Hello everyone! This week, we're going to cover in detail one of the new classes that will be available in Missions and Monsters: the Beastmaster class! The Beastmaster is our biggest class yet, with a ton of abilities. They are somewhat of an hybrid between a regular class and the Gadgeteer class, but with many new and unique mechanics. The Gadgeteer style part of the class comes from the way they will learn 14 of their abilities. These abilities are each tied to a specific pet monster and have 2 parts: the active part, which works the same way as any regular ability: you select the ability, you choose the target(s) and then you use it. Those have a wide range of effects, as the Beastmaster is incredibly versatile: damage, healing, debuffs, buffs, special abilities... Once the ability is used, the pet that it's associated with will appear next to the caster and remain there (almost) indefinitely. You can have up to 3 pets out at once per character, and if you summon a 4th one, the oldest pet will go away. Each character can only have 1 of each pet out, meaning they must have 3 different pets out at once. This is per character, so having 2 Beastmasters out won't interfere with their pets' availability.
At the end of the character's turn, any pet they have out will apply their effect to targets adjacent to the character. All pets are "smart", so healing pets will only apply their "end of turn effect" to friendlies and damaging pets will only target enemies, etc.
In the example above, 3 pets are out: the Blardger Brat, which deals damage, the Daodrenner Kit, which heals allies and the Arpia Guttersnipe, which has a chance to poison (and refresh poison duration on) adjacent enemies. All the effects happen at once so the information is displayed as quickly as possible. These 14 pets are unlocked by recruiting the corresponding monster, which means that once a monster is recruited, every Arbiter on your team will have access to the given pet summon (assuming they have access to the Beastmaster class to begin with). In this way, those behave much like gadgets. Monsters can be recruited through missions or through Taming (with the new Wrangler class). On top of these 14 pets that can be summoned, the Beastmaster has access to 7 more abilities that are learned normally through their skill tree (so those are not shared across all units and must be learned individually, like regular class skills). Those abilities are "Pet Dismisses" and are a new mechanic to the game. The Dismissal abilities can only be used when the character has at least 1 pet out. When they use a Dismiss ability, all their currently deployed pets will be dismissed and the spell will gain more power for each pet dismissed that way. The dismissal abilities have a very wide range of utility (and scale well with a high number of pets), such as damaging enemies, healing an allly or even all allies at once, revives, character displacement, etc.
All in all, the Beastmaster is a VERY versatile class, with varied play styles possible. The player can opt to maximize the pets' "end of turn" effects and run around with an aura of healing/damage to everything in range, or they can opt to focus on the Dismiss abilities, bringing out pets as fast as possible to prime big ratios to Dismiss abilities. Or they can pursue a balanced approach of the above, of course. One thing is certain, the true power of the class is tied to the cute pets it can bring out. And to help with that, there are various abilities to summon them faster, such as the counter Loyal Friends, which will trigger on any offensive action taken on the caster by summoning a random pet, thus helping the character bring out 3 pets faster than normal. The Beastmaster has 2 powerful passives, one which restores MP for each buff/debuff/pet that wears off or is dismissed/dispelled from the character, helping them build MP faster as they use their pets (or through buffs/debuffs removal). Their second passive is called Rampart, and it creates a "zone of control" around the unit, preventing any enemies from moving further once they move to an "adjacent tile" to the character. They'll only be able to walk past that tile on the next turn.
Here, Reiner can't walk past the unit with Rampart, as the shortest path is blocked by Rampart and he doesn't have enough movement to go fully around. With all these tools at their disposal, we expect the Beastmaster will quickly become a fan favorite! Let us know what you think! And as always, thanks for the support! Lastly, we hope everyone stays safe during these difficult times >.<