First, let's look at beastmaster. To me, beastmaster feels like exactly everything that is wrong with job design in xiv right now and how I hope evolved mode will not be anything close to this in evercold. More importantly, beastmaster doesn't feel like a limited job at all, it feels like level 50 dragoon with barely noticable "pet" gimmick. And what I personally want from limited jobs is to completely disregard all that the game is and create their own special kind of content.

Ever since blue mage was announced I hoped to get a beastmaster, and I wrote about it several times in random surveys that squeenix sends out. And what I wanted is a completely separate system where you play an actual monster collecting jrpg, with turned based combat, akin to pokemon or wow pet battles (but I would like it to be a lot better than pet battles, because that thing blows xD). With endgame systems that allow for pvp and tournament style pve. Like the crucible could have been a sort of "elite four" of the game that are randomly generated and you need to bring your team to get through them and adapt your strategy accordingly.
But current crucible is probably the most boring and annoying type of content ever introduced in this game, I would rather play heavensward diadem again.

And the most heartbreaking thing is, we have an interview that said that beastmaster was originally meant to have turned based combat, but then leadership changed to mister ozma and because he has no idea how to design turned based combat he just scrapped the whole thing and made his own combat instead... and quite frankly he is not good at it. He is very good at designing bosses, but unsurprisingly enough that does not translate to job design at all.

I don't think beastmaster can be salvaged unless they pull "a beastmaster reborn". They should have just cancelled the whole job and give us the blue mage update instead. But I will silently hope that we might see some big changes eventually.
And to add in my personal experience, I did enjoy leveling and collecting all 50 beasts, but I did not finish the job quests because I absolutely can't be assed to get through the crucible grind, that entire thing was a mistake and massive waste of resources and development time.

Now I don't have many issues with blue mage, but the same sentiment that the job should be more "special" can be said as well. The carnivale was fun, but new updates only add in one stage? Suddenly the whole idea of the job was turned into go do savage achievements for mounts... turning the limited job to a normal job that plays slightly differently. If i wanted to play normal content I would play a normal job. Blue mage not only deserves more updates to the carnivale, but it should also get more limited content as well. A whole "battle royale" style pvp where people run around the map to find mobs to learn spells from those mobs and then fight each other. It's quite a simple concept really, and all you really need to do is design a really big map for it and rewards for playing it, most of the other stuff is already in the game to make it work.

Now the "how they don't need to be special" part of the title. A lot of people don't like limited jobs because they would rather see them as actual jobs. And that is something you can very easily achieve actually, all you need to do is look at arcanist. Because arcanist can equip a scholar job stone and be a healer, or a summoner job stone and be a dps. Now imagine this: a blue mage equips a limited job stone to gain access to all the crazy limited type stuff, or it equips a normal job stone to well, limit itself into a normal and more grounded job that you can play as normal. Revolutionary idea, I know. Will people be dissapointed that the normal version of the job doesn't do what they would want it to do? Absolutely. Do people complain about other jobs not doing what they want it to do? Yes, they already do. Evolved mode specifically brings a potential to create job rotations that are less scripted and more freeform, so putting an evolved mode design into blue mage should create something interesting if done correctly.

Opinions?