If not buffs, then what?

[Goom]

To the post a few lines above about debuffing (even though it's over with) - I just want to point out that enchanters are the universally-recognized debuffers. They can touch every offensive stat a mob has and do it better than anyone.


Anyway - about the DPS thing. . . why not just give beastlords innate double attack, and then let the multiple-attack rate scale up on the very high end?

Is that too much dps? You know what? It's probably not. The DA cap could be set lower-per-level for BL's if it were. Someone play with a parser and see what would happen~

I'm serious. Maybe I just have the thread on "who is *not* a lvl 70 beastlord" stuck in my head, ruining my thought process for this, but (ignoring twinking 'corrections') beastlords are never really top dps on the way up to 70 anyway. And we wouldn't be with double attack. But all the screaming for more dps - maybe it could be stopped with double attack coming in early, triple attack at 65, and so on with AA's and such.

Bard's get DW but not DA because they have 50 ways to kill a mob and can gain xp faster than anyone. We are not on that level. DA for beastlords wouldn't be a ruin of game balance.

Eh, these are my thoughts.


Firiona.Goom
(fennin.faza)

[pusur]

Hey guys.....been reading through this endless thread and would just like to give my view on the matter.
I like having buffs and being a utilityclass but i wish we had a bit more dps. We arent even close to the best guildrangers or monks in end game. I do around 400dps without discs and i hardly use my pet on raids as he dies on every boss.
Alot of good points have been made through this thread and i like the idea of making us what we should be, BEASTlords....give us several AA petprocs for debuffing and manarecoursing. Also the idea of giving us the ability to tripleattack and quad would increase our dps substantially and actually make us more dps than wars. We are en par with wars atm and its embarrasing to say the least.
When it comes to spells. SA should have an endregen to it and SV should be upgraded. Today NOONE but myself want SV on our raids. Simply cause ppl prefer BBB. HP is obviously > atk even for dps classes. Maybe make SV same HP as BBB?:p Or add resists to SV?
When talking about Fero. It should have been made a groupspell with OOW so hopefully they make it group in next expansion with the same manacost. I rarely use it on other players simply cause i CBA. It costs too much mana and its a hazzle timing the reusetime on it. Fero is a very useful spell, not because of the atk it adds as any atk over 2-2.1k is worth close to nothing, but because it adds 65 to all resists, which on endgame bosses can mean the difference between life or death.

Fact is: On raids, we arent doing much else than buffing SA on random /request or buffing SA on raidprep as our dps is < depressing.
We dont have to be top dpsclass or even second best but be nice to even be CONSIDERED a dpsclass:(

Well just my 2cp

[Hurath]

haven't read nearly all of the post, but haven't seen Paragon of spirit mentioned once.  I have recently returned after over a year and a half off.  I remember when mgb paragon used to be a very desired thing(back in SSRA and VT and early-elemental planes... as far as i got by the time GoD/OOW came out)  , but this aa hardly seems a big boost in grps anymore with the high hps and mana everyone has now.  Would there be any use in significantly increasing paragon of spirit so that it could be used during raids to replenish hps and mana lost to a boss.  I know they added some aa to improve paragon, but if I'm not mistaken it was really weak and still remains fairly undesirable.  Personally would like a considerable buff here.   
      Also maybe for fero since some people don't want to be buff bots, besides improving it give it a longer duration, but with a longer recast time...... something like 20 minute buff with 8 minute recast time, which would give u 2.5 casts per beastlord.  This would cut down on the amount of time a beastlord would spend buffing while still adding to a beastlord's utility in a raid, as well as solo.
      Also just thinking outloud here, possibly an ability to sacrifice/morph w/ our warders, imbuing us the ability to gain extra attacks/more damage or something along those lines so that we can maintain some of the dps of our pets in battles where they cannot be used effectively. 

just some thoughts.  and if some things are entirely wrong or out of it, it is because i have yet to experience much OoW/DoN/DoD/PoR

[Ikkorus]

Hey there Hurath :)

[hakaaba]

perfection and fero are both buffs (see the title of the thread) :p

Absorbing our pets has been considered and the general consensus is we don't want it because if it was an option, we would use it ALWAYS.  And most don't really like the idea of losing their pet even if its ostensibly a "choice".

