God help us, its a BST thread

Taryth

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We had a server meeting recently and one of the things to come out of that was that we absolutely have to look at BSTs, because they seem to be adrift right now. This thread is to collect WORKABLE ideas on how to make that happen.

A few ground rules:

1. This thread is about BSTs only! If you want to say "well MAGs should have this too" or something, fine, but this is not the place. BST. Only.

2. I am going to heavily moderate this thread because I need a good signal to noise ratio. Don't be offended, but at the same time realize this is not going to be a useful venue to complain in. We want potential solutions, not just gripes. Be prepared to have your post unceremoniously deleted, sorry.

3. We are NOT looking to make the kind of massive changes that MNKs got. So before anyone starts panicking about that, know that's not the goal.

4. Just because it's said on here doesn't mean it WILL happen (even if I say it) - these are ideas at this point

5. There are a few guiding principles folks should keep in mind as we build suggestions:
- This is not going to simply be an "add 20% to attacks/spell damage/whatever" kind of solution. We want something more clever and in-line with what the class should be.
- We'd ideally like the class to be much more tied to its pet, that's sort of the whole point
- When making suggestions, you need to make sure you're taking into account balance in solo, group AND raid situations. This is really hard!
- We're not going to fundamentally change what it means to be a BST. You're not suddenly going to be on par with an SK for tanking, or a wiz for damage.
- Realize that, if we add in one area, we might have to subtract in another. For example, we may trade some amount of utility for more power or something (just an example, I'm not suggesting this will happen)

Have at it. Be respectful, and be on-topic. If folks want to paste GOOD suggestions from other threads, that will save me time.
 
First topic - considering making pets ignore WW/PS/etc. damage, and possibly AE. Individual fights can and will be coded to bypass this ability, but the general rule would be your pet would not take this sort of damage.
 
First topic - considering making pets ignore WW/PS/etc. damage, and possibly AE. Individual fights can and will be coded to bypass this ability, but the general rule would be your pet would not take this sort of damage.
Just this alone would be rather huge for bsts to be able to use their R1 on a lot of high end raid content and screw with my target closest npc button.
 
Making pets ignore WW/PS and other AE damage would be a huge buff to beastlords. It would improve their ability to keep their pet alive in 6man/raid settings, but in casual EXP/duo/solo it would be relatively unaffected. As far as I understand, pet survivability is a problem for BST in a raid, particularly swarm pets. On a side note, beastlord companion health 8 focus greatly limits their itemization, essentially forcing them into using certain items and is overall unhealthy to the class (beastlord weapon options are pretty terrible for a long time too but that can be discussed later)

Could also make the Spirit of Tearing buff proc add a debuff that makes the monster more likely to be critically hit, because as far as I understand the current Tearing proc is a very minor DPS increase, and some beast don't even consider it as a real option. Also, if beast had a spell like sublimate soul (Debuff on the mob, when it attacks you it can proc a raidwide heal) but for mana instead could be pretty useful, as well as fitting in with the whole SBliss/paragon mana regen thing they have going.

Giving the runic 1 swarm pets more survivability would be a huge boon to BST dps, as on most fights the swarm pets will die, giving nearly 0 dps or utility for a spell that cost nearly 1000 mana. Beastlord DoTs should also be looked at, currently they are very slow casting for a hybrid, as well as doing poor damage, meaning that when you cast DoTs it gimps your already bad melee dps. Beastlord DoTs should be changed to .5-1 second cast time to be closer to ranger spells, and have their damage/mana cost looked at as well. If BST spells became a larger portion of their damage, it promotes a more active play style, as well as helping the current scaling issues that beastlords have, as spell DPS scales very well with gear, tomes, charm, and refuge elemental damage augs.

