Beastmaster Melding, Stat Priority, and Consumables — Dawntrail 7.56

This section covers stat priority, materia melding, and consumables for Beastmaster. For full gearsets, refer to the Beastmaster Gear page.

Beastmaster is a melee DPS job and primarily scales with Strength. After that, the priority is:

1. Strength (main stat; always prioritize higher item level gear)
2. Direct Hit Rate and Determination
3. Critical Hit, but only in melds, for the reason below

Every piece of Beastmaster gear is itemized into Direct Hit Rate and Determination, and there is no Critical Hit anywhere on the set. You can't build for crit either; the only place to find it is outside the Beastmaster gear, and those pieces have far worse defensive stats. You take what the gear gives you, which admittedly is a ton of bonus stats in the Crucible.

Crit does turn up in the melds. Materia can't push a substat past that piece's cap, and Direct Hit Rate and Determination are already at or near theirs, so most of a meld into either one is wasted. Crit starts at zero. The first slot or two on a piece tops off whichever native substat is short, and everything after that goes to crit.

Skill Speed isn't worth melding. Stacking it everywhere takes your GCD from 2.50 to 2.42, which brings your first combo in at ~26.62 seconds instead of ~27.5 and Universality at ~84.7 instead of ~87.5; one extra weaponskill for every slot you have. Nearly all of your TP generation comes from weaponskills, so it looks better than it is.

This could change in the future as we get more gear. Critical Hit and Direct Hit also have a history of behaving oddly with pet damage, which nobody has fully pinned down yet. Neither is something you can act on right now, though.

There is not much to meld. The only pieces that take materia at all are the achievement axe, hoplon and Beastmaster's Earrings, so until you have those there is nothing to do here. The exact melds for each piece are in the best in slot sheet on the gear page.

You cannot use potions inside the Crucible of the Unbroken at all. Bear in mind too that Beastmaster has no role actions anywhere, so Second Wind and Bloodbath were never options to begin with. Between the two, everything you would normally reach for when a fight goes wrong is unavailable, which is a large part of why the mode leans so hard on crowd control and on using your beast to soak damage.

Food is mostly unaffected. However there is one major consideration, while you can eat food inside the crucible, you will not recover any HP meaning that while your max HP is higher, you've effectively lost out on it until you use a potion. Therefore, you should always use food before going into a board.

For food, you want Direct Hit Rate and Determination, which is what Rock-fisted Popoto Stew gives you and why it is the food on the best in slot sheet. Crit food does nothing for us; there's no Critical Hit on the gear for it to take a percentage of. Our substats are small enough that the caps never come into play either, so anything with those two substats does the same job for less money.

Make sure to use the high quality version. High quality food is a 10% bonus and normal quality is 8%, and you lose those two points even when you are nowhere near the cap. The vitality is worth having too, and a finished set sits under 690 vitality, so anything around Vegetable Soup's item level or above has room to spare there. There is more on this on the Beastmaster Gear page.