Leveling Rotations and Tips for Beastmaster — Dawntrail 7.56

Welcome to our Beastmaster leveling guide for Final Fantasy XIV. Beastmaster starts at level 1 and caps at level 50.

If you came here expecting a repeat of Blue Mage, I have some bad news. Beastmaster does not get the enormous experience bonus that Blue Mage gets for killing enemies in the open world, so none of the habits you built up leveling that job transfer over.

What replaced it is more fun anyway. Run FATEs to about 15, then dungeons the rest of the way. Dungeon experience for Beastmaster is absurd, roughly a level per boss, and you even get to capture beasts while you are in there. Therefore making it the route I would recommend to almost everyone.

Blue Mage gets a massive bonus for killing enemies at or below its level cap, which means killing higher level enemies is actively worse. Beastmaster has no such bonus, so the normal experience rules apply to open world kills, and killing the highest level enemies you can is best.

Beastmaster is not left with nothing, though. It gets its own experience bonus from FATEs instead, which is why the early part of the route below leans on them rather than on grinding mobs.

What this means in practice is that all the old Blue Mage farming spots are irrelevant. There is no reason to seek out level 50 enemies, and no reason to avoid higher level ones.

It also means capturing beasts is not a leveling strategy. The experience for taming something is close to nothing, so treat capturing and leveling as two separate activities that happen to overlap in dungeons.

Go dig through your Armoury Chest and inventory before you start. All of the usual suspects work and they stack up to a serious difference:

• Preorder and promotional experience earrings, rings, and hats. Most of us have a pile of these gathering dust and they all work below level 30 or higher depending on the item.
• Battle manuals and rationing manuals. These are cheap and the effect is significant over a full leveling session.
• Experience food. Any of them will do.
• Free Company experience buffs, if your FC has them running.
• The Road to 90 and similar rested experience bonuses.

You cannot queue for a dungeon until 15, so FATEs are where you start. They give solid experience and, importantly, they are safe. Beastmaster has no real healing and dies to a stiff breeze at low level, so being surrounded by other players is a nice safety net.

Do not go out of your way to capture things during this stretch. It is tempting, but you will constantly run into the problem of finding a beast you want and being one level too low to capture it, and the experience from taming is not worth detouring for. Get to 15 first, then come back with levels to spare. The exception to that is anything that is directly on your way, since there is no reason to walk past a free capture.

One useful trick is that FATE versions of enemies count as valid capture targets, and they are often a lower level than the overworld version. If a regular spawn is out of reach, check whether a FATE nearby has the same enemy in it.

Once you hit 15, put up a Party Finder and spam the highest level dungeon you have access to. This is by far the fastest route, and it is not close. A single run of an early dungeon with experience buffs going can be worth a dozen FATEs. Expect roughly two to three levels per run.

The natural progression is Copperbell Mines, then Halatali, then Toto-Rak, then whatever else opens up as you climb. Conveniently, Copperbell has a Slime and Halatali has both a Dullahan and a Cobra, so you are collecting while you level.

You must be level synced to get the experience. You can absolutely run these unsynced with a high level friend if you only care about captures, but then you are not really leveling, you are shopping.

Beastmaster is squishy and has no healing to speak of, so being carried by a group is the comfortable way to do this. If you are running with other Beastmasters, be aware that bosses can get uncomfortably close. Bring Phoenix Downs.

The Crucible of the Unbroken opens up partway through the questline, and since it is the job's flagship content it is reasonable to wonder whether it doubles as a leveling method. It is worth going in with the right expectations. A run tends to come in at under a level, and the earlier boards are fairly modest for beast rank experience as well, so it will not keep pace with dungeons for experience gains.

You still do not need to skip it entirely; you will be clearing the story boards anyway, the beast ranks you pick up are worth having, and it is a nice change of scenery from running Copperbell for the fifth time. Just reach for dungeons when what you specifically need is levels.

There is nothing special here, which is a relief. Beastmaster uses standard Striking gear, exactly the same as any other axe-adjacent melee, so vendor and crafted gear works fine and Grand Company gear is cheap.

The job quests hand you a set at level 30 which will comfortably carry you to 50. It is ordinary ARR leveling gear rather than anything unique, so do not expect it to be special, but it does mean you can mostly ignore gearing until then.

Do pay attention around the level 25 to 30 range though. There are a couple of points where Beastmaster's survivability falls off a cliff if you are still in starter gear, and dungeon bosses will let you know about it. If you are dying a lot, upgrade before you assume you are playing badly.

Your kit unlocks by level rather than through the job quests, so you do not need to worry about a quest gating a button. What the quests do give you is the story, a gear set at level 30, and access to the Crucible. The unlocks that change how you play are:

• Battlehorns at levels 1, 10, and 20. These are your beast slots, so you are not running a full team of three until 20.
• Trick at level 8, which is where the combo system starts working.
• Tempered Release at level 18 and Borrow at level 22.
• Rally at level 28 and Rallying Cheer at level 40, which are your gauge refills.
• The level 50 finisher, which is the point where the rotation stops feeling like filler. See the Rotation page for what to do with all of this.

It is worth knowing that the level 50 quest chain runs through the Crucible of the Unbroken, and the first board expects you to have a few beasts that are not completely untrained. If you sprint to 50 with an empty bestiary you are going to hit a wall. Capturing a reasonable spread on the way up saves you a lot of pain later.

Level first, mostly. You must be at or above an enemy's level to capture it, so every level you gain widens the pool of things you can tame, and nothing is more annoying than trekking out to a beast and discovering you are one level short. Capturing on the way is free, so do it when it is convenient, but do not build your route around it.

For the full list of where everything lives, including the easier alternate sources the community has found, see the Beasts page.