I feel like Beastmaster and his pets lack both functionality and maybe even survivability. So here are some thoughts I have for the future of the mastery.
Beginning thoughts about specific aspects of the mastery
I feel like the “downed” functionality could be improved on, either through the tree or by default.
Bear and its tree. It lacks some cool stuff, and it’s tree feels out of place with the caster route. I feel like it needs some more tank stuff and possibly some crowd control.
Pet commanding needs some more options to create and fiddle with tactics for your pets.
Thoughts on how to improve the specific aspects of the mastery
Downed: It could be improved by increasing the range at which you can revive your pet. I feel like the range is very small and you have to stay too close to the pet, which feels very punishing if you are a melee build especially. It isn’t as bad if you are a caster or also use totems.
There could even be nodes on the tree that further improved your stats, when you are reviving a pet from it’s downed state. Either giving you increased melee attack range, attack speed or increased dmg, or just a way to revive your pet faster. It does take a while if it happens, and since you are a pet down, which is often stronger than you, it feels really rough.
Bear: I would prefer to remove the whole caster route and do something completely different with it.
It could be changed into a super tank route, and have it be able to taunt or some way of generating threat.
An interesting point from Lonestar McFluffin was to have other pets that fight close to the bear have some sort of buff with better stats, and a way for them to stay close to the bear as a result.
Make it into a Polar Bear, and give it some cool crowd control options, like freeze and chill. Maybe make the roar ability freeze or chill nearby enemies.
Give the right side of the tree some more play around stun and or bleed.
Pet commander: The upcoming changes to the A command is certainly a nice improvement, and it’s needed to break boxes and for better focus of enemies. But I feel like it really needs some more, not just the A command, but pet focus and the ranges at which they attack.
At the moment they like to run off screen and attack, even before I know there are enemies incoming, so first of all I think the range at which the pets pick up a target should be decreased.
Furthermore I think there should be some kind of way to add tactics to the way you fight with your pets as a Beastmaster, you are afterall the leader of your pack of pets. That should be reflected in combat. I think it could be done with a pet bar to which there are a simpler version and an advanced version for.
Simple: Set all pets to be aggressive, or stay close to you until you attack or enemies come too close, which they will then attack.
Advanced: On each pet, there is a way to set them to aggressive or passive, but also determine what kind of enemy they target. Some pets could be set to focus on weaker enemies, like mages, or rangers, while other pets could be set to focus on tougher enemies like bosses or tanks. This would make it feel like you are working together with your pets, knowing their strengths and change how you fight with them.
I hope you all can see sense in my thoughts and suggestions, but these changes are something that I would love to see, to feel like a real Beastmaster.
I also hope this starts a discussion and that you all come up with ideas of your own, or improvements or critiques to mine.
Don’t you take away my caster bear!!! On a more serious note, these are great ideas, and to expand on the bear stuff, I think it would be especially cool, thematic, and add depth if the bear could become a true tank, something that pulls threat similar to how the bone golem can, but that will also be followed by other pets, allowing them to play more into the role of “DPS” while the bear is the tank. I think this would also fit the idea that you and your pets are a team, or even a “party” working together and filling different roles.
As we also talked about in McFluffin’s stream, instead of changing the bear to a Polar Bear, make it focused around earth, since we got the Ice Tiger already. So like rooting to stop enemies and stomping to create difficult terrain that would slow the enemy or something.
That sounds great! We discussed it further on the stream and found that since you are sacrificing a lot of affix slots for your pets, you yourself can end up becoming quite squishy, thereby losing the theme of going into melee battle with your pets.
I don’t feel it is as much an issue for the acolyte, since she gets so many pets to tank for her as well as different kinds of ward generation, leech, and health regen options.
To this point I think it would be nice if the wording on the second +1 companion node was changed so that you only have to do dmg of any kind and not just melee dmg for the negative part of the node to be undone.
Generally agree on all Points.
