Sword of Spirit
Legend
While this thread so far isn’t representing it, you are not alone in your dissatisfaction with how a Beastmaster’s animal companion works. It’s one of the (if not *the*) biggest complaints among the PHB subclasses. That doesn’t mean that everyone agrees, but as to your original question: no you are not missing something, you are seeing the same issue a lot of people see.
Basically, there is nothing stopping you from buying a well trained warhorse (or war elephant, campaign allowing - elephant pricing in PHB) and having it be a more effective contribution that doesn’t require your subclass.
They could have just said (and I recommend this as a quick-fix house rule) that the actions the Beastmaster grants to his companion are *in addition to* the animal’s regular actions. Then the class actually is giving you something cool. The probable reason they didn’t was during class design they were assuming only the ranger would have a companion/pet, so they are comparing them against party members without a pet. If they had instead used the sort of common sense interpretations of how to interact with the world that they did in the rest of the game they would have compared Beastmaster with animal to anyone else with the same animal, and balanced their class features accordingly.
Basically, there is nothing stopping you from buying a well trained warhorse (or war elephant, campaign allowing - elephant pricing in PHB) and having it be a more effective contribution that doesn’t require your subclass.
They could have just said (and I recommend this as a quick-fix house rule) that the actions the Beastmaster grants to his companion are *in addition to* the animal’s regular actions. Then the class actually is giving you something cool. The probable reason they didn’t was during class design they were assuming only the ranger would have a companion/pet, so they are comparing them against party members without a pet. If they had instead used the sort of common sense interpretations of how to interact with the world that they did in the rest of the game they would have compared Beastmaster with animal to anyone else with the same animal, and balanced their class features accordingly.