Beastmaster DPS Rotation, Openers, and Abilities — Dawntrail 7.56

This guide covers Beastmaster combat at level 50. If you are still working toward the level cap, check out the Leveling and Beasts pages first.

Fair warning before we start: Beastmaster's in-game explanation of its own gauge leaves room for improvement. If you have read the tooltips three times and are still unsure, this guide will give you everything you need to know to understant everything Beastmaster.

The Beastmaster gauge tracks four things at once:

• TP, the yellow bar. This is your resource. It caps at 250.
• Pet TP, the blue bar. This is your beast's resource. It also caps at 250.
• Mastered Instinct, the yellow diamonds. Three of them.
• Natural Instinct, the blue diamonds. Also three.

The bars are spent on actions. The diamonds are spent on refilling the bars.

Your TP comes almost entirely from weaponskills, which is why Skill Speed is worth more to Beastmaster than you might expect. Your beast's TP comes from its auto-attacks at 12 per swing, which means a melee beast chasing a moving boss generates noticeably less than one standing still.

Your 1-2-3 is Smash Axe, Axeblade Bite, and Shieldsplitter. The potencies when comboed are 160, 500, and 600, which is a ridiculous spread and tells you everything about how much the first button matters.

The second and third steps give 13 and 15 TP respectively, so a full combo is 28 TP across three GCDs. At a 2.5 second GCD that works out to around 30 seconds to bank the 100 TP you need for a single colored action. This is the part of the job that feels slow, and it is slow, so anything that gives you TP back is worth paying attention to.

Shield Charge is your gap closer and it deals real damage, so use it to open rather than saving it for movement.

The second gauge features four colors arranged on a wheel: red, blue, yellow, and green. They combo clockwise:

Both you and your beast have colored actions. Your four colored axe actions each cost a minimum of 100 TP. Your beast's colored action is its Trick, which costs a minimum of 100 Pet TP, and its color is fixed by which beast you have out. You can check which color a given beast is in the Master's Bestiary.

A combo is one of your actions and one of your beast's actions, used within a 7 second window. If the second one is clockwise of the first, you get an Intentional Combo, which is the good version. If it is any other pairing, you get an Instinctual Combo, which is the consolation prize.

An early job quest tells you to match colors, red with red. Ignore it. Same color pairings do nothing useful and the quest is a bad tutorial. You always want the clockwise pairing.

You cannot chain around the whole wheel. Each colored action consumes your entire bar, so without a refill you get exactly two steps.

Whichever action finishes the combo determines which diamond on the gauge you get.

• Trick, then your axe gives you a Mastered Instinct (yellow).
• Your axe, then Trick gives you a Natural Instinct (blue).

Yellow diamonds are generally the ones you care about, because they feed Rally, which feeds your finisher. So your default is Trick first, axe second, over and over.

A three step combo, which you can only do with a refill in the middle, gives you both colors of diamond at once.

One thing to be careful of. If you press your axe and your beast's Trick in the same GCD window, your own action frequently resolves first regardless of which you pressed first, because the beast has to receive the command and get into position before it acts. If a combo is not registering the way you expect, this is usually why. Give the beast a moment.

These are your refills, and they are what turn the gauge from a slow trickle into an actual rotation.

• Rally (level 28) consumes all your Mastered Instinct and gives you 40 TP plus 70 per yellow diamond, up to the 250 cap. 90 second cooldown.
• Rallying Cheer (level 40) consumes all your Natural Instinct and gives your beast 30 Pet TP plus 70 per blue diamond, up to 240. 90 second cooldown.

Three yellow diamonds into Rally is 250 TP, which is a full bar from nothing. That is the number to remember.

There is an ongoing argument about whether Natural Instinct is worth building at all, and I am broadly on the side that says it is a pity mechanic for people who comboed in the wrong order. It does have a real use though. Rallying Cheer lets you use Trick, swap to a different beast, and immediately Trick again, which is a meaningful burst of damage and a nice trick to have in your back pocket. Build yellow by default, take blue when it falls into your lap.

Everything above is setup for this. At level 50, holding 250 TP transforms your colored actions into Light and Dark versions, and those are your big hits.

Combos come in two flavors depending on which way you move around the wheel. Pairs that sit opposite each other on one axis give you a Sunstrider (sun), and pairs on the other axis give you a Moonstalker (moon). Each one fills half of the indicator in the center of the gauge. Fill both halves and you have set up Universality, the full combo.

The practical version, which is all you need to remember:

1. Combo Trick into axe repeatedly until you have two Mastered Instinct diamonds. This takes roughly 30 to 45 seconds at a 2.5 second GCD.
2. Perform one more combo, either sun or moon, whichever you like. This combo does two jobs at once. It fills half of the center indicator and it awards your third diamond.
3. Use Rally, spending all three diamonds to refill you to 250 TP and light up your Light and Dark actions.
4. Finish with the opposite action to the half you just filled. If your shield went Dark, swing Light, and vice versa.

That finisher is roughly a 1,000 potency hit followed by a 1,200 potency hit, which is most of your damage in a single window. Getting this sequence out on cooldown is the main source of optimization for Beastmaster.

The ordering here is important. You are not building to three diamonds and then comboing. You build to two, and the combo that sets up your finisher is the same one that hands you the third. Rally after it and the refill carries you into the finisher.

