Beastmaster is finally in the game, and if you are anything like me you logged in and went straight off to find the quest. The problem is that the unlock drops you in a quiet corner of the Central Shroud with very little explanation, and there are a couple of steps that are genuinely easy to get stuck on. I went and did the whole thing, so here is every step in order.
What you need before you start
Three things, and if you are missing any of them the quest simply will not appear:
- Dawntrail on your account. You do not need to have finished it, you just need to own it.
- Any combat job at level 50 or higher. Disciple of War or Magic, it does not matter which one.
- The main scenario quest The Ultimate Weapon completed. That is the one that closes out A Realm Reborn.
The quest itself is flagged level 50, so make sure you are actually wearing your level 50 job when you go to pick it up.
Where the Beastmaster unlock quest starts
Head to New Gridania and look for the Excited Adventurer at X:11.8, Y:13.6. The quest is called Strangers in the Wood.
It shows up with the blue quest icon with a plus on it, which is the marker the game uses for anything that unlocks new content. Handy to know if you are scanning a busy map.
Walking through Strangers in the Wood
Once you have the quest, make your way to Sorrel Haven in the Central Shroud, around X:15.1, Y:18.9.
Here is the first bit that catches people out. The quest points you at a spot on the ground, and what you are actually looking for is a faint shimmer. It is not a marker you walk into, it is something you click. Interact with it and a cutscene plays.
After the cutscene, talk to the Mysterious Miqo’te standing right there.
This is the second thing worth knowing. Most guides list the Mysterious Miqo’te and J’yhuh Tia as two separate steps, which makes it read like two different people in two different places. It is the same person. The name just gets filled in once you have spoken to them, so you are not going anywhere.
Then it is the Cu Sith, the big pale beast sitting next to them. Feed it raw meat, which the quest hands you, then target it and use the /pet emote. That emote is unlocked for everyone by default, so there is nothing to go and track down first.
Hand the quest back in and that is the unlock done. You walk away with 11,700 EXP, 883 gil and five items.
Equip everything, or you are not a Beastmaster yet
This one gets people, because unlocking the job does not actually put you on it.
Open the Beast Herder’s Coffer for your level 1 armour, then equip the Beast Herder’s Hand Axe and the Beast Herder’s Hoplon. The Soul of the Beastmaster goes in your soul crystal slot. The moment the weapon is on, you are a Beastmaster.
Your item level is going to look rough, because you are starting again from level 1. That is completely normal, every limited job does this.
Use the Cu Sith Gourd to get your first beast
The last item is the Cu Sith Gourd. Use it straight from your inventory.
It is not a minion, which is what I assumed when I first saw it. It is a pact vessel, and using it forges a pact with the Cu Sith you just befriended. You get a big Beast Captured splash, your first familiar, and it rolls you straight into the next quest.
The nice part is that your first beast is simply handed to you. You do not have to go out and capture anything to get started.
Small aside if you have played the older Final Fantasy games: the Kornago Gourd is a Final Fantasy V reference. In FFV the Beastmaster catches a Kornago and trades it in for the Kornago Gourd, which lets you catch monsters at half health instead of an eighth. That is the same idea running underneath Beastmaster here, where the lower a beast’s health, the better your chance of capturing it.
What Beastmaster can and cannot do
Beastmaster is a limited job, the same family as Blue Mage, so it comes with a long list of things it is locked out of:
- No duty roulettes, and no random matching in Duty Finder. Premade parties only.
- No main scenario progress.
- No deep dungeons, Ultimates or PvP.
- No Eureka, Bozja, Occult Crescent, Variant or Criterion dungeons, or Stone, Sky, Sea.
- No squadron missions and no Hall of the Novice.
- No role actions, and you cannot send a retainer out on it.
It starts at level 1 and caps at 50. It is a melee DPS that swings an axe and carries a shield, and it wears the same gear as Monk and Samurai, so anything of Striking for armour and of Slaying for accessories.
How to level Beastmaster from 1 to 50
FATEs. That is genuinely the answer.
Beastmaster gets a big experience bonus from FATEs, and that is clearly how the job is meant to be levelled. Worth knowing though: unlike Blue Mage there is no bonus for killing things out in the open world, so grinding random mobs will just eat your evening for very little.
The efficient way is to run FATEs and capture beasts while you are already out there, rather than treating those as two separate trips. Then at level 30 you unlock the Crucible of the Unbroken, which is Beastmaster’s own solo content, the same way the Masked Carnivale belongs to Blue Mage. It is built like a board game with three difficulty tiers, and clearing boards gives you experience and feeds back into your job quests.
That is the whole unlock
It takes ten minutes or so once you know where you are going, and most of that is the run out to the Central Shroud. The only two things that really slow people down are the shimmer you have to click and remembering to actually equip the axe at the end.
If you are still working out which jobs you actually enjoy playing, I went through every role and job in FFXIV and who each one suits. And since Beastmaster is locked out of Eureka, if that was where you were hoping to take it, my beginner to pro Eureka guide covers what you actually want to bring in there instead.
Happy crafting & gathering!
