I played some Beastmaster in order to really see if it is as bad as people claim and it actually is! I managed to level really quick to 55 with pets from Arena waves 50+ it got way too slow even with what seemed to be the options and gear from my level 98 character.
The survivability can even somewhat a little bit worked around if you do enough Strength & Glancing Blow stacking but the main problem is - BASE CRITICAL STRIKES.
There are plenty of nodes in the passive and skill trees which increase the critical strikes but the investment is far from being worth it for any pet or build because it’s too low - a mere 5%! This alone makes all the critical strike nodes useless.
If you’d increase the base crit to 20 - 25% through passive tree / uniques or just by simply having it as the standard, the pets would be capable of hitting much more through armor and leech enough to survive. The crit nodes would be a viable build option then as well!
I see this as the easiest fix for Beastmaster.
The second minor detail I’d add on top of it is increasing the Leap’s range to as far as Lunge aka whole screen.
And of course having pets skills cast instantly. I’d understand the cast time if there would be no mana costs but there are!
Thanks for the suggestions; we’ll be discussing them during a future design meeting.
One thing I’d add is that the core fantasy of the Beastmaster is to be actively fighting alongside your pets. Their activatable abilities being insta-cast might better realize that fantasy, as opposed to interrupting you and potentially making it feel more like a tag team situation. We’ll discuss alternative constraints for these skills and see where that goes.
I definitely agree with the pet abilities being instant cast. Trying to use the pets as a supplement to a melee skill feels very clunky as you have to chose whether to keep attacking to leech/poison/buff for yourself or use pet abilities. Depending on your gearing, likely only one of those choices is correct.
Fighting along side your pet would be nice if that actually happened. Instead a grand majority of the time they run off on their own get swarmed and slaughtered before you can do anything. So again I ask for them to stay by our side and attack what we do unless given the command to attack something else.
