FFXIV: Beastmaster Adventures and Impressions
Posted on September 18, 2026 by Aywren
Last week, FFXIV patch 7.56 brought the newest limited job, Beastmaster. This has been something I’ve been looking forward to with cautious optimism for a while. I’ve now spent many hours with the job, have leveled it from 1 to 50, finished some floors of the Crucible, and befriended all beasts.
Here are my thoughts about the job – both good and not so good!
What I Enjoyed
Aside from the concept of befriending and calling forth beasts, what I enjoyed most about the job was the fact that we got to go back in time, so to speak, to my ARR roots. What do I mean by that?
Leveling to 50 on Beastmaster is most quickly obtained by running FATEs in the open world. This means that I was getting big flashback energy to my ARR days when FATEs were the main way of leveling alt jobs. I was out there tanking some FATEs that I’d not done in over 10 years and that felt fantastic to me!
This included Svara…
And even tanking The Eyes Have It (with kind healer support!
I know FATEs aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, and early leveling might feel like a slog for some, but I was honestly a little sad when I hit level 50 because I had to bid farewell to the FATE train in some of my hometown zones.
I also worry a little for the folks who wait to level their Beastmaster because I know I was at an advantage having done it early on in the first four days after the patch dropped. Once the FATE train slows down, leveling will likely slow down for those who come after.
I also loved running through the zones at an early level, scanning every beast to see if it was something I could add to my bestiary. You get a scan skill that tells you if you can befriend the beast, and how difficult they are to befriend. The Rotting Goobbue in particular took me many, many attempts before I finally was able to capture it. But that’s a story for a different part of this post!
The storyline behind the Beastmaster job is interesting enough with memorable characters, so that’s another little positive about the job. As you progress through the story, the job trainer kept you mostly up to date on gear, finally giving you the AF gear for Beastmaster that provides bonuses on the solo-mode content, the Crucible.
The Meh of the Job
There’s a number of things about Beastmaster that I consider somewhat meh. Unfortunately, that all skews towards the area of the battle content.
How do I say this… pairing with your beast to do combos is a cool idea. Sadly, it just takes so long to build up the meter between you and your beast, and your beast’s skills feel so limited.
For example, you must choose between Tempered Release and Borrow when you summon a creature.
Tempered Release prompts the beast to execute their special skill. But they can only do it once per summon, period.
Borrow provides you with an additional skill based on the beast type. This can be used multiple times a summon. However, some of the skills have a very long cooldown timer.
I guess the idea is to be cycling through your beasts for skills and perks. But then the horns have such a long cooldown timer while in battle, it feels like that’s also punished.
I dunno. I’m probably doing something wrong here. But as a casual approaching battle with Beastmaster, it just feels like things are slow and limited. Even working up to your combo feels like it takes so much time, in which you’re simply executing the same 1-2-3 combo to increase your own gauge.
What I’d hoped would have been an exciting and active job of exchange between yourself and your beast friend… just isn’t. Again, the game probably intends you to interact with more “advanced” summoning and unsummoning rotations or something. But if it does, it didn’t make that very clear, despite sending us to the practice dummy in job quests over and over to try out skills.
The elephant in the room is really the Crucible, however.
Crucible – Good or Bad?
I’m overall OK with the Crucible. However, not everyone is, as you can see from forum posts.
I understood what this content was meant to be – a roguelike mode built within an MMO.
Knowing it was devised by Mr. Ozma, I also had an inkling it would be demanding of the average player. And it is. It is a mish-mash of boss mechanics you’d find in other parts of the game, sometimes spiced up with other newer mechanics.
I do worry this content is yet again too difficult for a casual player. Especially since leveling your beasts only helps out so much when their level gets forcibly capped at a certain point.
So, yes, if you fail, your beasts do still earn experience and level up, though far less than if you were able to complete the entire board. There is a way to make slow progress – though really, knowledge and memorization of the mechanics are the deciding factor in the end.
I learned this really quickly when I ran up against a fight on the second board that kept handing me my head. At the time, there weren’t any in-depth guides on what to watch for mechanically per fight – I hope those are starting to emerge now, because I needed one then.
I did watch a few videos to review what other “legendary” players were doing to clear the content, and that helped me to take away a few pointers and approaches. In the end, I did finish up the second board, and now sit at the beginning of the third board – whether I’ll actually push further, I’m not sure at the moment.
The issue isn’t so much that the Crucible is built this way. It’s that the Crucible is required content to finish the job quest story. You can still level to 50 and capture all the beasts without finishing Crucible, but much of the rewards – including better beasts and gear improvements – are locked behind finishing Crucible boards.