Allowing beastlord pets to mimic the spells that the beastlord cast a percentage of the time would be pretty cool as well (I think this was in another thread). It would tie the beastlord to their pet in a way that is more engaging then /pet attack.
DISCLAIMER: I do not play a beastlord, have never played a beastlord (outside of parsing with kjiel in a relatively controlled setting) and have no intentions of ever playing a beastlord. My opinion on the class is based purely off of my time raiding with them and carrying them in 6 man, as well as my general knowledge of the game.
 
Using this post to gather status items:

- Pets ignore WW/PS (under consideration)
- Pets ignore AE (under consideration)
- CH8 itemization (likely)
- Spirit of Tearing debuff for crit hits
- Sublimate soul-style functionality
- DoT cast speeds
- Stance to have pet mimic owner spells (under consideration)
 
A suggestion I saw in another thread a while back, was giving BST's a few spells of their own that diverged a bit from the Shaman spell lines they pick up and tailoring them a little more for beastlords
 
Need something more specific if you have it Marthog. I think there's going to be a fair amount of pushback on giving them MORE utility given that their pets will become more of a focus, but if we have specific things to look at, we can at least think on it.
 
Unfortunately I don't, I'm not familiar enough with BST mechanics to make a more specific suggestion, but when I heard others discussing the matter previously, it seemed like a good idea to me, so I wanted it mentioned here. I'm sure others can generate specifics tho.
 
Having played a beastlord to 65 and playing Others beastlords on and off, beastlords always felt like they had a laundry list of problems. I don’t feel like I’m really qualified to address the high tier beastlord’s concerns, but I feel like I can take a pretty big stab at the issues that plague the class throughout tiers 1-9. All information is based on parses I did several months ago when goon squad reformed. This was before the hand to hand scaling changes, so im not sure how exact these things still are.

Let’s start with the beastlord DoTs. These had three two problems when I parsed them months ago.
  1. Damage per Cast Time (DPCT). The largest problem with beastlord dots in my testing was the amount of damage they did relative to their cast times was very poor. Venom of the Wild was the only dot that parsed being worth using over just auto attacking. Rage of the Wild was basically dps neutral, but the mana cost made it a dps loss in the long run. Plague was just a straight dps loss.
  2. Mana cost. Beastlord mana pools are quite small until high tiers, and their spells cost quite a lot of mana. I know this is a normal hybrid problem, but beastlords have always seemed to have it the worse. You can cast ~10 dots/nukes before being oom at low tiers, which always seemed really bad for a class who’s supposed to get a reasonable portion of their dps from spells. Exacerbating this was the fact your dot damage just isn’t good enough without using the nuke to increase the dot damage.
Those are the widespread problems I found with the spells. But even other things stuck out to me. Mostly the fact that until level ~61 beastlords have one DoT line, the poison line, then both Plague and Rage of the wild just magically appear over the next few levels. Why? This never made any sense to me whatsoever. It always felt like they should of had another DoT line of some sort from 1-65 that culminated in a DoT actually worth casting, rather than two dots that felt haphazardly tacked on.


Harsh winter/Bitter cold feel similarly tacked on. It always felt odd that the beastlord dots were super weak, but then you got a spell that costs a lot of mana to make them slightly better. It always seemed awkward and kind of out of place to me.

Suggestions on fixing this:

First and Foremost give beastlords their own line of disease dots. Fast casting, long duration, reasonable damage, Culminating in dot that replaces plague.

Remove rage of the wild from the game. This spell doesn’t really fit for beastlords.

Scales the dots so their damage/dpct is reasonable without the current Harsh Winter/Bitter Cold Mechanic.

Remove the Current Harsh Winter/Bitter Cold mechanic. Replace the current buff with some sort of debuff that increases pet dps. This gives you a way to make pet dps beefier without it just being making the pet better passively. My suggestion: Harsh Winter/Bitter cold Cause the Infected Wounds debuff on the enemy, increasing damage done by your pet by 20% (Harsh Winter)/25%(Bitter Cold)for each dot that you have cast on the target (40%/50% total)

I’ll probably make another post about Bst Buffs, but that comes later!
 
