BST Merrits?

Looked around the threads and cant find anything new bout BST merrits, so i was wondering what would be best to do. Here's what I was tinking

Group 1:
Reward Recast: 5/5 (was also thinking maybe Sic recast?)
Call Beast: 5/5 (for Aby purposes?)

Group 2:
Beast Affinity 5/5 (was told this 1 but dunno how pets work yet completly)
Beast Healer: 5/5

Any advice or info. would be great thanks.

I recently leveled/merited BST, and this is what I gathered.

5/5 Call Beast and 5/5 Reward is your best bet with Group 1.

Group 2 is...mostly your decision.

Either 2/5 or 5/5 Beast Affinity.
Basically, NurseryNazuna's pet level caps at 86 by default.
With 2/5 Beast Affinity, it caps at exactly 90.
However, when the 95 level cap comes, you would need 5/5 to make Nazuna's level cap 96, so that you'll have it capped at 95.

So, you can either get 2/5 now and redo your points later, or go 5/5 and be good-to-go.

I recommend either 5/5 Beast Healer or 4/5 Beast Healer + 1/5 Feral Howl.
Feral Howl doesn't work on pretty much everything that matters these days, so most have deemed it useless for now. But it has a few uses in old zones, I suppose.
Killer Instinct is pretty situational, I don't find it worth it, but could put a point in it if you can find a use for it.

...so in short what you were thinking is pretty much fine.

BST really depends on how you play the job and where you play it mostly (abyssea or outside).

Beast Affinity adds levels to the spawning level of you jug pet. Each jug has a level range it can pop in; such as the lower level jugs only spawn up to level 30, etc. Higher level jugs can spawn from -2 your current level, to your exact level. Monster gloves add +1 level and merits on top of that. CC was popular in the old days because you could raise it's level using gloves + merits and she became a very good tank and decent DD for how cheap it was.

- Do you want your pet to tank? Reward Recast and Beast Healer.

- If you play outside abyssea a lot and plan on charming or plain old tanking yourself; killer effects is nice here. You'd be surprised how often "5%" procs. I capped Parry on BST at 75 solo as BST/DNC in the old days on black mandy in Den of Rancor and it would proc every other hit it seemed.

- Killer Instinct is nice if you know beast traits well; you can give terror effects to your tank but you could also get your tank terror in return if you screw it up.

Feral Howl is nice for claiming NM's when you have a jug pet out. It's also good for trying to stun that random super-ga4 spell aimed at you, or holding your pet a few more seconds until reward recast is up.

I personally hate jug pet tanking and have no desire to solo anything in abyssea right now. So I have my BST built stronger than most normal WAR's today. Notice I didn't say all ... not even going to pretend I can keep up with a properly skilled/geared Ukko WAR.

Myself and the 4 other BSTs I know meritted this way.

I did exctally that, even though the 2 popular jugs(sheep and ladybug) have high caps they will still be very popular at 99. At worse merits are so easy to get u can always change them.

1 Feral Howl, 4/5 Beast Healer was the path I took.

The one merit in beast healer isn't potent enough to outweigh the (albeit small) utility that Feral Howl has. Its a good claim tool, good for stunning/getting immediate hate on adds and pop NMs. The most common use I find for Feral Howl is to use it and immediately snarl when initiating a pop NM, aggro/links, or just need to get away from a mob.

Killer Instinct gives a 15% damage increase to the appropriate family, which stacks with the increase from Ferine Gausape and is enhanced by killer effects merits. 5/5 merits makes it active 20% of the time (so I guess an overall damage increase of 3%). It's underrated, IMO. Probably better than an additional 5hp/tick healed by pet food if you melee with your BST regularly. For solo-only stand-back and let pet do all the work, maybe Beast Healer is better.


Currently, I have
5/5 Reward recast
5/5 Killer effect
5/5 Beast Affinity
5/5 Killer Instinct

After level cap upgrade I may drop some of the Beast Affinity depending on what new pets are added (i.e. if there is a cheap NN replacement that caps above 86). If so, I'll put the spare merits into Feral Howl, as it's a nice occasional utility tool. E.g. getting hate on a link to snarl, or claiming.

sounds reasonable and i like to melee with my pet, but if i took that route, what would u give up for killer instinct?

Beast Healer. If you're mostly in Abyssea, atma dwarf it anyway, and the addition of Dawn Mulsum has reduced the dependence on pet food regen also.