The complaints I see are folks who are struggling with mechanics and can’t pass the boards, therefore, have to give up on progressing through the job quests and earning rewards. Which… well… is a major chunk of the content for the job at this point.
No amount of leveling – either yourself or your beasts – is going to save you from not reading mechanics well. Therefore, what started out as a fun romp to gather pets has turned into a mechanic-fest of dungeon and raid bosses solo. Which is a content type Dawntrail already has in spades.
I can see why that turns folks away.
One final note, you can level your beasts up to 25 within the Crucible. Doing so unlocks a new skin for them. But this is also likely the level future content in the Crucible will be looking for. So, if you’re wanting to tackle Beastmaster long-term, this will be something to work on.
There are all sorts of legendary rankings and eventually a ranking ladder system for other Crucible rewards. I’ve paid none of that any mind as I’m lucky just to clear the content, much less be competitive about it. I did want to mention it’s a thing, however.
Non-Solo Closed-World Job
My other grump about the job is again… FFXIV seems allergic in making anything that’s purely open-world solo. Like Blue Mage, the game starts you out in the open world running about and making discoveries. This is the part that I enjoyed the most, as I noted.
But then, just like Blue Mage where spells started to get locked behind group content and instances, a number of the higher ranked beasts can only be captured in dungeon or even raid instances.
They walked the line this time as these beasts are available for a cost using the currency won at the Crucible. Which means technically, you can solo the Crucible to buy them. But seeing that I have to wait until weekly reset to earn the currency from challenge logs, this is doing Crucible for many weeks.
Not to mention, purchasing the harder beasts that you can only get in instanced zones do require you to clear the second board of the Crucible. If you’re having trouble doing that, then getting these beasts solo isn’t very viable.
Now, I do want to note that they softened the requirements for capturing beasts as compared to the likelihood of learning skills as a Blue Mage. I keep comparing these two because they’re the two limited jobs we have.
Unlike Blue Mage, there’s no penalty that I saw in going into the instanced zone unsynced. If you outlevel and outgear a dungeon, this means you can stay at your level and go in to capture the beast solo – which is, in fact, the best thing to do. But a number of these beasts require level 50 dungeons or raids. For those, even taking one friend in unsynced to help clear the way to the boss and keep boss aggro is good enough for a capture.
There is no real viable way of soloing group instances with your beasts on level, which was a bit of a disappointment to me. I’m not sure where I got the idea this would be a thing, but it’s not.
Thankfully, Syn was super helpful and willing to bear the burden of this for me. We discovered that taking her level 100 White Mage in, equipped with a lower-level weapon and no gear at all was the way to go. She could take out the dungeon trash and help do damage to the bosses without insta-killing them.
Thus, the nekked Zeb runs began – specifically for my nemesis - the Rotting Goobbue of The Lost City of Amdapor. I don’t know how many times we had to run that before I finally caught it.
The scan noted he “wouldn’t be easy” – but that’s not even the highest level of capturing difficulty. Syn and I began to wonder if there might be a bug with the Goobbue at one point. Funny thing is that after the hotfix patch, I was able to catch it the first try last night. Have no idea if that’s just RNG or something else.
Anyhow, the point of this is that soloing to complete the bestiary through buying beasts is possible, but may be frustrating to those who don’t enjoy the Crucible. The job at level 50 still requires the help of at least one other person to capture all creatures. Still, this isn’t as strictly defined as the Blue Mage spell learning system, thankfully.
I was able to finish up my bestiary last night, which awards you with the Hydra mount.
I think he’s quite fetching, actually.
My Takeaway
Overall, I had fun with the leveling experience of Beastmaster. I’ve been itching to level something in FFXIV again without having to start from scratch on a new character. This was a good solution to that. It leveled at a quick rate (which I appreciated), but once it was done, it was done.
Locking job and story progression behind the Crucible isn’t favored by some folks. I understand why and do think maybe Crucible should have been an option instead of a forced element. Not everyone is into roguelikes.
I wish they’d focus more on open-world solo aspects of jobs – Beastmaster started well, but then turned into a dungeon/raid/instance fest again. Or, if we must go into dungeons, allow us to be able to use our pets for tanking and healing somehow. Even if it means smart soloing.
I wish battle felt a little more engaging than just comboing over and over to build up a very slow gauge. I understand a balance between complexity and building, and maybe as the job matures a bit, this will be addressed. But for now, I just wanted to see my beasts do more cool things.
All in all, if you haven’t given it a try, I say go for it. Once you get to level 30, you can discover if you enjoy the Crucible or not!
And if you have tried Beastmaster, what do you think?