I started my first strengh primalist beastmaster a few days ago, and one Thing that I always found awkward is the hard split between minion stats and character stats, especially for the primalist. It’s fine on the acolyte as necromancers have ways to delegate their own activity to minion damage (Mages sacrificing wraiths you cast for example).
But for the primalist, where both (melee) shaman and beastmaster are supposed to fight alongside their minions, this becomes a bit awkward.
So first of all, I’d like to see Passive Nodes (on the tree or the pets) along the lines of “Minions/Companions gain X% of your physical damage increases” etc.
Still making pure pet stats more powerful, but giving you a meaningful Option to actually split up your stats between you and your companions. Much like strength/attunement does, scaling both your skills and your minions.
Apart of that, I mostly agree. An earth bear line seems most Logical, as we got lightning wolves and scorpion, frost tiger (and scorpion, does ice and lightning scorpion function together btw? It says nowhere that they cancel each other out), plant spriggan. And an earth/Stone bear would fit the tank theme quite well as well.
Instead of thorns it could retaliate with Tremors for example.
Next: The behaviour:
I suggested in the General Forum (as did many for a Long time) to include the Basic Aggressive, Defensive, Passive modes. Bonus for the additional selection ReimerhArts wrote up, as well as seperate modes per Pet.
The downed state I’m personally not too invested in, I have nothing against the revive being punishing as the Goal of a beastmaster should be to Keep their beasts alive in the first place
The additional companion node: Oh yes, very much would appreciate “If you hit an enemy recently” instead of melee hit.
Why? If a very combat experienced person trains a hamster the hamster didn’t get stronger. There could be a final tree node in beastmaster like “For every point spent in the Beastmaster tree the bond with your pets grow stronger. Your experience in animal training increase all your pets stats by 1% for each point spent in the tree”. I would love such “final” nodes to ofset some all over the place skilling. Sure it’s fun to have options but good end tree skills could lead to changes and a meta shift.
The AI is stupid as a brick nothing to add there. I hope for improvements for those who use pets.
Well, if I get my Memory wiped by a hypnotizer, I can’t “reskill” all my Memory “Points” either
Meaning: A Fantasy ARPG is the wrong place for logic
You actually went for the wording I’d add: Just as shamanistic bond makes wolves scale with attunement, I’d call those nodes something bond something.
“Nourishing Bond” (Pets gain your Health Regen)
“Bonded Rage” (Pets gain your damage) etc.
As for why, I wrote that above:
Primalists are supposed to fight alongside their pets, see all those “Pets gain X when you melee hit an enemy” nodes etc.
But Minion Stats and Character Stats being mutually exclusive on gear requires you to Focus on one or the other basically, as most nodes do already. Same with Skill Specs, most either have a Support line, or a damage line.
Has anyone successfully played a pet/personal-fighter hybrid yet? I believe you’ll quickly run into Problems that neither you nor your pets are strong enough (even together) if you split up your stats evenly among both.
Except that there are nodes that strengthens just you as well, or requires you to be in the thick of battle alongside your pets. Which is difficult when all your stats are dedicated to buffing your pets.
It’s just a personal Thing I’d test out if asked, based on my very limited experience of one beastmaster I SSF Leveled to ~lvl 40 I think. I wanted to create a pet/fighter hybrid that seems to be suggested based on the passives, but quickly found myself a bit…starved of stats to actually do both in a meaningful way, and thus made a pure pet build in the end where I’m just a buff bot for my pets.
Another option would be separate out minions (such as those from the acolyte) and companions further. Grim Dawn has some summons/minions that are explicitly player-scaling and don’t scale with minion bonuses. Companions could be reclassified to fit that, and then have their scaling with player stats adjusted.
Uniques that intend to be available for both types of builds could say “Minions and companions” instead of just minions for increases and such.