[Tigrah]

I personally want to see beastlords gain more buffs, including MUCH better kitty crack spells. I mean 10hp/mana per tick is nearly negligable compared to the chanty line. If I'm soloing I need buffs to survive, and when the chanty crack is gone that leaves me with my own buffs, which becomes a slow crawl. Stat buffs are one thing I really wish they'd add an upgrade to soon, I know a lot of folks have their stats perminently capped wi/out buffs, but there are those of us not so ubber that could still use as much help as we can get. I could care less about fero though, I never saw a huge difference with it. I love the pet recourse spells, and really wish they'd make a line of them with longer lifespans than growl honestly (and that stack with growl line).

[Yoggi]

I am still new to these boards so it is taking me  a while to read all these nice posts.  As far as raiding goes with us being same as a warrior DPS ... thats really hard for me to believe.  Our guild is in Demi atm and it is not uncommon for one of the beasts to be first or in the top 5 of DPS for a boss.  That also depends on what our role is on each raid. 

Perfection could use a boost for the Mana part of the spell.  660 mana  is not alot of mana to a raiding cleric or caster.  Wouldn't say it needed a HUGE boost but instead of 110per tick maybe 150 - 175. 

Fero being a group buff would be nice I usually keep both FoI and Fero up on raids because I keep it on 4-8 people while raiding.   Although I could see where that would be a nuisance to people that do not raid and the ones that just solo.   Even if the group buff was the same as the FoI stats just about double the mana cost.  However I would rather see Fero line be made into a more desirable buff.  I know on our raids it is, but as I have read on here that is not always the case.  I like the combat effects Idea since that is really hard to max out without severely hurting your avoidance and accuracy.

SV Line well I do not believe we were intended to have the best HP buff here.  About the only time I use SV is on Raids when we are short on Pallies or Soloing.

I was at the last Fanfare In Atlanta and talked to several of the developers about where we was intended to be DPS wise.  I was sad to find out that without our pet we should be Dion about the same DPS as a bard.  I hopefully will be at the next Fanfare.  If anyone is able to go to one they should go at least once.  The Best of the Best Tourney is alto of fun.

[Shamno]

I was at the last Fanfare In Atlanta and talked to several of the developers about where we was intended to be DPS wise.  I was sad to find out that without our pet we should be Dion about the same DPS as a bard.

Keep in mind when they say this they are not including hastes, spells, pets, discs, and varias other abilities that are tied into our DPS. They usually mean just pressing auto attack and going. This doesn't even include kick and the like.

Trust me even then we might be slightly higher then bards beause of the weapon lines we get from the monk half *shrug*\

Itemization and spell lines really are a huge difference in what we are suppose to do.

What I like to know is when you throw everything into a pot, what our DPS is suppose to be.

Dang warriors need to stop hiding behind that dang pre luclin quote about DPS and hybrids. :?

[Mewzee]

Ok well I have had different experiences as a low end beastlord, and now a high end beastlord.

When I was a low end beastlord, they loved me for dps and I WAS CONSIDERED A DPS class, I was also big for SA constantly and Fero. I also used my pet or pets and discs always at raids and MGB Paragon or Purrfection was alwayyyyyys loved and appreciated for mana mostly but also for health. Also funny enough, my guild had 5-8 beastlords at one time, in the same raid. And let me tell you, if you put that many beastlords together, their pets go attack together trash mobs...my god...stuff just dies so fast like no tommorrow. Its quite amazing watching a pack of wolves,tiggers,leezards,crocs, and bears, just run at the same target and munch it to bits in 30 seconds.

When I became a high end raiding beastlord, things changed. I am NO LONGER CONSIDERED A DPS CLASS at all. This really pisses me off more than anything and downright hurts my feelings. People will name classes off the top of their head, and yes the brand new Zerker class gets mentioned and so does every other class EXCEPT BEASTLORD. That I think speaks tons in the fact that we have become the INVISIBLE CLASS. So invisible that we barely exisit since everyone can do everything better than us. Again this really hurts me as a beastlord and my feelings.

The ONLY things that have not changed in my high end raiding guild is, them wanting SA constantly...and now they want FERO TONS more, and they want it cast much faster and more often than I can, even if I used both feros, and they will occassionly want my Purrfection MGBed, but right now its becoming such an extreme rarity its depressing.

