I made a comment similar to [MENTION=67296]Laurefindel[/MENTION]'s
I think it would improve the beastmaster because it would show the baseline power of the pet if it belonged to the party's rogue, and then we could all actually see how the beastmaster's pet-related features are improvements to the pet, and by just how much.
Plus, it'd be clear that you don't have to be a beastmaster to have a pet.
This exactly,
If it had been made clear that only intelligent creatures (INT 5 and up) act on their own turn and have their own actions, but that animals...
a) act on their master's turn
b) require that their master take an action to command them anything else than movement (possibly with an animal handling check)
...then the beastmaster's feature would immediately look more impressive. Otherwise, we can only compare the animal companion to a familiar or a summoned creature, both of which look superior to the animal companion.
I think your solution there Laurefindel is bad on a few levels.
My biggest is wondering if you have thought through saying all creatures with an intelligence of less than 5 are unable to take actions. Because as soon as you do that, you might as well delete quite a few iconic creatures from the Monster Manual. A rule such as that would be completely unsustainable.
And follow this by what it would look like for a DM designing an encounter. Let us say, a handful of Orcs in the mountains with pair of Dire Wolves they use for hunting. Not a terribly unreasonable encounter, but suddenly, if a DM is to be fair, their must be two orcs whose sole job is to command the Wolves to take their actions. And if the orcs are killed off, the wolves only option is to run away, because they suddenly can no longer fight.
Heck, a classic "pit trap filled with snakes" would be completely harmless, because the snakes cannot attack if their is no one to tell them to attack.
This is actually a big reason why the PHB Beastmaster is so nonsensical to some people, because clearly beasts can and do attack people, and yet being a "beastmaster" makes your companion unable to act on their own in combat, while Adventure Paths are still written with monsters commanding beasts to fight, and those beasts acting entirely independently of any control.
...
0.1% of 13.75 million is only 13,750 people.
Sorry, bad math moment. Wrote .1% and then did the math for 10%. That was entirely my bad.
These would probably be among the 10% of fans in 2015 who decided the ranger was underpowered. A percentage that has only gone down. But said 10% would also include people who never liked the ranger and would be unhappy with any implementation of the class and people who don’t like rangers who casts spells and won’t be happy with any spellcaster rangers.
So, the percentage that might play a variant range is inherently <10%
But this is also a potential audience. They *might* play a ranger if it’s changed. But they also might not. And it’s favouring them instead of the people actually playing a ranger, who may not play an altered ranger.
I don't know where you got the number 10% of fans in 2015, I also don't like your phrasing on how they "decided" the ranger was underpowered, as though it was a nearly arbitrary choice.
The numbers I thought we were working off of are the current number of players, and the current number of players playing Rangers, but now you are talking about a group of players from 3 years ago. So, we are assuming that people's opinions haven't changed, that more people have gotten upset with the ranger, that the sentiments of those people have not spread?
I will grant you, no fix will ever be perfect, there is no silver bullet, but just because we can't fix everything doesn't mean we shouldn't try to fix anything.
Apparently less than the people who play the other four classes less popular than the ranger.
Shouldn’t those be a higher focus?
(It’s almost as if most players care about other factors than inherent class power.)
You are completely right, we should focus on them as well.
Which classes are they, why are they unpopular, what kinds of things could we do to fix them if there are legitimate problems.
Because, I think if you've been following the discussion on the Ranger you would find that a large part of the complaint is how the theme does not match the mechanics and it is far too backwards in how it approaches the beast companion. Yes, there is a mechanical argument as well about the power of the sub-class, but no solution proposed would beat out a Fighter armed with a Flametongue, or a Paladin's Smite damage Spikes or any of the other highest tiers of inherent class power.
Trying to dismiss the concerns brought out as power gaming nonsense doesn't work when the problem is not limited to how weak the beast is, but instead extends into the action economy disaster of the their implementation and how it doesn't reflect the reality of how DMs use beasts in their own encounter.
That’s not a useful statement.
How many people are satisfied with any class but would really like it to be a bit more powerful? I don’t think anyone would complain about more power.
Well... players who are primarily concerned about combat power at least. Which is not everyone.
Plus, it’s not like the ranger class is bottom of the power rankings. It has the lowest ranked subclass, but others subclasses do just fine.
And there is always going to be a subclass at the bottom. You could double the power level of the beast master and people would just find the next lowest subclass and gripe about that instead. Trying to balance all subclasses is and endless task.
It isn't a matter of who is at the bottom. At least, not to me. And it isn't all about combat power either.
A Beastmaster is fully outclassed in utility by any person who takes the Find Familiar Ritual spell. The Familiar has a telepathic link, you can see through it's eyes, it can be turned into any type of small animal that might be useful so that it can fly one day as a sparrow scouting the forest and sneak into the a bar as a rat the next, it can deliver touch spells and it has it's own initiative and takes it's own actions. This actually means there is a potential argument that Find Familiar is more useful in combat than a beast master's companion as well, since it can take the Help action to grant advantage to an ally.
The Beastmaster get's their companion 2 levels after someone can get Find Familiar, and it is far inferior as a utility option. An entire sub-class has half of it's potential usefulness outclassed by a single spell (Half because we are splitting Exploration and Combat, there are few pertinent ways to use either in Social situations).
This isn't the slippery slope of "Now the Champion does 3.5 less DPR per day than the lowest class, so we need to buff them up followed by the Paladin who then falls behind on a per week basis" This is a severe mechanical problem.
Anecdotes are what they are, I understand that, but I have yet to hold a conversation with someone outside of this website who thinks the Beastmaster Ranger is perfectly fine. In just these past two weeks I've had a player in Dischord deride another player for choosing a Ranger (because they are too weak) and a conversation in the GiTP forums were again most people giving advice on the Beastmaster were urging the player to pick an entirely different class.
But I think the core of it comes to me right here.
We don’t know the full numbers. But WotC does. And they decided that the ratio of unhappy fans in 2015 was worth doing something about, but the ratio of unhappy fans in 2017 and 2018 changes the dynamic and was not worth doing something about.
Yes, the totally number of unhappy fans has not changed, but the number of happy fans has grown substantially, and the ratio is different.
So because WoTC dragged it's feet we don't have a problem anymore? That is an absurdity to me.
CEO: "We devote ourselves to solving this problem"
Staff: "Sir, we just gained ten million new players, that changes our dissatisfaction rating to less than 30%"
CEO: "Great, no need to fix those problems then"
I understand, they are a business, they need to make money, and therefore they should only care about 55% of their audience because then they get to keep being successful. But, honestly, they don't need to even print anything new. The only part about JC's tweet (the one that started this whole thread) that truly upsets me is not acknowledging that for some players, the Revised Ranger is their Ranger of choice.
"Due to shifts in the player base we are no longer going to devote resources to working on the Revised Ranger, but it is still available for those who prefer to use it." would have been received a lot better by me personally, instead we got dismissed. There was never a problem, despite their research saying there was a problem and their solution only fueled the illusion of a problem, so they are glad to kill it off and move on.
*sarcastic rant*
Well, at least now I know, can't just sit around and wait for them to finish any of the projects they started. Player base might change and they decide it isn't worth it anymore. Want a better version of the Mystic, contact them constantly about doing it now, because if you wait a year, more people might join the game who aren't aware of the mystic and the percentage of people looking forward to it will drop beneath levels worth bothering about. I mean, we all want the game to grow and expand and reach new audiences so they can share in our love for this game, but we've got to make sure everything gets fixed first, that way the new players won't skew things so that WoTC shuts down and stops producing the content we want now. /End Sarcastic Rant