It would be quite a change, but it would create a larger difference between how you build a primalist and how you build an acolyte for summons. Another idea is to have a 1 pointer somewhere on the primalist (or beast master) passive tree that makes companions scale with player stats instead of minion stats (perhaps with some sort of drawback that makes the pets worse than they would be in a full pet-centric build). It would have a similar effect, but would allow a player to opt-in.
In my experience, the early game with a hybrid works fairly well, and it’s when moving toward the end game that stat contention forces you to hard commit to one or the other.
Uhm… I played my Druid first as a Beastmaster and I had 0 issues with a full pet build. Sure you run arround like a headless chicken and hope for no lost arrow that flys into your direction but my pets made fast work in killing everything. It was my first toon so completely ssf untill lvl 56 when I respecced to be a bear :D. As someone who hates petclasses and even more bad AI and as a mdium skilled player… I think anyone can do this better then I am able to ^^.
The sad thing about it is the feeling of beeing a backseat player while your pets do all the fun stuff and it’s easy to scale your pets to a point where they are freaking powerfull ^^.
Yeah, of Course you can do that, that’s not the issue.
I just don’t think the “Vision” of the beastmaster from a character concept Point of view was that it was supposed to be “Just another pet class”. We got various iterations of the Necromancer for that as well as the Pet Shaman. Now it’s totally fine that you CAN make a pure pet beastmaster, I just think that you should ALSO be able to build a beastmaster as something Close to 50/50 fighter/petmaster, as many nodes seems to suggest that this Option was planned by the devs. And I personally found that this is not really an Option later on, as you Need to Focus either on your own stats, or your minions’ stats, otherwise neither you nor your pets will be strong enough.
And my Suggestion of giving the beastmaster some Option to “Split off” some of his own stats towards his minions would maybe alleviate that issue and allow for this hybrid fighter/pet playstyle.
As in every arpg I can think of a 50/50 build is crap. You need to stick to something and pull it through. Sure there are more forgiving ARPGs out there where you can skill whatever you want or have some sets that press you into a certain playstyle without thinking about it for 5 seconds.
I realy get your point but freebe points for pets just because your class have pets is a slap in the face for every other class without pets. Scaling changes on the pet stats won’t do the trick either because if you increase them pure pet builds would be even stronger.
I still say a werbear druid build and pets don’t work so it would make sence to give him “no pet” nodes instead of “One pet” nodes but a lot of people see this differently. We simply have a lot of petclasses in this game as sad as it is.
I simply have no idea how you eyplain the step that somehow the beastmaster gets magicly benefits only because he’s a beastmaster, you need valid changes for totem shamans necros and every other build that has a pet in there. Even making some of the pet stats scale for the player would be hard to balance because at the end of the day this might lead to gear that has only petstats left on it.
Again I understand where you are coming from but I don’t see a valid option to make this possible. maybe someone else has some ideas because it’s an intresting point :).
Whatever they do, please make Beastmaster different from Necromancer.
I feel Necromancer is just a typical (and very effective) summoner build. You get all range mage, skeleton, rogue and even good, FAST moving tanks in Golem.
What about the Beasts? I don’t mind reviving them. I really don’t. The animals are your companions and they shouldn’t die and be resummoned like the skeletons.
They can start by making each Animal cool-down abilities much much stronger. Nova from Scorpion is kind of a joke now. Poison Nova is okay. Lightning Nova is a complete joke. And there is no Frost Nova or Fire Nova. It’s a shame because the Scorpion Boss enemy is like the coolest thing in this game.
Thorn Bear is probably the most effective route for Bear now but it looks kind of ridiculous. lol
The Wolves are the strongest for sure. They’ve got speed, damage and stacking buffs.
Sabretooth needs more damage or two Sabretooth.
There should be even more synergies between Beast and Master. I get jealous that Necro gets a Blood buff for the melee pets. It’s so simply and effective.
Beastmaster is a melee hybrid. part of survival is from the beast tanking for you and yet both Bear/Scorpion are like the slowest pets in the game… T_T
