Beast master companions pros and cons (not a guide just a run-down of each companion):

Primalist
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Wolf starting companion - only thing it is good for end-game is a make-shift tank. The damage falls off HARD compared to other companions.
Saber tooth - great for both critical damage builds and DOT builds. Scales bleeds and can stack them very quickly with 2 AS node in its tree. One for 50% and one for
Raptor: Right now (I will update if they balance it) this is the strongest pet by far. You can build for speed, pure critical damage or DOT.
Bear: Everyone will tell you that bear is only good for tanking but that is not true at all. It has has plenty of nodes to boost it’s damage.
Scorpion: From my testing this companion doesn’t do very well as a critical based physical damage dealer and is best left for DOT builds.

So for BM’s I recommend focusing on no more than 3 companions and using both frenzy totem (op) and fury leap. Summoners main form of defense is mobility as most of your affixes to minion affixes. Fury leap can also boost minion damage.
Bear Saber tooth and Raptor for a critical-hit based build
Sabter tooth Raptor and Scorpion for DOT based builds.

Feel free to leave a comment if you have a question or PM Servire in-game

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The unfortunate thing about minion critical strike builds is that there are not many added Critical Strike bonuses for minions as there are for players, so even if you take all the Critical Strike nodes, your pets only Crit around 25% of the time. I know we’re talking double-triple damage per crit, but it’s not a good feeling investing most of your nodes into something that doesn’t work 75% of the time.

In my opinion, Scorpion is the most lacking of the pets. It’s slower than Wolves and doesn’t have the Frenzy Howl that Wolves do, the damage nodes are all over the place (why would someone want Cold + Lightning damage?), and the AoE doesn’t justify giving up the bonuses other pets have.

Bears are in a weird spot. You can invest 13 points (more than half) into Health + Armor, but the nodes are wasted when you’re righting anything but Physical enemies. Bear’s tree wants you to invest in it casting at far range when its real purpose is taunting and bringing enemies to it.

Sabertooth and Raptor are definitely the highest-performing pets so far. For DoT builds, I run Wolves, Sabertooth, Raptor, and Spriggan and I’m incredibly pleased with its performance. Spriggan’s healing aura is great when you invest a few nodes in it - it definitely helps soak up the little hits that come while the pets whittle down large packs.

For defenses, it sucks that Beastmaster has access to very few defensive skill / node options outside of Dodge. My Beastmaster is going for large Health and Health regen while taking 100% Glancing Blow and simply dodging the more telegraphed moves.

Once I have access to some sort of character editor, I’d love to explore more of the Partner - one companion options. The most common one is Wearbear with Spriggan, and Bear is a nice option to have for this as well, but I’d like to see how Sabertooth or Scorpion can handle this sort of task. An option I’d like to try once the game comes out is Raptor / Frenzy Totem / Eterra’s Blessing / Flanking Strike / Swipe or some other Melee ability that focuses on Bleed.

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Thanks for the constructive feedback, @Tree.

We’ll be discussing some of these points during a meeting sometime next week. :slightly_smiling_face:

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i have nearly 100% crit on my companions. Tested on 3 different beast masters. I pretty much only see yellow numbers. Make sure to max the crit nodes on the character tree and companion trees.
Right now spriggan is only useful for healing and a small damage buff. Even with 70 or so attunement and a ton of minion damage they do maybe 75 dmg a hit

yeah i agree with you life and armour nodes are a waste of time grab the crit and damage nodes at the top of the tree ignore everything else. Between the crit damage (with mediocre stats they were criting 15-25k with a lot of leech no need for other sources of sustain or protection

seems i need to make a guide for beast master too…

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Lets bring math into this:

  • There is one node in all of the Primalist trees that have Minion Crit damage, and it provides a 100% increase for 10 nodes.
  • Both Sabertooth and Raptor have 150% - 160% Crit increase by selecting their crit nodes. Raptor has 100% more Crit chance on bleeding targets.
  • There is no node that provides added Crit chance to pets. Frenzy Totem doesn’t increase Crit chance for pets either.
  • The only source of increased minion crit in gear is the 34% that comes from the amulet.
  • That means that with Raptor, the highest crit minion in the game, its crit chance comes to 5% * 3.95 * 2 = roughly 40% against bleeding targets, with Sabertooth having half that.

I’m not seeing where it is possible to get nearly 100% on minions, even with everything maxed out. Beside the point, if the only worthy skill nodes to take are the max Crit + damage nodes, they would certainly be adjusted as the devs don’t want a Golden path where 75% of the nodes are completely obsolete. My bet is that the design is more of a active summoner that uses heals and other survivability methods to keep pets alive than simply “max damage and max leech,” and I’m sure that will come out in their node balancing and path design.

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i dont go based on math, i go based off what i can see. And what i see is A LOT of yellow numbers. But no one is making you follow my guide :slight_smile: i’ve played 3 beast masters and my opinions you have yours. Doesn’t de-value my post.

