to begin, the Beastmaster wasn’t my first character choice in general, but was definitely the first primalist class i was interested in. i like pets.
my philosophy going into the primalist was pretty simple and straightforward: as many pets as fit on my bar is how many i will summon.
initially, of course, this was only the wolf and a cat, but once i had completed the story and done a bit of monolith grinding, i was sitting on 2 wolves, 1 cat, 1 raptor, 1 very large scorpion, 3 baby scorpions, and i felt inclined to go deep enough into the druid tree to put a spriggan behind them for support. and so it is the summons i will be primarily discussing in this primalist post.
the wolves: pretty useless on its own for damage, even after getting it to full build it was just a buff for the other pets, once i had two it was just two buffs for the other pets and more stacks of bleed to feed to my raptor, and poison just in general. also there seems to be a bit of desperation to make wolf pack an attractive option, since not only is there a talent for it, but 2 different unique necklaces that allow you to summon wolves up to your cap. while this was fine for me since i eventually got to the 6 pet cap, and therefore had an open slot, 6 wolves would never be better than the lowest amount of wolves possible and 4 of any other pet. an alternative to this passive would be: summon wolf now summons twice as many wolves (extra wolves not counting against pet cap) thus allowing 12 wolves, which would in fact be worthwhile.
the cat: nice damage, nice ability, pretty redundant talent options though. right off the main node you can give it’s melee attacks a 33% chance to bleed, but only 2 or so nodes south of that you can give its melee attacks… a 50% chance to bleed. I’m unsure how these stack, or if each attack has an individual 33 and 50% chance to apply two different stacks of bleed. it is unclear. also I’ll say it here: but all the talents that reduce the cooldown/ mana cost of summoning your pet is worthless, since they should have been summoned before you got into a fight, and if they die they get downed and aren’t re-summonable. a good alternative would be to just make it affect the cooldown/ mana cost of both their summon AND skill. if i could get free howls on half the cd, free swipes on half the CD, etc. it would certainly be a decision for me to labor over.
the raptor: definitely what any bleed related build has to focus on, but there needs to be more clarity on 2 things: what does 200% bleed chance mean, and can we make the evolved form look different so we can know if/ when it actually happened?
the scorpion: the baby scorpion tree has some redundancy in the talent that allows babies to be summoned on ability cast, as it doesn’t increase the cap and so does basically nothing after 30 seconds have passed from the time of summoning the big scorpion. also, the ironclad talent that gives 15 base physical damage but prevents the scorpion from applying poison needs to be more clear, as there is a beastmaster talent on the passive tree that gives all pets a 50% chance to poison on hit, and i need to know if this affects big scorpion or not with ironclad on.
The bear (and why i don’t use it): short form answer: it’s bleed build is mediocre, and i veiw the talent that turns it into a ranged pet as a huge nerf, as it puts more enemies outside of it’s taunt range, and makes it less likely to get hit in general, and therefore less retaliation triggers.
the spriggan (and why i do use it): it has an 80% damage buff aura for my other pets, keeps their health bars full at all times, and can do 200% more damage to bleeding targets (which is every target), no brainer option for a beastmaster build, but i wish i didn’t have to burn 15 points in the druid tree to get it (technically i only had to put 10 points, but the druids get a passive that boosts minion physical damage i.e bleeds, so i finished that off and played around with maybe being a spriggan myself, but that wasn’t nearly as good)
). I like the playstyle that much that I built a Minion Lich to try to get a similar flow going. But it’s not the same 