doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
lol this cracks me up, man.Maybe the variant Class features will work out to replace half-casting with a more robust Beast (which is needed to get the math some people want). But the Beastmaster as a distinct archetype will not happen in a 6E: no way Crawford brigns it back.
Another one for 6E: variant core class features, separate from archetype, like spell casting versus martial feats versus a beast for Rangers.
The beastmaster would definately be back in a 6e. 0% chance of it not coming back. The idea of making the player choose between spellcasting and having a beast is a silly notion that Mearls toyed with, that will never become the mainstream representation of the archetype, because it doesn't allow the Ranger that a huge swath of ranger fans want. That is, a spellcasting ranger with a beast.
Not to mention, even what you want would be much, much, more elegantly acheived by simply including spells that beef up a creature you control, or even boost you and such a creature with one spell, OR simply allowing the ranger to burn spell slots in a manner similar to Divine Smite, and let BM ranger pets benefit whenever the ranger does so, in addition to simply burning a spell slot to heal the beast as a bonus action.
But the Beast Conclave beast works just fine. It accomplishes all of it's goals, even if you do like we did at my table to ditch the conclave specific extra attack back to normal extra attack. A wolf companion has HP simialr to a rogue, can wear barding to get similar AC or better, and the HP and proficiency based buffs scale with character level rather than ranger level, meaning that the beast doesn't become less powerful as an MC ranger levels up. Fixing the core class issues with the PHB ranger, and replacing the PHB BM with the Beast Conclave, is all that is needed.