP similar to physical moves and can now properly Magic Burst on skill chains.
• Jugs’ physical ready moves now have a higher fTP modifier if they use more ready charges to provide more potency to these abilities.
• Jugs’ physical ready moves now have the ability to multi-strike based on the jug’s double, triple, and quadruple attack rating.
• Jugs now gain the passive traits of their selected jobs, such as Hippogryphs gaining triple attack as they are thieves.
• Jugs now have their expected family traits, such as reduced water damage taken by pugils, treasure hunter gained by ladybugs, and reduced physical damage taken by crabs.
• High-quality jugs are even better! All high-quality jugs have a +25% increased base combat damage multiplier.

What commands did we modify?

• Call Beast has been modified to improve the new Beastmaster experience.

  • Players now gain Call Beast at level 1 by beastmasters (must be a beastmaster main job).
  • Level 1 to 22 players (pre-jug) can use Call Beast to summon Novice Ned , a rabbit familiar that aids the beastmaster until jugs are available.
  • Novice Ned isn’t affected by the 0 ~ -2 level variance of normal jugs (mostly so he doesn’t try to spawn at level 0, or -1). 😄
  • Level 23 and beyond, Call Beast requires the appropriate jugs to summon pets.

• Bestial Loyalty has been updated to not expend an equipped high-quality jug. If a low-quality jug is equipped, it will be expended and summon the HQ version of that pet. Custom HQ pets have been added to all jugs where no HQ version previously existed. (e.g. Lyrical Broth)

• Charm* has been redesigned. This ability now provides a “Deus Ex Automata”-esque functionality that can summon a player’s equipped jug pet in an emergency.

  • Players now gain Charm at level 80.
  • The recast of Charm is set to 60s.
  • Players must be engaged with a target to use this ability, have an equipped jug, and not have an active pet.
  • Jug pets summoned by Charm will immediately engage the target.
  • Jug pets summoned by Charm will have a Weakness effect on them that lasts for 60s. The duration of this effect can be reduced by CHARM TIME modifiers on gear. If players can reduce the this below the 60s threshold, the pet will summon without any Weakness effect.

• Familiar has been updated to increase the bonus rates from 10% to 20% and provide bonuses for ranged attack, magic attack bonus, magic accuracy, and magic defense.

• Reward has been redesigned. The associated pet biscuits have been updated to provide unique effects in addition to an improved regen effects.

  • Base recast has been reset to the ‘retail’ recast of 90s due to the additional effects and increased healing.
  • Base pet healing is now based on the pet’s maximum health and is the same for each biscuit. A biscuit can heal a maximum of 10% of the pet’s total HP, with the REWARD HP BONUS adding an additional 1% per modifier. REWARD HP BONUS caps at 50% as per retail.
  • The pet regen amount is now based on the pet’s level, in 10 level increments, with level 1-10 pets regening 1 HP/tick and level and 116+ pets regening 80 HP/tick. Similar to the healing effect, this does not vary by biscuit.
  • Each biscuit provides an additional benefit to the pet depending on the type of biscuit. These bonuses scale on the MND of the Beastmaster and last 90s.
  • Biscuit effects
    • Alpha: Defense + Magic Defense Boost
    • Beta: Attack + Accuracy Boost
    • Gamma: Evasion + Magic Evasion Boost
    • Delta: Subtle Blow + Store TP
    • Epsilon: Critical Hit Rate
    • Zeta: Double Attack
    • Eta: Magic Attack + Magic Accuracy
    • Theta: Severe Damage Reduction (Migawari)

What did we pass on?

• We did not add the new August 2020 traits Tandem Strike and Tandem Blow as the “you and your pet are attacking the same target” as the accuracy bonus would provide little value to players and wiring it up would have been unnecessarily difficult at this time. We’ll continue to evaluate this for the future if we ever wanted it to do something different.

Why did we do away with the concept of charming mobs?

In reviewing how charmed targets work, there was no way to consistently ‘scale’ a charmed monster to equate to what a jug could provide as the monster’s stats had already been calculated. In addition, once monster get more than 8 levels higher than a player, then chance to charm floors down to 0%. Monsters in most 99+ content are 30-40 levels higher than the player. Finally, as we looked at play style, many of our end-game arenas are battlefields without viable monsters to charm which forces Beastmasters to use jugs.

These were all taken into account when deciding to shift to a jug-only based system. In addition, this allows us to better tune and scale pets, add new pets as necessary, and apply unique bonuses that can only be applied “on spawn” when a jug pet is summoned.

Custom HQ Pets

40 custom high-quality jugs have been added for pets that had no corresponding HQ jugs. These jugs can be activated by using Bestial Loyality with the NQ jug equipped. The following jugs have custom, high-quality pets associated to them:

New/Updated Beastmaster Equipment

• Beastmaster’s can now complete their Relic JSE necklace with Aurix.
  • HQ+2 is pre-augmented with: STR/DEX +10, Pet: Double Attack +10%, Pet: Att/Ratt/Acc/Racc +15
• The relic armor gloves (Monsters and Ankusa) have the “Enhance Beast Affinity” modifier pre-applied similar to how it is pre-augmented in retail.

Other Beastmaster Enhancements

• Updated Pet Augments that apply haste to use the new /1024 scale.
• Updated the logic to allow pets to have additional effects (used by Slugs who have chance to enslow, may have other uses in the future).