Beastmaster needs few small QoL adjustments

Feedback and Suggestions
1

Companions and minions need to count as ‘you’ for the purpose of activating ‘on kill’ effects. This includes ‘Health on Kill’, the ‘Circle of Life’ passive node, etc… Currently, you render 33%+ of Beastmaster’s passive tree useless if you try and build around your companions doing the combat because you can’t activate aspect of the shark unless you kill/hit things yourself. This is also not an obvious interaction as in most games kills by pets count as your kills and activate on kill style effects.

I was very disappointed when I learned that my entire build concept was effectively not supported because of this interaction. Given that more than half of the primalist’s available skills and all but 1 of the beastmaster’s skills don’t count as you for these effects, this interaction as is seems overly restrictive. It actually has me wondering what the point of companion builds are supposed to be. In most ARPG games, you pick a skill to be your primary damage skill and then optimize around it with support skills and your items/passives. If you are supposed to optimize around your own hit damage in order to actually get the on kill effects to function, then what are the companions for?

At the very least, please add this interaction into the game guide so people that read it aren’t caught unawares when they build a companion based build.

As a side note, the frenzy totem skill node that gives a chance to cast eterra’s blessing every second does NOT inherit the effects of specializing on eterra’s blessing either. This is also not intuitive at all and irritating to find out after you build around it. This feels like a bug since every other skill I’ve used that mentions using another skill in its tree inherits the effects of that other skill’s tree as expected. If this is intended behavior it needs to be explicitly stated.

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There are 2 different nodes that can grant you Aspect of the Shark, the one you mentioned and also “Ambush”, which grants you guaranteed Aspect of the Shark for 3 seconds with a 5sec cooldown, when hitting with a melee skill. This is also the branch, that gives you companions the effect of aspect of the shark and also increases the duration, which you can bring to over 5seconds, to make it permanent.

I don’t think minions should count for on kill or on hit affects, as “being you”.

But there should be definitely better support for BM hybrid playstyle, where you AND your minions want to do dmg. This playstyle is not very much supported and not endgame viable, since all the minion affixes compete with player stats.

With the recent addition of minion “shared stats” with the Rogue’s Ballista, where you can give you ballista a % chance of your ailment chance, crit chance or damage i have hopes, that Beastmaster as a whole gets a slightly overhaul.

The mechanic, that some of your player stats affect your companions seems very fitting for Beastmaster (and maybe also for the bigger nercomancer summons).
I would like to see some shard base stats as mastery bonus with the possiblitly to futher invest into that in the passive tree somewhere at the very top, to make it BM exclusive.

I am pretty sure, that this is not intended. Basically every skill within anotehr ksills skill spec tree uses their respective skill spec tree, unless specifically stated otherwise (for example for Meteor, within Black Holes skill tree)

EDIT: And btw, welcome to the LE Forum!

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Aspect of the shark, is a hybrid buff for both you and your companions and I believe it was designed so you run a hybrid build, where you attack with your companions and that’s why its on YOUR hit/kill. In its current form you would be able to get way to many stacks if on companion hit/kill you could also gain stacks.

Aspect of the lynx can be activated just using a minion ability where you don’t have to fight and can just stand behind your minions. If you don’t want to be in the fight I recommend building around lynx

Aspect of the viper is on any “hit” so you can build a ranged build using ice thorns or avalanche from afar and letting your pets do good DOT damage

Aspect of boar can be activated WHEN hit by melee but also on MELEE hit you do. Honestly since this only buffs you and not your companions it should be build this way and only activated when YOUR are fighting.

Honestly I think they did a good job building this tree, its the best tree in the game in my opinion and it lets you diversify your build in many ways. you have

Hybrid, melee, ranged, and hide all in one passive tree with lots of support.

Companions have very strong interactions, there are MANY ways to build them, however this game does have certain restrictions and you wont always be able to build exactly what you want, but if you study the passive tree and the companions skill trees you will find many builds that will be viable and one will be close to what you want. I’m sure more possibilities will be added In the future.

this is a bug, its been posted a few times, not sure when it will be fixed, its been a few patches
but it should use your specialized skill tree.

There are endgame viable builds that are hybrid melee companion builds that allow you and your companions high survivability and can do all game content.

I will have a build up tomorrow showcasing a hybrid melee build with 6 wolves. Not a single wolf, died all the way to 150 waves in the arena and they can even stand in logan’s beam.

The build is based around aspect of the Lynx and massive companion melee leech.

Defintely +1 this. There should be a lot more “Hybrid” affixes for minion builds. IM actually surprised this far into beta they haven’t added any other than for the specific chest helm primalist shared melee/spell damage. There should be shared weapon affixes such as
+4 life on hit
+4 minion life on hit

and for other gear slots
+12% elemental resist
+12% companions elemental resist.

Perhaps on 60-70% as strong as a specific “For you” affix they should be added.

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Apart from minions, which is what totems are…

I also wouldn’t want minion stats to buff the player, but nodes in the minion trees to grant them a % of your stats would be fine.

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@Llama8 you still asleep lol fix your post

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That’s doing stuff on phones for you…

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I don’t doubt that is isn’t possible entirely.

But still it’s just something that is generally not very well supported.
And needs crazy investment to work smoothly and does not feel clunky, because either the companion dies all the time or you doing not enough dmg.

Besides my suggested "shared companion affixes, any “life on hit” for you and/or your companion would be awesome.

Both ways around would be cool:“Companion give YOU X health on hit” OR “You give comapnions X health on hit”

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Oh yes, just more options in general that are more viable that what we have currently is all good.

I’ll never be against more types of affixes or more supported types of builds, sometimes though I feel people miss out on a lot of builds that are currently viable.

I feel that if the statement:

Then this is more of a problem needing to balance stats of affixes than it is the passive tree/skills.

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Thanks for the warm welcome everyone!

For context, I am still playing through the campaign on my beastmaster. (I’m currently playing through the campaign on each mastery to try them out before experimenting with endgame builds) When I looked through the beastmaster passive tree, I incorrectly assumed that anything killed by a companion or totem would count as your kill, so I planned out a build where my pack of wolves would be combined with my thorn totems for DoT damage and I added in a buffed eterra’s blessing and frenzy totem to the mix to support that.

It was only after I got to around level 40ish that I realized that things didn’t work the way I expected at all. My build was far less supported than it first seemed as I had no way to activate aspect of the shark or aspect of the viper with my setup. Add to that the bug with eterra’s blessing and fenzy totem and you get a recipe for dismay. If this had been my first character it would have left an extremely bad first impression and may have led me to drop this game. Fortunately, this is my 7th character, so I understand that I can rework the build around a different playstyle and move on.

The main reason I wanted to give feedback is to avoid this issue for new players by making things either more supportive for this playstyle (my initial thought on letting them count as you for on kill effects) or at the very least making it far more obvious that this playstyle isn’t supported and you shouldn’t waste your time with it. I like this game a lot and would hate to see people drop it from a bad first impression that could be avoided.

I fully admit that I have 0 endgame experience so my initial suggestion may not be balanced at all. I defer to the experts on that. Thanks for the assistance!

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Its good feedback and theres alot of text descriptions that could definitely use a touch up that would lead to less confusion.

If your still working on that build and wanting shark I recommend swapping thorn totem for swipe if using any weapon besides polearm. If using a Polearm use serpent strike as its a mid range melee skill. If your wanting to go viper instead of shark swap it with ice thorns and hit things from decent range to proc viper

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