Beastmaster - Red headed step child?

[Spifnar]

To get back to the main point of the thread, BM is an amazing support soul for several things:

1) Bonds: no-brainer group buffs that stack with bard buffs

2) +10% armor for party. This is very nice for the tank
2a) -x% damage for the target. Based on # of bleeds. Anyone know if this works on bosses? Seems OP because a BM can stack 4-5 bleeds up, which would result in -20-25% damage!

3) +10% damage for whole party
3a) +5% damage taken on a single target

A single warrior can only have #2 or #3 up at one time. But by themselves, they are so powerful I'd think that any 10 or 20 man would benefit from 2 BMs in the party.

[Isara]

I did some theory crafting with BM as sub-spec for pet dps and support, check out the build in this thread and let me know what you guys think. http://forums.riftgame.com/showthrea...049-Build-idea

[Phylo]

To get back to the main point of the thread, BM is an amazing support soul for several things:

1) Bonds: no-brainer group buffs that stack with bard buffs

2) +10% armor for party. This is very nice for the tank
2a) -x% damage for the target. Based on # of bleeds. Anyone know if this works on bosses? Seems OP because a BM can stack 4-5 bleeds up, which would result in -20-25% damage!

3) +10% damage for whole party
3a) +5% damage taken on a single target

A single warrior can only have #2 or #3 up at one time. But by themselves, they are so powerful I'd think that any 10 or 20 man would benefit from 2 BMs in the party.

2) that was beta, the protective buff is a flat amount of armor now.

3) Also patched from beta, it's 5% with a messed up tooltip, spell description and buff description conflict.

Other than that ya, amazing class

[Crassius]

i currently play bm offspec to my main paragon

only problem im seeing is that alot of talents in their tree are wasted space

talent breakdown:

natural instincts (5) - 10% bonus bringing fierce strike from 20% to 30%, this talent is lacking because pet dmg is tiny to begin with

backhanded blow (1) - at the moment its just filler, i think they wanted this to be BM's go to move but its not, just too weak

agile footwork (5) - 50% movement speed debuff duration, gives nothing to PvE at all, wasted points and wasted space

improved protective instincts (3) - while protective instincts is nice to prevent a surprise atk the reduce stun duration follows suit with agile footwork, another pvp talent we dont need for PvE

primal senses (3) - why do we need 3 more wasted points on stealth detection when we already have our pet doing that for us?

ties that bind (3) - 30% pet health increase, not very important because the pets hardly gets aggro on average fight

thats 20 points in the tree that either need vast improvement / total reworking

I currently play BM/Champ solo spec and I have to disagree with two of your points:

• natural instincts - every bit counts and 10% is not nothing, especially if you run "enraged companion". it also helps the pet keep aggro better with "protective companion".
• ties that bind - i took this up as well because sometimes you get jumped by mobs and are suddenly surrounded and I like to run the "protective companion" alot to minimize down-time and switch aggro holder. so if you're soloing and get in a tight spot its pretty good to NOT have your pet die on you. and yes the pet gets aggro and keeps it until the mobs almost dead if you run "prot.companion", even if you hit like a truck from the champion spec. just start your fights with buffing your pet damage ("mark of inevitability"-champ tree, "fierce strike"), helping it keep aggro for abit longer.

i can't comment on backhanded blow, as I havent picked it up yet (no idea how it scales), but I'll agree with you on the rest. then again, there aren't alot of classes that have only useful stuff. I found none so far.

[Phylo]

• natural instincts - every bit counts and 10% is not nothing, especially if you run "enraged companion". it also helps the pet keep aggro better with "protective companion".

Yep, at lvl 46 questing, i had a parser urning the entire time, the pet, in aggressive, averaged 60 dps. And i was right around 230-240. Putting the pet just around 25% of my current damage (and i have 5 points into it, and try to have the target constantly debuffed with it)

• ties that bind - i took this up as well because sometimes you get jumped by mobs and are suddenly surrounded and I like to run the "protective companion" alot to minimize down-time and switch aggro holder. so if you're soloing and get in a tight spot its pretty good to NOT have your pet die on you. and yes the pet gets aggro and keeps it until the mobs almost dead if you run "prot.companion", even if you hit like a truck from the champion spec. just start your fights with buffing your pet damage ("mark of inevitability"-champ tree, "fierce strike"), helping it keep aggro for abit longer.

i can't comment on backhanded blow, as I havent picked it up yet (no idea how it scales), but I'll agree with you on the rest. then again, there aren't alot of classes that have only useful stuff. I found none so far.

Depending on how you spec, if your pet dies you loose 16% of your own damage, + the pet dsp 25% of your damage. So yes, an alive pet = happy warrior/group.

My Tearing slash (single target finisher) is nearly breaking 1k on a crit. we'll call it 950.
My Backhanded blow's are right around 850 on a Crit (when you add both entries together)

Scales well enough for 1 point ability, off GCD, absolutly no reason not to take it.

Edit:
Wow i just found a way to compeltly break the froum thread

[rebel9884]

OP here, I just played a few hours specced BM/Champ and BM/RB and I was entirely underwhelmed. In fact, watching my lvl 35 greater cat fight was a joke, even with all the buffs he could get he would occasionally hit for 78. I kept waiting for it to crit and trigger some sort of frenzy where he would shred through ****, instead I had to check combat logs several times to see if he was actually doing damage.

As for using cat for a third soul, I will be taking voidknight for %5 spell absorb every time over the cat for sure.


Edit: The healing was pathetic. I thought it would scale with your lvl but nope, it's like 120hp on a 10 sec cd for 30 energy.

I'm curious to know where your points were spent in the BM tree. If you're not putting points to increase your pets dmg, then it will probably be lack-luster. But if you do have all the points filled in to increase it's dmg then you might have an argument.

[Krodd_Mandoon]

I'm curious to know why nobody put points into the tier 1 talent set "Natural Instincts"?
It's an extra 10% damage bonus from Fierce Strike...every time you use it.

I do just fine with dps as BM, using a two handed Spear (haven't found an axe that can be the Titan's Toothpick yet).

My BM Build

I don't have any issues with this. The pet and I both do damned good damage (when I want the pet to do damage, that is).

I harped on BM being full of fail at the start too, during day 1 of head start. Then I realized that I hadn't trained my abilities yet (from the trainer) and was using just the rank 1 skills. But ever since correcting that mistake, this BM build has a slot on my role bar.

The thing with BM in groups is you want to use the BM Finishers over the Champ Finishers if it's a group of mobs and not single target...that last Finisher in my build is an aoe bleed, which is great for helping to get down packs of mobs. If you're on a boss, use the Champ Finisher (or rotate between that and the bleed for more BHB damage on BM).

All in all the class is designed well, although I admit it would be nice to get some buffs on it so it wasn't so..."passive". A frency/berserk type of skill would be awesome, especially on a BM who's had his pet killed.

I made a mage the other night as Elementalist and...wow do the pets sure suck! Earth Elemental doesn't survive more than one mob before having to wait for it's health to get to 100%. It wasn't until I got farther in the spec to take -% damage to him and put points in Chloromancer so that he would heal while fighting. Haven't tried Necro yet but it seems like they made each pet class drastically different...except for the fact that they all have pets.