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If you can figure out how a 20% chance of crit based off of Last Epoch’s mechanics translates into nearly 100% crit chance based on “what you can see,” it would be worthy of posting and demonstrating to the devs for balancing. Maybe some of the “increased Crit” passive or skill nodes are actually “added Crit” nodes? Who knows? If you’re not willing to bother going into the mechanics and figuring out the nuances of min-maxing for optimal damage and survivability, what would the point be to your “guide?”

Based off the other class guides I’ve seen from other players, 100% Crit chance + All Leech nodes + 100% Glancing Blow provides everything a build can ask for - regardless of which class or style you play, making 75-90% of all the other passive nodes, equipment choices and skill choices / nodes out there completely obsolete. Not exactly a recipe for a successful long-term metagame.

I’d focus less on spam-botting the forums with build’s you aped off of other people’s work without bothering to attribute to them at all (like how your Druid is a carbon-copy of
Magatti’s Druid Werebear and your Acolyte Lich is likely stolen from Squeezeboxe’s Low-Life Sacrifice Lich) and focus more on providing ideas for the developers to focus on as they prepare for release where a much larger audience who hasn’t played the game before may be more appreciative to random leveling guides and paint-by-numbers builds. I’m much more interested in discussions that help bring the other 75-90% of options in this game capable of competing with the simple “max damage max leech” builds.

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what are you talking about!? I’ve personally made these builds testing as i play with them. As evident on the leader board and on my streams. I don’t understand the personal attack? Lot’s of people have found my guides useful and found enjoyment in them. I was also specifically asked for those guides, I had no intention of making them before that. I wanted to play werebear so i made it work. I wanted to play lich and i tested every skill and only sacrifice did any damage. Seeing as most of the lich nodes consume health the only viable defense option was Ensang…

EDIT: You know if you don’t like my info I provide feel free to ignore it :). Just wrote down some info based on my experience playing the game. I had 6 different people ask for advice on the pet build i was playing like “why did you choose X pet over X pet” so i wrote it out for them to have access to the info. I’m not sure what the big deal is?

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Attacking the OP is quite odd. It is bad form. I like reading other people’s opinions.

Nuances and min-maxing seem fruitless in Beta, so claiming that this is the only way to provide a guide post is simply not true.

This I find insightful, at least. I hope the Devs take note. Investing in defence should provide players with actual rewards, so I don’t begrudge glancing blow being powerful, but other options should at least do something. Likewise, crit builds don’t need to be nerfed, but for the power they provide, players could at least be asked to give up something, or to have some synergy to their build to get that power, rather than stacking anything at all. Leech just needs flat out hard nerfing. Leech being too powerful makes balance impossible, and a narrow oneshot /clearspeed /thoughtless meta inevitable.

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to be fair ONLY werebear can max crit so easily. All other classes/builds struggle. Especially spells. Only builds that can use poelarms can even get 100% crit and using a 2h is in-itself a sacrifice, with the way the game is currently. As for life leech and GB you want them nerfed or the other forms of defense such as dodge brought up to its level? Don’t forget gb is only 50% damage reduction while have 80% dodge or 100% block provides more surviverabilty. Lich and some sorcs use pure ward and don’t even use GB, just massive amounts of flat EHP. Nerfing all those would not be an improvement imo. Only life based non ward/block/dodge builds use GB. So at most 40% of builds. The problem imo seems to be that the classes that have some innate defense, in this case block/high res (werebear), out perform GB. I’m willing to bet a lot of those on the LB have less than 60% GB> As for masteries such as shaman or BM they have no way of getting defenses other than GB. Dodge is currently unrealistic because for what ever reason BM is str based instead of dex based meaning you can’t stack dodge w/o sacrificing damage to the point where you would still have low dodge and no damage. So in short GB is at best a place-holder until mechanics are fine-tuned or re-worked. Pure res/def is currently underwhelming (again except werebear) , dodge requires too much investment, as for LL there is no other self sustain in the game other than exsang ward builds or heal on block. So any class that can’t build ward using exsang or isnt a sentinel heal on block build there is no other self sustain. Healing skill require giving up one of your limited skill bar slots and health regen is again underwhelming. So while you may be right crit/GB are “too op” they are required. Again I also want to re-iterate only werebear uses 100% crit all other builds can’t pass 50% or have better options. Lots of people are playing DOT builds atm and those can’t even use crit.

EDIT: Please provide other examples of 100% crit 100% LL 100% GB on any build other than werebear. I’m genuinely curios because i want to play it lol.

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Hey guys, I haven’t read all of the posts in here yet but I just want to remind you all to keep it civil. It’s totally fine to disagree and express your opinions.

Edit: I’m really liking what the ladder is doing now that it’s working better. We’re starting to see a fledgling meta form. We were aware that werebear was very strong going in to this patch. We may have underestimated it a bit. We really want to make sure that it stays fun without it being too over the top.

