Hi! I'm currently ranked 74th on the NA Beastmaster Crucible rankings, and I wanted to share my thoughts on Beastmaster. I only bring up my rank to establish that I am at least baseline competent at this job and have engaged enough with the content to be able to clear Third Degree boards.
I have many issues with the way the Beastmaster content is currently designed. For the most part, I have had fun with it in spite of that, but I don't think that playing the boards on third degree is particularly fun. I've split this into my three big issues, and some smaller nitpicks I have.
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I have many issues with the way the Beastmaster content is currently designed. For the most part, I have had fun with it in spite of that, but I don't think that playing the boards on third degree is particularly fun. I've split this into my three big issues, and some smaller nitpicks I have.
- On the whole, the Beastmaster rotation is somehow both opaque and confusing while being very dull. The 1-2-3 rotation with very little else to do is not super interesting for a dps class when playing at a lower skill level, but at a higher level, the way the cooldowns work is finnicky and confusing.
- The tooltips especially are so long and confusing and have so many proper nouns that it's very hard to parse what any of it is even saying.
- That one quest early on should not tell you to do red into red. It should at least tell you to do red into blue, or green into red, to get you understanding how the wheel works.
- The level 50 quest that just has you sit there doing your basic combo repeatedly with your beast to build up universality teaches the wrong way to play the job. You should not be doing a 1-2 combo three times to build up to a slightly stronger universality combo, but instead, you should be trying to do a longer combo that does more damage overall in a shorter time. Also, it's really boring. Put me in an instance with some crucible feathers or something, please.
- Once you understand the rotation and know how to do things, it's admittedly fun to figure out a 5-6 hit combo and do a 40% of a boss's health in a single hit.
- It really should not be a 6s timer between colors. It's genuinely way too tight. I can do it consistently, but in situations where you need to be doing mechanics during a combo, or pushing other OGCDs to get the TP in the first place, it's frustrating to lose a combo to the timer. A lot of the randomness in these boss patterns also means you sometimes get disrupted in a way that doesn't feel fun. Also I have good ping, and doing these tight combos with a worse connection sounds miserable. I don't think it'd be a big deal to shift it up to, say, 8, or even 10.
- Something about the way universality works needs to change. It honestly kind of just doesn't happen very often. At a low level, it takes way too much time, and on a high level, most fights just don't take that long. It's faster to just use rally and cheer at one stack to go around the wheel faster than it is to build all the way up to three. It feels lame that your level 50 capstone skill so rarely comes up.
- On the first three boards, I was still having fun figuring out beast compositions and strategies to beat the third degree bosses. I stopped having fun once I got to the master boards.
- The sheer amount of health and damage Lauda and Borgny have feels overtuned to the point where you either need to be a top 1% player or get lucky in the run to beat them. I would really like it if the unavoidable damage was toned down, even if the avoidable damage was increased to compensate.
- I've beaten both of them several times, I just don't think these fights are fun. There's probably a lot of people who can't beat them and won't even want to engage with the content. It's just too much.
- I love roguelikes and have hundreds of hours in them, and in my opinion, the crucible is a very poor approximation of a roguelike.
- The decisions between pieces of gear are very surface level. Some gear gives damage, and some gear gives defense, but it's almost all just a flat percentage upside of a different type.
- There are some items that give an upside and a downside (Thunder Axe, Demonic Helm, etc) and you can take those speculatively, you can buy both it and the item that cancels the downside if they're both there, or you just don't buy it. This isn't a particularly interesting decision either. It's a simple flowchart of "If X, then Y."
- For the most part, what actually affects a run isn't your decisions, but variance. If none of the shops drop Breathtaker on MB2, Borgny will be way harder. If I never see an axe in any rewards or a shop, my damage will probably be too low to beat third degree Lauda. Variance and random chance are not inherently bad, and are the crux of what makes most roguelikes work, but pure randomness has a much larger effect here compared to any actual decisions you're making.
- Beyond the decisions not being interesting, the biggest problem is that none of the decisions you make affect the gameplay in a meaningful way. Regardless of if you have -45% damage reduction or if you have a huge crit rate, the actual rotation you do rarely ever changes. The only items that do change your rotation are crucible feather, the TP refresh items, and hero's crown, and those mostly just affect when or how you do the same combo you'd be doing anyway.
- I don't know how I'd solve this issue. To be honest, with how busy the team is, it feels like the content very much bit off more than it could chew here. Given that I would be shocked if cbu3 had the time to spend precariously balancing and playtesting a well-thought-out and interesting roguelike, especially with Evercold coming up, I would rather the next set of Beastmaster content abandons the roguelike concept entirely in favor of static encounters, instead of reusing the half-baked version we have here.
a) Pet Actions
- The scholar mains I know who I told "your rotation is based on pet actions and pet auto attack timings" died on the spot when I said this.
- There's a lot of inconsistency in when you push a pet action vs when they actually execute it. This comes up most often with Trick and pet placement. For Trick especially, this makes the 6s timer feel really bad.
- It'd be nice if there was an item you could get with the remnants that can give a level to a beast. That way, if you go through all the content with a smaller group of beasts, it's less tedious to raise the rest up to max level.
- It's frustrating the wall in the Crucible isn't a kill wall for when I want to reset. If it's an issue with difficulty for the lower level content, consider making the arena wall scale to be "more difficult" with higher degrees and turn it into an instant-kill wall.
- The sheer degree to which these two are unbalanced makes me concerned what playtesting looked like for this content.
- Either all the borrow actions should be as strong as scaleskin, or scaleskin should be changed.
- I also don't know what we fed this crab to make it so strong, but I'd like if there was more than one option for this kind of effect if it's going to stay this way.
- On my usual path through MB2, going Drake into Dirge means two fights in a row (on third degree) that involve stalling out the boss, either for regen to run out or for your cooldowns to refresh. I think it'd be good if the design team tried to make this kind of strategy less common in future encounters.
- A lot of 3-beast clears I see online involve kiting the boss a lot in order to save health by avoiding auto-attacks. Maybe this is okay to have as a really high-level optimization, but I don't find it to be particularly fun, especially over the multiple runs the Crucible rankings ask of you.
- I also question the design decision of encouraging people to bring fewer beasts for a higher score, because it goes against the core job fantasy of being a Beastmaster. I want to use all my beasts and their different abilities, not the same three over and over.
- I think it'd be fun to instead reward the player for using three different beasts every fight. This way, even if a beast is over-centralizing, like crab, you have a reason to not use it for every battle.
- Every time one of my beasts autos the bomb I'm hitting away from the hole I'm trying to knock it into, I die a little inside.
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