Consider adding a new pet spell (suggested in other threads consistently). While I feel from personal experience that the 63 pet could use a tweaking, getting the pet to the level of stop gap before runic 2 (relic level?) would probably cause balance issues.

Through the leveling process the BST pet goes through a wax and wane cycle. Stronger than you for a level or two when its new, then on par for 4 levels, then weaker than you for one or two levels, then new pet and restart cycle. It just seemed to me that once you got to the 63 pet it was just... flat? Every other pet before it felt like a noticeable upgrade over the one previous but after 55 the most noticeable thing about the lvl 63 pet is that it can get the good magician toys.

I know that the pre 65 game is fairly linear and increases in monster difficulty are mostly through size of pull or potentially type of monster (enchanters for example... fucking paw) where as the post 65 game is a far more dramatic curve where difficulty can be adjusted in a number of different way.

Other ideas:

While 2 bst dots are up on a target the pet will do increased DPS vs the target?

Spirit of tearing becomes a "stacking" armor/resist debuff? -20 ac and -5 all saves per "stack" intensifying up to 5 or 10 "stacks"
 
Making the swarm pets immune to WW/Phantom/AE/Whatever would make them huge dps on a lot of fights. Making the main pet survive fights easier is a good idea but applying it to the swarm pets would create some issues I think. The swarm pets currently are amazing on some fights, decent on others, and useless or hugely mana inefficient on the rest. If the horrible BST DOT situation is remedied, it would further reduce the number of fights that the swarm pets are used on. Maybe the swarm pets should be reworked into something other than what they are currently, since buffed DOTs would basically supplant the swarm pets on most fights.

I believe the spell ID situation was resolved, right? So reworking BST DOTs throughout the levels with their own line should be doable. Faster cast times with some sort of pet secondary effect seem like it would be a good fit.

Also Savagery requiring a peridot is dumb and should be changed.
 
Some ideas along the lines of making BST more about... beasty things.

Shape of the Beast: Ability which allows BST and pet to merge as a temporary(?) buff. BST cannot cast spells but gains physical prowess. Can be clicked off to spit pet back out. Variation: Ala Marthog's suggestion, a self-only line of spells that (1) make the BST look like their pet, (2) combines several of the SHM buff spells, and (3) prevents spell casting, (4) procs a reverse cannibalize --mana into hp-- which hits both BST and pet.

Bestial Affliction: Have BST DoTs summon swarm pets, similar to druid dots with bees. E.g., snakes for the poison line, rats for the disease line, bears for rage of the wild, etc. Also change recourse from the cold DD line to a melee proc which summons pet arctic wolves (functions like Yclist rat bracer).

Spiritual Mending: On any pet death, swarm or otherwise, give a chance to recover X mana/hp.

Vengeance of the Wild: Kind of like GDB, only instead of a chance to resurrect, it infuses the person who died with 'a wild spirit' - and they have 15 seconds of revenge in the form of a spirit wolf.

Add Affliction and Scourge (disease dots between sicken and plague) to BST spell list.
 
If you want the pet to be more tied to the class you're going to have to increase pet survivability first of all. A beast lord's pet should either gain a permanent inventory for gear even if it dies, or it needs to get 100%(75%+the pet tomes?)of the armour and resists that the beastlord has. This is the only way to make it scale in tank with the beastlord.

Once this is done then we can start having some fun with the tag team idea. Here are a few off the top of my head.

1) Venomous assault. Target: pet, duration 1 tick, cast time 0.5 seconds. The description could be something like "The beastlord instructs their pet to poison its target through the open wounds the beastlord creates. The more physical damage done by the beastlord during the spells duration, the more poison is applied"

The idea is that the poison dot will do a % of the physical damage done during that tick the spell is on the pet. So if the BST does a total of 600 damage and the spell does 20% then the poison dot will hit for 120 damage per tick for X number of ticks.