(Disclaimer: The numbers below are hypothetical and just to illustrate a general philosophy and not exact values that will be used)
Our general philosophy regarding balancing and nerfs is that if a build is 50% stronger than anything else, it’s too strong and needs to be brought back down to earth. However, many players will have invested time and energy in to creating this character that is supposed to be very strong. We will probably nerf it down to say 5% stronger than everything else. This might seem extreme but it would still be the best build out there. Now, ideally we would never have any builds that are the clear outright winners but it’s bound to happen. We will attempt to restrict balance changes to the time between cycles whenever possible.

We are going to nerf werebear. It’s already happened on our development branch. We’re testing to see how it feels and I can say that it’s still really good. We are also looking to bring up some of the other classes that might be struggling a little bit cough sorc cough. It is still beta and we’re still creating entirely new systems and learning things about our current systems so things are bound to shake up in interesting ways as we move forward.

I love reading these discussion threads and I hope to see many more :smile:
Thanks for playing our game.

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Yeah knew the nerf was coming. Definitely is my favorite build and ill be happy as long as perma-bear will still be possible even if it has less damage and surviverabilty.

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With less dmg AND less survivability there is no reason to pick Werebear over Sentinel. For example if they half the crit bonuses from Werebear you’ll have a rough time because it kills you offence, your defence and your uptime. If they nerf the passive or tank nodes that offsets the downside of beeing tied to the polearm pretty much. Dmg reduction for the abilitys seem to be the best way from my point of view to still have a tanky fella that takes longer to kill stuff like it was intended I think.
Well time to wait for the next patchnotes then because it pretty much sounds like it’s “Go Sentinel or go home!” time again ^^.

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The only thing that worries me about perma bear is if that is even an option with the devs vision of the class. One of the perks of Druid is the damage reduction after coming out of shape change . Plus wearbear appears to be balanced around it being transient.

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Mike confirmed that they are working on making transforming more fluent sometime in the future as well as adding a 3rd form.

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And he said that perma bear will still be a thing as well or better said perma one form.

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Still Sentinel or bust though. They just do everything so well compared to anything else. They do seem to be the favored class for sure.

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i dont go based on math, i go based off what i can see. And what i see is A LOT of yellow numbers. But no one is making you follow my guide :slight_smile: i’ve played 3 beast masters and my opinions you have yours. Doesn’t de-value my post.

Pretty sure I am replying to this incorrectly, I don’t post often. Though I hope you can consider this without thinking it’s a personal attack. I think online it’s hard to tell the context or the tone of some replies.

I can’t say for sure, but I don’t think Tree was attacking you, but was definitely calling out your claim of “100%” crit. I know that you backpedaled and said it’s not 100%, but I must say that it bothers me to make a statement of “going from what you can see”.

If what you see, doesn’t make sense math wise, then that’s fine; but it needs to be addressed. Example, “My pet’s only have a crit of 40% on paper, but all I see are crits.”. A comment like this is much more useful, as long as there is follow up.

Why are you only seeing crits? Is there a mistake in the UI, making crits overlap non crits for displaying all of the numbers? Is there a mistake with one of the nodes, giving base crit where it shouldn’t? Is it intended for crit to be so high, or clearly a bug?

These things are important, and I can’t disagree with Grimlock9999 more. Why is nuances and min maxing fruitless, just because we are in beta? If anything, it’s MORE important that this shit gets sorted out now. Not so that we can find an OP build, but so that we can be confident the mechanics actually work as intended… You know… Kinda like how we are all testing the game for the developers… How is now not the time to figure this stuff out?

I find it frustrating that there is so little information about the game, and then on the forums, where we should all be working together to figure this stuff out, instead I’m seeing fanboyisms already. I get it, you guys like this game, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a mess, that a ton of stuff clearly isn’t working as intended.

We should be all working together to find these inconsistencies, and when someone calls you out and says this math doesn’t add up, that should be a good thing. But instead it looks like that logical thinker was the one attacked.

I think the point of this thread was to discuss pets. It got derailed, but I’d like to see that conversation start over. Is there anything you can add about the difference in crit from on paper as to on screen? This is the information that I feel all of us would like to see.

I don’t have any character other than a paladin, so I can’t add to the conversation, but just from playing that one class, there are clearly bugs and things not working. I don’t feel that a guide can be written about inconsistencies without at least addressing them.

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I have written more about Beastmaster pets over in this thread. I want to give a more clearer vision of how each of the pet skills synergize with each other and how to give the Beastmaster a more unique style of play. What I am not a fan of is the style of “let’s just take all the max damage, max crit, max leech nodes and aim for #5 on the ladder.” Funneling players toward a single optimized route without considering any of the other nodes will be disastrous for the long-term health, as either the game is balanced around the one optimized route which leaves 75% of the other skill nodes as completely worthless, or the optimized route gets nerfed to the ground and nobody bothers with testing the other nodes.

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not that any of that matters… BM wont be on the LB any time soon. This post was to answer the people who are always asking “what does each pet do” clearly says “IT IS NOT A GUIDE” and yet I got people telling me my “guide” is wrong lmfao