I hope you had the chance to take a breather from the Shaman thread (and by that, I mean I hope you actually read the Shaman thread), because now I want to discuss the Beastmaster mastery. In short, I really like it. My Word Document containing feedback is only half of that of the Shaman thread, and that’s with nearly every Companion covered here.
The post-Mastery tree is littered with animal Aspects, and each of them are extremely well-designed and build-defining. These are heavy-investment nodes done right, as they’re powerful enough to make each node worth investing into, while also ensuring that a build has to fully invest in the concept and can’t just dabble in picking from every Aspect.
Each companion has its own flavor (though some skill trees are much more thought-out than others), and the player has a good variety in choosing how many companions would fit that particular build. You have your mix of swarming pets (wolves & crows, maybe Scorpion if you include the babies), some pets that are better mixed with other pets (spriggans & wolves providing flat Crit chance to your remaining companions), and some minions that would rather be alone (raptors, roar). As this mastery leans on the companions more than the other Primalist masteries, any quips I have regarding minions will be found here.
MINION DODGE
It’s listed in the Beastmaster tree, it’s listed as an equipment affix, and it’s on nearly every companion skill. I’m not exactly calling it a waste… but with the premium of passive points and skill points we have, when would we invest in minion dodge that we wouldn’t want to invest in more attack damage or more health? Comparing companions to the player character: they’ll have a lot more health, so one-shots are not a danger. They could do a lot of damage, and their leech is formidable, so they can withstand smaller hits okay as well. The best use of minion dodge is when there’s the 10 explosions on the same screen that can break down even the sturdiest of builds, and I can see why minion dodge would be valuable there, as dodging 2 out of 10 big explosions can be the difference between a living companion and a downed one.
That being said, it’s hard to really quantify how much minion dodge would contribute to a build’s functionality, especially as the affix competes with both minion health and minion damage (not to mention attributes like Strength and Attunement that both benefit the player as well as give specific bonuses to the companion skills themselves). As for the skill nodes, if the nodes that grant dodge rating are out of the way, why invest points in getting them when you can grab nodes that are either damage multipliers or grant new functionalities? If the nodes are part of the main path, then they feel like a waste.
It just never feels good to invest in minion dodge, and unless you can convert the dodge rating to something else (like Foot of the Mountain converts Dodge Rating to Endurance Threshold, which seems pretty good when the player is issuing commands and doesn’t need to be in constant movement) or if the companions can do an action like Sabertooth’s Fury Swipes when they dodge, I don’t see any way you can salvage this stat.
MINION HEALING
For some reason, you can invest 22 passive points (that’s roughly 1/5 of the total passive points you get, for those keeping score) specifically for minion healing. And all of it is found in the Druid tree, which makes sense because that’s where the Spriggan skills are, but if you’re putting the points there, they’re not advancing the Beastmaster tree where all the goodies are.
Eterra’s Blessing is the main focus for player healing, and I’m assuming the main sources for minion healing are either healing totems (which unless you’re in Spriggan form are very rare to come across) or the Spriggan’s Aura itself. Yeah, there are nodes that increase the healing effectiveness and are designed to combo with the passive investment, but it raises the question of why make so much investment when you can just invest in damage? There are Adorned idols that grant increased minion healing effectiveness, but I don’t see any apparent synergies that mesh well with it.
This is another case where you don’t really feel the investment and the build doesn’t feel particularly stronger if you have these investments, and people aren’t going to like builds where they don’t feel an immediate effect.
FIXES
I’ll list the general fixes in this first post, as you’ll see my complaints throughout the companions post, and outside of that, there’s not too much I can specify in the ways that I pointed out specifically in the Shaman thread.
I’ll give praise where praise is due: the passive tree is very good, and it provides hefty bonuses that give each level-up a real impact. What it does well, it does really well, but what it does poorly, it’s simply a disaster. It’s hard to recommend specific fixes as various skill trees just need to be thrown into the trash and be given an influx of fresh ideas. There are plenty of items that mesh well with certain build concepts, though I really wish there are more Fire synergies to make good use of the Hakar’s Phoenix Axe.
There are some good interactions between the Primalist’s Melee skills (War Cry with Berserk, Swipe Aspect of the Panther, Gathering Storm with the Cold Friends of the Tempest fixed now, Storm Crows having various bonuses when you land a melee strike). There are a few interactions with spells (Entangling Roots providing crit chance and spell damage being the main one), but the companion sub-skills that are not related to their main abilities (Scorpion’s Lightning Nova, Sabertooth’s cold spells, you can even put Caster Bear in here) need to be updated to better gel with Shaman’s or Druid’s core abilities. As an example, Swarmblade’s Dive attack allows you to use a Companion ability, but outside of Cold Raven’s Frostbite Crowstorm, what companion do you actually want to use with Swarmblade? There may be companion spells, but so much relies on the Shaman update that it’s impossible to tell what the vision for Shaman companions is going to be.