NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Asisreo" data-source="post: 8124048" data-attributes="member: 7019027">Wait...when are you getting hex? Its very interesting that you have hex, but you also still have +4 to your main stat and Dual Wielding. This means you're at level 12, when you get your next ASI. This is important because the beastmaster's companion just got 2 more improvements to across levels 9-12 that will improve its damage by quite alot. Your proficiency bonus increases, which means your companion's damage increases. At level 9, the wolf spider does 15.5 damage now. But it also attacks twice when used as an action, so the spider now does 31 damage in a turn, by itself. Add in the likely 2d8+10=19 damage from the Ranger, and they're doing a total of 50 damage a turn. Yes, they took the basic +1 rather than any feat. There aren't as many Ranger buffs as you think. Many of their spells resemble smites more than buffs despite the concentration. The only really relevant one would be Hunter's Mark, a couple of defensive spells, and spells like Longstrider and Jump. What I'm trying to say is that this statistic would be relevant if it was expected that a party encounters every creature exactly once over the course of a campaign. This is not how campaigns are ordinarily structured. Even in a game such as Curse of Strahd, there's a quite alot of beasts and humanoids that are hostile to the party. You mean the Orc Warchief. I was about to say, the Warlord is CR 12. By level 20, a beastmaster should have spells like Stoneskin, Protection from Energy, Protection from Poison, and Cure Wounds while having the Inspiring Leader Feat and Magic Initiate Protection from Good and Evil. They should also have a couple of healer's kits. Even if the beast goes down, that doesn't mean its dead. If you stabilize it, you can wait until the fight is over and get into seriously healing it.Even if the Ranger happens to lose their companion first combat, Rangers get their primary benefits from their core class rather than their subclass. Its where they get their spellcasting, fighting style, extra attack, etc. A core Ranger is fairly close to a subclass Ranger in terms of power. Even the Hunter. If the Hunter chose Colossus Slayer, Steel Will, and Whirlwind Attack, you won't get much from your subclass if the DM loves having ranged medium creatures without a frighten ability. Interesting that you chose Erinyes. Very interesting indeed. Let me start in the general case. At level 20, the Ranger can cast StoneSkin on himself and share it with his beast to give both of them resistance to nonmagical BPS damage. If the enemy happens to rely on common elemental damage, the Ranger can use Protection from Energy to give his companion resistance to the relevant damage type. For the Erinyes, they actually have magical weapons so Stoneskin won't work. What will work, though, is Protection from Poison since Erinyes usually rely on poison damage to deal their damage. You just get better tools to prevent the beast from dying. I mean, if the companion can sneak into a room and return with enemy information (squeak for every enemy), the party probably has more info than they did before. Its not that expensive all things considered. You have the spell slot and your concentration is free. Might as well do something with it. But a portion of creatures don't need Barkskin anyways. No, I just think that if someone hasn't played a class at least in a functional manner, they shouldn't tell others that its a bad class. They can say that its hard, but if your understanding isn't deep enough for the class, why should you opine? Imps and Quasits are decent scouts but they don't have as good actual stealth, which is important for a scout. Even with invisibility, all that means is that your Imp can take the Hide action anywhere, but a Wolf Spider gets +9 to stealth from the get-go so is more reliable to stay out of sight. Also, the other part of scouting is actually seeing things, in which alot of the Beastmaster's companions can do better than even Rogues with expertise, let alone imps, quasits, pixies, and psuedodragons. Actually, I think Beastmasters are even better as Skill Monkeys/scouts than even combat. They're just good at those, too. They have great senses like darkvision and blindsight while also having good movement options in the forms of Flight, Climbing, and Burrowing. They usually have keen senses which puts their already bolstered Passive Perception up to +5, meaning they'll know danger pretty reliably. Their stealth is good and they can thrive in completely dark environments where many other creatures struggle (darkvision rogue gets -5 perception, blindsight spider does not). Plus, they're pretty innocuous. No matter what detection spell the enemy puts on them, they're just a beast. No dispel magic can affect them and they could easily be ignored by the enemy even if it is discovered.</blockquote>

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