2) Aid of the Wild. Target: pet, duration 3 ticks?, cast time 0.5 seconds. "The beastlord's pet is imbued with healing powers. While this spell is active the pet will heal itself or the beastlord(or a group?)"

3) Howl of battle. Target: self+pet, duration of spell+recourse 3 ticks?, cast time 0.5 seconds. The beastlord and their pet each feed from the other's battle call. The beastlord gains DPS dependent on the health of the pet, and the pet gains DPS dependent on the BL's health.
 
A beast lord's pet should either gain a permanent inventory for gear even if it dies, or it needs to get 100%(75%+the pet tomes?)of the armour and resists that the beastlord has. This is the only way to make it scale in tank with the beastlord.

These are way too much. A permanent inventory is nuts, you'd have to nerf a crazy amount of pet gear (or atleast make some of it no rent or something, if that's even possible) to make it balanced, or every pet would eventually resemble a spiky jumble of animation weapons (or similar). As for AC/resists, the current pet has little mitigation as I understand it, but a good stack of HP. Giving it the beastlords AC/resists ontop of that makes it nearly as good as any tank of a similar tier, if not better. It'd be like having a tank/healer duo, with one character.

A permanent inventory is kinda a cool idea, because you'd have more inventory slots to hunt down and gear up, but I feel like that idea would've needed to be in place at the get-go, not added into the class/game at this point in time.
 
It will still have significantly less AC than a tank, no skills for mitigation, and no tome/AA mitigations. I don't think it would come anywhere near a real tank, but if this is something that is a concern nerf the life. Mitigation is more important anyways.
 
I'm fairly sure that Moraelin was talking about damage that cannot be mitigated, which typically appears in raid zones later on, meaning that having the mitigation of the BST while lowering total HPs would actually decrease the survivability of the pet (in that circumstance). I feel like the idea that pets could dodge/mitigate things like WWs and PS is a better solution overall than playing with the ratio of mitigation to HP of the pet.

As another idea, another pet spell between 65 and R2 would be cool, I think that putting it in the murk village would be appropriate as there are other class specific quests there (IE mage silks) and it'd be a neat part of exploring a new environment and the spirits/animals therein.
 
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So I'm new. I can't talk too much about what's wrong with beastlords at the high end in SoD. I did play the retail version for quite a while and so that's where these observations are coming from. So here's some opinions that may be worth exactly the cost of the digital ink to print them.

Speaking as Ye Olde Mage from the retail version, balancing pet power vs character power looked to be extremely difficult.
If AoE or rampage ate your pet, you were gimped.
If your pet survived, you were still behind the wizard.
After the raid, when you soloed something that ate said Wizard there were calls for nerfs. (meanwhile the necro was laughing up his sleeve).

So I wouldn't tie more DPS to the pet. Lore, fluff, and utility, sure. I love what SoD does with the mage pets. Perhaps try to emulate those flavor choices with the pet proc buffs (spirit of...)

As an analogy, I read the thread about knights getting the 2H damage style. Seemed like a trade off that could work here. Perhaps a set of pet buff's that add a -hate modifer, -AC, but also add +pet resists, +pet weapon proc chance (more runeguard proc's).

Add one that grants whirlwind for AoE events. Or a PBAOE. That might be amusing. Spirit of Swipe? AKA my pet's dead again?
Add one that proc's a slow? I know it's mitigated harshly, and redundant, but put it on the list.
ATK or AC Debuff for more group utility?


Maybe add something like combat teamwork. New styles?
Flanking team. If both the BST and the PET are meleeing the same target, but neither is tanking or aux tanking, add crit chance.
Defensive team. If both the BST and PET are meleeing the same target, and both are either on the tank or aux tank list, add increased mitigation (block chance).
Allow the beastlord to /shield his pet?


There's a few thoughts. Enjoy.
 