One word of caution that trips people up frequently: your beast does not perform its Trick the instant you press it; this is the same behavior that we used to see with Summoner pets. If you fire your axe weaponskill straight after, the two can resolve in the wrong order and you lose the combo, so weave a single ability between each GCD rather than pressing Trick and axe back to back.

There is no rush on that last part. Your diamonds and your filled half both sit there waiting, so if the combo window slips past you before you get Rally off, nothing is lost. Just pick the finisher up on your next combo instead. It is worth getting the sequence out on cooldown over a fight, but a few seconds of delay on any given attempt costs you nothing.

You have three battlehorns, and swapping between them mid-fight is part of the job rather than an emergency button.

Summoning a beast gives you One with Nature, which lets you use one of two actions:

• Tempered Release is generally your damage option, with some utility attached depending on the beast.
• Borrow is generally your utility option. It converts your Beast Mode button into that beast's kinship ability, and unlike Tempered Release you can keep using it on roughly a 90 second cooldown.

Both grant Lingering Vantage, and you only get one per summon, so this is your maind decision each time you bring a beast out.

The important thing to understand about Borrow is that kinship abilities are shared across an entire kin type rather than being unique to one beast. There are eight of them, one for each kin, so every Wavekin you own hands you the same tool. This matters for team building far more than it first appears, because it means you are picking a category of utility, not a specific creature.

• Wavekin give Quelling Wave, a spammable 2.5 second recast ranged attack. This is the one that solves Beastmaster's complete lack of a ranged button.
• Soulkin give Soul Crush, a 30 second recast interrupt.
• Vilekin give Vileskin, which raises your block rate and returns TP on a successful block.
• The remaining five are Beastskin (Beastkin), Cloud Skim (Cloudkin), Seedsower (Seedkin), Scaleskin (Scalekin), and Scouring Ash (Ashkin).

So if you want an interrupt, you do not need a Coblyn specifically, you need any Soulkin. Bear that in mind when you are trying to cover several needs with only three battlehorns.

Parting Blow is your beast's exit. It is 1,000 potency (1500 with Lingering Vantage) in a large radius with no damage falloff whatsoever, and it sacrifices the beast, which puts that horn on cooldown. Use it as the last thing you do before swapping horns, ideally after you have already spent Tempered Release or Borrow. It also returns a small amount of TP.

Worth knowing, though I make no promises about how long it survives. Out of combat, if you reassign any beast in the Master's Bestiary, or simply use the Away command, your current beast is dismissed and its cooldowns reset. Resummon and you have a fresh Trick and a fresh Borrow.

The catch is that it only works out of combat and only if you have not put the horn itself on cooldown, so no Parting Blow and no swapping to a different horn. In practice this means you can walk into every trash pack in a dungeon with a fresh The Ram's Voice. It does not work in the Crucible, where horns are handled differently.

Beastmaster's AoE damage is bizarrely good, for the simple reason that none of the beast actions appear to have damage falloff. Parting Blow hits an entire pack for its full 1,000 potency.

What you do in a pack of enemies is lock it down and then delete it. The standard shape is a hard crowd control effect followed by Parting Blow, and almost nothing survives it. The popular picks:

• Chimera (#38) for The Ram's Voice, which is an instant Deep Freeze on the whole pack.
• Buffalo (#26) for Heave, its stun. These two are the consensus dungeon pair.
• Treant (#36) is badly underrated while leveling. Acorn Bomb is an area effect that applies Nightmare, effectively a 30 second stun with no duration falloff on repeat casts, and it lands on nearly everything that is not a dungeon boss. Because it is a Trick rather than a Tempered Release, you can loop it as long as your beast keeps generating TP.
• Coblyn (#7) for an interrupt and physical vulnerability down.
• Coeurl (#33) for Blaster, paralysis, and a 25% damage reduction.
• Bat (#19) for Blood Drain, the occasional large heal and evasion, which matters more than you would think given the lack of healing.

The elemental vulnerability debuffs your beasts apply do stack, at around 20% each, so two Beastmasters running the same element in a dungeon is a large damage increase.

There is no enmity tool in your kit. Snarl exists, but it is a Crucible duty action and does not come with you. If you are in a dungeon or an alliance raid, you are not tanking anything on purpose.

There is also essentially no healing. A couple of beasts offer small amounts, Bat being the notable one, and lifesteal effects exist but returns single digit amounts of health on hits that crit for a thousand. Your survival plan is Borrow for mitigation, potions, and killing things before they kill you. Beastmaster is not a job that comfortably solos dungeons.

The short version, for anyone who scrolled to the bottom:

1. Summon your first beast before the pull. You need it out to combo at all, and its auto-attacks start building Pet TP immediately.
2. Open with Shield Charge to close the gap.
3. Run your 1-2-3 to build TP, and use Tempered Release or Borrow depending on what that beast is for.
4. Every time both bars are at 100, combo Trick into your axe, moving clockwise on the wheel, to bank a Mastered Instinct diamond.
5. At two diamonds, perform one more combo, which gives you the third. Then use Rally and finish with the opposite Light or Dark action.
6. Use Parting Blow before swapping horns, never as a filler.
7. Repeat. Use Rallying Cheer when it lines up, particularly to double up Tricks across a beast swap.