Unlike everyone else here for high end bsts that say they don't use a pet b/c it dies all the time, well I use my pet ALL THE TIME and I keep it alive perfectly fine. My pet has pet affinity and that AA helps TONS, with all the free buffs I get, plus the filtering tools given to us now, I can have almost a 9-10k hp pet plus myself at 15k hps raid buffed.

My heals are EXCELLENT, I don't see where they need to increase even more, my Heal AAs crit TONS when I do use them to splash the pet once or twice and I use Pet Mend CONSTANTLY during an AE hit and it also crits for almost 8k Mana Free and pet is back at full HPs. There are *some* bosses that due to the boss having too many big HP hitting AEs in a row, that yes I would not be able to sustain a pet (think HQ) and so I don't bother in that situation. But a good majority of the time, I have my pet with me 99% of all raids, PLUS my werewolf, which I cast every time the spell refreshes on everything I can...lol.

Now for me - I see that folks do not want us to get more buffs, and well I'm sorry but we need better buffs. Big BIG upgrades to our buffs. Changing SA line to lasting longer so that we can now ATTEMPT to compete with everyone else on how big their buff timers on was nice, but I STILL think that it can have that timer made even LONGER than what was given to us. Seriously my SA atm lasts 101 mins long and I am the only bst in my guild that has the longest lasting SA (and we have myself plus two other constantly raiding bsts and yes all three of us raid AT THE SAME TIME and are always wanted). The main reason we are wanted for thou is...funny enough mainly Fero, second SA, third MGB Purrfection, fourth and lastly our mediocre dps. This is CURRENTLY the experiences I am having, right now in a Demiplane Guild.

So things or ideas to make beastlords more wanted?

Give us LONGER LASTING SA, even more than what you have already given us, we NEED SPELL CASTING REINFORCEMENT MASTERY PLEASE! Competing vrs a Chanter who gives 224mins of ONE CRACK/Mana Buff compared to our 101 mins is a joke. Make it at least 180 Mins at LEAST.

Give us a GROUP FERO that can be MGBED. THIS IS THE KEY that will help us be wanted, the more bsts you got , the more Fero can be MGBED, or Purrfection, or SA, just to make certain things easier, aka buffing, and even heal/mana regen recovery. Also maybe a MGB AA to LOWER THE TIMER for ALL CLASSES so that MGB can be cast every hmm 40-35mins maybe?

Give Purrfection a boost in how much mana and hp is gathered back for MGB Heal purposes.

and finally maybe we can try / discuss / brainstorm from this new idea I just brainstormed on the fly as I was typing...lol..

!!!!! NEW IDEA !!!!!!!! :

Maybe if you gave Beastlords an innate ability or special ability this will make us more popular and wanted in groups and raids again....I am basing my idea from funny enough, a Charm slot item. I came up with this idea from that Charm Slot item that states, "whenever you are surrounded by members of the same class, your charm gets stronger." Well how about we take that and instead of putting it into an item, we put it into an actual class like the beastlord?

We are a Beast LORD.  Since we are specialists in training/maintaining beasts of all kinds (Examples: wolf/tiger/bear/leezard/balisk) we should be able to somehow make any beast that is in our prescence better in some way... for we are the Lord of all things Beastlike. You could turn this ability into that it effects only other beastlords if you have more of them around you, BUT if you did I think that would not help as much since it would only affect the same class, so therefore I think it needs to be that, the more beastlords you have in a raid or group, this special ability activates (even if you only have one raiding beastlord).  Also we should have it increase a certain percentage for if you have two beastlords at a raid or group, and three ect..you get the picture.

Now what is the Special Ability you ask?
Here it is: The more pets of ANY CLASS that they are in a raid or grouped with a Beastlord, all owners' PETS will have an increase in DPS/HPS by *insert percentage or number here*  and the SAME percentage will affect the WHOLE RAID OR GROUP MEMBERS THEMSELVES..!

You can make this a Innate Ability that you gain at certain levels, of course the higher the level, the better the ability gets and it will automatically override the old ability with the newest/higher version according to level.

Now, if beastlords could have something, this special, and that could actually work and benefit not only themselves, but a raid or a group,I think you'd see beastlords wanted more. Other notes and ideas, this could be an ability that only will "turn on" so to speak when your in a group with at least one more person, or within a raid. This way the beastlord would not be giving its pet an extra boost while we solo. You can say that for arguments sake, the reason we do not gain this special ability when solo is because we are "training" our pets.