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Caveat: I'm not yet a beastlord on SoD, but I played one on the retail game for some time and have been interested in making one on SoD. I don't know the state of the endgame beastlord, so be aware that I'm spitballing here.

My opinion:
As Outlander Engine suggested above, positional stuff based on both the master and the pet is good imo. It's something I really wished the retail game had explored more when I played there. In general, since BST is the only class in the game that is a melee bruiser fighting alongside a melee bruiser pet, I tend to think that mechanics which make use of this "Gemini melee attack potential" will tend to feel rewarding to play with. I like the idea of the skill interactions varying when the BST and the pet are on different targets or attacking the same target from diffeing angles.

A specific set of suggestions I will make is that if the Beastlord performs Kick on a mob, have the pet also perform a special attack at the same time. Have the exact nature of this attack differ depending on:

-Whether the pet is attacking the same target the BST kicked, or a different one.
-What side of its target the pet is on.
-What side of the target the BST is on (if they're on the same target).

For example:

Master and pet attacking same mob:
Both BST and pet attacking the rear of the same mob:
-Passively increased crit chance for both master and pet.
-Kicking causes the pet to perform a mini-backstab attack.

BST at front of mob and pet behind same mob:
-Passively enhance's master's avoidance or mitigation in some way.
-Kicking causes the pet to perform a stunning pounce that generates additional threat (to help with peeling aggro off the beastlord).

Pet in front of mob and BST behind same mob:
-Passively enhance's pet's avoidance or mitigation in some way.
-Kicking causes the pet to auto-dodge the next single incoming melee swing and reduces its threat (to help with strategic aggro ping-pong).

Both BST and pet at front of same mob:
-Passively, both master and pet have significantly enhanced strikethrough (chance to avoid being parried/dodged/riposted).
-Kicking causes the pet to "go for the face," boosting pet's Aux effectiveness or otherwise inhibiting the mob's attacks.

Master and pet attacking different mobs within standard spellcasting range and line of sight of one another:
Master in front of master's target, pet in front of pet's target.
-No passive benefit.
-Kicking causes the pet to "go for the face," boosting pet's Aux effectiveness or otherwise inhibiting the mob's attacks.

Master behind master's target, pet in front of pet's target.
-No passive benefit.
-Kicking causes the pet to "go for the face," boosting pet's Aux effectiveness or otherwise inhibiting the mob's attacks.

Master in front of master's target, pet behind pet's target.
-No passive benefit.
-Kicking causes the pet to perform a mini-backstab attack.

Master behind master's target, pet behind pet's target.
-No passive benefit.
-Kicking causes the pet to perform a mini-backstab attack.

These could be tinkered with any number of ways and made either more or less complicated at the devs' discretion, but I listed things out to demonstrate the level of nuance it could bring to BST fighting.

Other suggestions:
-At all times, as long as BST and pet they are within /shield distance of each other, the warder takes 50% less damage from AoE DDs, and the BST has no rear arc (enemy never behind the beastlord).

-Situate BST styles in such a way that there's a recurring theme of each style having the same type of effect on both the BST and the warder, and/or complimentary opposite effects from one another.

-If attempting to salvage DoTs, consider adding a synergistic pair of spells where a short-term proc buff on the pet will frequently trigger a bleeding DoT on the pet's target, and then allow the master to exploit that DoT via another spell (e.g. a disease DoT that deals much more damage on targets suffering from the pet's bleed, the idea being that the open wound dealt by the warder festers rapidly from the BST's curse). (This might be able to interestingly replace the DoT-synergy combos that currently exist for the class, and get numbers tweaked at the same time to make it more useful to actually do.)

-For beastlord-specific DD spells, consider forking the effects in such a way that part of the spell's damage comes from the BST onto the BST's target, and part of it originates from the warder onto the warder's target.

Those are my thoughts. Feel free to tear the suggestions up and rebuild them at your discretion!
 
