Beastmaster DPS Gear and Best in Slot — Dawntrail 7.56

This page contains best-in-slot (BiS) gearsets for Beastmaster at the current level cap of 50. Beastmaster uses a one-handed axe and shield as its weapon combination.

For more information on which stats to prioritize and how to meld materia, see the Stats and Melding page.

Beastmaster gearing is refreshingly simple, and if you take one thing from this page take this: the level 50 job gear you get from the Crucible, upgraded through the Crucible, is your best in slot and stays that way. There is no tomestone treadmill to run and no raid tier to clear. You grind the Crucible of the Unbroken, you upgrade your set, you are done.

The reason is that the Beastmaster set carries Crucible-specific attributes that ordinary gear does not, along with much higher defensive stats than the Dreadwyrm or Ironworks equivalents. In board one, swapping a Dreadwyrm set for the Beastmaster set takes you from 192 defense and magic defense to 347, with the same main stat and vitality on each piece once the Crucible bonuses are counted. Inside the Crucible survivability is worth more than a handful of substats, and the Crucible is where you are going to be spending your time.

Before you have bought anything, do not buy the Dreadwyrm or Ironworks armor. Buy the Ironworks accessories, unsync farm the Dreadwyrm choker and a Dreadwyrm ring, get the Beastmaster set, and skip the rest. Only one ring slot wants the Dreadwyrm version; the other stays Ironworks.

The full best in slot for Beastmaster can be seen below. The sheet has both the set assuming a fully completed Crucible grind (including achievement gear) and the set without it, so use whichever matches your progress.

The accessories are the one place you are shopping outside the Crucible, otherwise everything is already there. It's also worth pointing out that the Beastliege's Hand Axe and Beastliege's Hoplon are easier to acquire than the other weapons with materia slots, but they do require the lengthy grind of getting every beast to rank 25.

The Beastmaster's Earrings are BiS by roughly three whole substats, which is an enormous margin for a single accessory slot. They are also locked behind the Unbroken Endgame achievement, which requires clearing the Crucible's first three boards and both master's boards under the third degree. That is the hardest thing in the job and it will be a while.

Until then, use the Dreadwyrm Earring of Fending as a placeholder. It is not close, but nothing else is available. Don't bother with a preorder earring like the Azeyma's Earrings either; they don't grant the stats on their tooltip once they sync down. You can verify this by seeing the actual stats you gain when equipping and unequipping the earrings.

The item level 135 weapons have identical stats, so this is purely a question of which one you can get and which one you like looking at.

Guttler Unleashed and Augmented Kornago Hoplon come from Master of the Menagerie for hitting Legendary rank across the first three boards and both master's boards.

The base Beastmaster's +0 set is item level 90 and carries a Crucible buff that ordinary gear does not have. Its raw stats are unremarkable, though its defense is high, and you will be upgrading out of the base version almost immediately anyway. Grab it and start feeding it remnants.

You can upgrade the Beastmaster's gear with Bright Remnant of Resilience earned in the Crucible. Going from +0 to a fully maxed set costs a few hundred of them, and since a meaningful chunk of your income is capped weekly through the Challenge Log, expect this to be a multi-week project rather than a weekend one unless you play a lot. Running the boards weekly is worth doing even when you are not actively pushing rank.

When upgrading gear, you may be tempted to ignore the axe/hoplon since you can get those for "free" by leveling up all of your beasts or getting Legendary scores on all boards. This is a trap; you will absolutely have enough Remnants to fully upgrade all of your gear by the time you accomplish either of those achievements (and it will be substantially more difficult/slow without upgrading your axe/hoplon). My general recommendation for upgrade order is axe/hoplon > chest/legs > head/hands/feet, but if you have the Remnants to upgrade any piece you should always do it as soon as possible.

Rock-fisted Popoto Stew is our BiS food, but this is the least impactful gearing decision you can make and I would not spend any real effort on it.

The reason is that our substats at level 50 are tiny compared to the caps on any modern food, so the cap never comes into play and all you are really getting is the percentage. Vegetable Soup does the same job for a fraction of the price, and whatever the current raid tier's food is will also cap you comfortably. If you already have a stack sitting in your inventory from your weekly reclears, just eat that. There is no reason to make a special trip to the market board for this.

The one thing worth checking is which substats a given food boosts, since that is the only axis on which these differ. What you want is Direct Hit Rate and Determination, which is the pair both of the foods above happen to carry.

After Strength, the priority is Direct Hit Rate and Determination, which is what every piece of Beastmaster gear is itemized into. There is no Critical Hit on the set at all and no Skill Speed either, and the only way to get either is to drop pieces for far worse defensive stats. Crit does appear in the melds, but only because it is the one stat left with room under the cap. There is less riding on any of this than you would expect, since the only pieces that take materia at all are the achievement axe, hoplon and Beastmaster's Earrings, which means the non-achievement set has nothing to meld. The exact melds for each piece are in the sheet above.