Woot, a BST discussion, finally!!!! Wall of text starts now...

First: Bst stances suck, plain and simple. They need a complete revamp. As they stand now, you might as well never leave /S2, the rest are that bad. I recall using /S4 while leveling solo (to pass aggro to pet), but stopped using that by the 50's. /S7 used to be good, but that was nerfed to shit. Stance 5 cost too much stamina, iirc, for the marginal boost, and /S6 I never even touched. If the class is to be a melee with a super pet focus, then perhaps reworking stances to make them synergize better. A stance to boost pet mitigation and aggro, for soloing, for example. Another stance that reduces pet aggro/mitigation, while boosting its dps (for groups/raids). Make these low stamina costs. And a worthwhile dps stance for the bst would be great, perhaps similar to the knight 2 hander style (w/o the weapon limit). Boosted damage and melee proc rate, for mitigation loss and a moderate stamina cost.

Second: As mentioned already, BST dot spells need severe improvements to be made useful. They mostly have slow casts and high mana costs. The disease dot is so slow of a cast, I could go get a beer while waiting on it to finish. As mentioned already, they need quick casts, to not cost us our marginal melee dps. Both Rage of the wild (magic splurt) and Plague (disease) are singles adding in late in leveling, and seem out of place as is. Either flesh out the lines, or just replace them, imo. Something like this from the other thread:
I feel like you should be casting your dots on top of you swarm pets, and not your swarm pets just replacing them on 70% of fights as soon as you get them.

My thoughts:

Reduce the cost of runic 1 by 33%.

Increase venom of the wild's damage by 50% and reduces its mana cost by 25% reduce cast time by .5 seconds. New Stats:
1 Sec Cast
Mana Cost 380
163 initial damage
318 damage per tick

Remove plague and sicken from the beastlord. Remove Rage of the wild because splurts dont really belong on a beastlord. Replace with a new disease dot line that starts at level 15, and goes up to 65, all vendor sold.

Final rank being something along the lines of:

Rabies
Mana Cost 500
9 Ticks, 1 second cast time.
100 Initial Damage
200 Damage/tick.

and bitter cold could probably use a decrease in cast time from 2.0 to 1.0 as well.

Third: The cold nuke dot enhancer needs to be fleshed out more, as it stands, we only get 2 spells for it. level 59, and then at 65 from refuge. Reduce the mana cost on these slightly, remove all those shammy cold nukes, and the 30second recast nukes, and flesh out this line across the leveling life of the BST. So it becomes more of a standard boost, instead of an "oh yeah, here have this too" thing.

Fourth: The rest of the spells....
Mana costs need reduction across the board, we don't have the mana a pure caster has, but we often have spells of similar (or greater) cost. And often for far less effect. Runic 1, swarm pet, is especially guilty and in need of a cost reduction.
As mentioned in the other thread, maybe some new beast spells that are melee range, varied element damage, quick casts. If they left a stacking debuff, then they could be worth the typical mana costs.
Perhaps flesh out the fleeting fury spell line into a self/pet only buff line, that spans all the levels. Make it a dps variant of the yaulp line, in effect.
Remove the peridot cost from Savagery. It is just an annoyance, not a limitation.
Make spirit of tearing a valid alternative to soothing, the debuff is so minor, it is worthless at the point you get the spell. Buff the proc damage, the debuff amount, or make the debuff it casts stack with itself.
Group acumen, seriously, why hasn't this happened yet?
An upgrade to Sha's ferocity, that we get at 59, as part of our level 65 spells.
Fix the buff durations on the pet buffs, please. Ferocity and Keshuval's Protection have a base of 1 hour only, but soothing/tearing last 2 hours. Please make the base of all of them 2 hours at least. If you'd make the base even longer, me lub you long time!

Fifth: Pets.
Pet scaling is terrible. As you are leveling, the pet is a beast (no pun intended), easily capable of tanking a mob while you kill another. Trying that at 65 will often leave you with no pet and two mobs beating you down until you ranger gate. The only idea I have to help it to scale better, is that it gains a base percent of its masters' hp, ac, and resists, and then an incremental % based on AA's earned. Like 1% every 100 or 200 aa's earned, numbers would need tweaking so that it helps the lower tier beastlords, but so that it doesn't get over the top for the over t9000 beastlords (if there is any these days). This concept could help all pet classes in general with scaling. Of course, this assumes the pets base stats are of a decent level to begin with.
As many people mentioned, a pet of relic quality for the beastlord, earned through a quest in murk, or given perhaps by the lich lady from the MQ. This could perhaps require drops from mid-tier dungeons, raids and 6-mans to accomplish. Though if the scaling I suggested were implemented, it might not be needed.
The runic2 pet needs some boosting, not perhaps to its prior level, but somewhere above where it is at now.
Expand the pet tome lines, please.

First topic - considering making pets ignore WW/PS/etc. damage, and possibly AE. Individual fights can and will be coded to bypass this ability, but the general rule would be your pet would not take this sort of damage.
Would this affect the main pet, the swarm pets, or both? Ignoring aoe would be awesome, as it is one of the biggest pet killers I can recall once you hit the mid tiers (and up) of raiding. Just afraid that might be OP. Also:

*snip*
- Realize that, if we add in one area, we might have to subtract in another. For example, we may trade some amount of utility for more power or something (just an example, I'm not suggesting this will happen)

I am not trying to be rude, but what utility do you think we have now that we can lose? We have Vigor (most want SSS anyways, except ranger/rogue in my experience), Bliss (one of the few buffs other classes want, mana regen yum), Savagery (two targets max), and Wrath/Cunning (one group only). We also have sow/bih'li, single target acumen, pet haste collar, and group shrink, all of which are situational at best. Then we have a crappy haste spell, a crappy debuff spell, and a couple of slows... all of which others can do far better, and are quickly over-written if those classes are present. So I am unsure what you can subtract for these boosts, or even why the class that is buried beneath the barrel (we aren't even good enough to be at the bottom) should lose anything to be made relevant finally.
 
This is an exciting topic to be seriously discussed. Our class needs some real love.

At lower tiers mana cost is indeed a huge problem. However once you've passed T5 or 6, mana cost is less of an issue and the bigger problem is the horrid damage that our nukes and dots actually do and worse yet the loss of our already not-great melee DPS from casting spells. They scale terribly and rather than get a mana cost reduction (save swarm pets), I feel like a 60%ish increase in all base spells damage is more warranted, in addition to a spell cast time reduction will make a nice improvement. I would like to see all the beastlord venom dot line and harsh winter/bitter cold line cast time changed to .5

As for stances, I agree with @darksabbath that most stances are not in any way useful. /s 2 all the time. /s 5 takes WAY too much stamina, especially when you never know if you need to save some for /s 7 cuz you have to tank halfway through an encounter. I could see /s 4 hate transfer being useful if it INCREASED hate generation, considering how bad our pets tankability is currently, I hate putting mobs on my pet.

I disagree however that stance 7 in its current form is "broken". I like that I can share my damage taken with my pet, and also the reverse. Especially if improvements to pet scaling/tankability is on the table. I can see where this stance would increase in usefulness. It also maintains the lore that my character is bound to the pet I chose from my guild master. I don't think this should revert or change.

My biggest issue and what I think to be the reason Beastlords suffer from low dps is the inability to double attack... We don't get this skill and we get treated differently than every other melee class when it comes to the double attack AA (Melee Mastery) in that we get a "small chance" to have an additional attack with our primary hand only.. Whether it be a client issue or something else, I never understood why a majority melee class does not receive this skill. It could easily be resolved by changing the melee mastery AA... Our PETS get double attack for cripes sake!
 
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