I think this idea fits into the category in which you are looking for Tast, its not a buff since we don't cast it, and it will make other beasts happy here since its not a spell to purchase thru plat, nor do they use mana to use, it just...happens automatically :)

Please discuss and let me know what you think, like I said I just came up with this on the fly and I got myself excited now...LOL

[Boister]

I didn't read all the 8 pages, but i thought of a ideal.  What if you can cast a Buff on our pet that will improve all the pet's that are grouped with Bst.  This pet buff will increase dps and maybe the resistance of those pet so they have better chance of survival again AE mob.

So we not trying to become Player buffer, but we are master of pet buff a role that fit our title.

[Kanan]

magi were sorta given similar to that already.. the PoR aura is a 5% damage mod to pets.  Overwrites might.

[Boister]

I didn't know about Mage aura, but why in hell :evil: we don't have a Aura!

Still, having specialize pet spell to increase effectivness of pet in Raid situation will be great.  As all other's aspect of buff are already cover 10 times better from others class.  Even if they added regen endurance to our crack Bst spell, you still only 1 Bst in raid to do it.

[laissez]

Buffing first of all is a very big part of the bst class, our dps is not good enough for us to Sollie rely on to get us groups(this also goes to our usefulness in groups) getting guild invites cause 1 bst in a guild would be enough.  As a raiding bst when we face a boss mob or something, our raid leader puts me in groups with melee, and i fero all of them, keeping fero on 6 ppl at once is a difficult task in and of itself, but it can be done.  In groups i still find myself feroing a rog or zerker just cause it seems to be habit, of course fero is one of those buffs that is always on me.  In response to the if not buffs question, the only answer is buffs, we need our buffs w/o them we become a second rate melee class with a pet (which could also be considered a buff.  People who complain because they don't want to be a buffing class need to play a rogue or wiz, obviously this is not the class for you.
  Now what i would like to see them add to our spell list is a group fero, people say that fero is only good for raiding, I'm gonna have to disagree on that because the atk and resist component on the spell would be a huge boost to any groups dps and there chance to resist any spells that the mob would cast, also a second spell i would like to see is a canni type spell that would mimic the shm version but would be just as good as the SK version of lich is to the necro version, maybe a 40'ish version of canni.  I mean we are part shm our spells reflect that and i think a lower lvl canni could be put to alot of use.

[Kanan]

Group Fero is the debil  :evil: DEBIL!

kk.. folks.. go read the analysis Tastian did for what the mana cost would end up being on group Fero, based upon the comparison of similar single target buff (FA) turned group (Champion).  Go read his parsing analysis of what Ferocity does for dps, not just bst.  I've seen parses on very high end monks to where it increases their dps a whopping 11 dps.... when they were popping out almost 900 dps.  Lemme see.. 11/900 ~= 1.222% dps increase.. for a relatively massive amount of mana. 

Now.. your Raid leaders will then expect your role to be to pop out this probably, at the very least, 2200mana point buff on everyone, as much as it is possible to cast.  I've got 12k mana, raid buffed.  That's prolly 6 casts before I become OOM (add'll cast due to mana regen in the interim 2 mins).  That is 2/3rds typical full raid force nowadays (54 man exped limits are so bloody annoying).  Now.. a vast majority of those folks will be adding it to their blocked buffs list because they don't want it to use up a buff slot. 

Your raid leaders might also want it mgb'd at times.  There's an even more incredible amount of mana pissed away on a pretty worthless buff and our mgb role of PoS (yeah, it sucks atm, but I still get it called for) goes down the drain.

And from having to cast this so much, you will no longer be nuking, casting BE, nor dotting (if you for some reason actually like casting dots.. /shiver).  You will just be buffing.  That's it.  You will become nothing more than a buff bot.  I don't have objections to buffing, per se, but that is not the core role of the class.  It would devolve us into one trick ponies, except our role can be substituted by a boxed toon, and where would that leave us.

In summary, SAY NO TO GROUP FERO!! PLEASE DEAR GOD BY ALL THAT'S HOLY!!

[Urim]

NO GROUP FERO! NO GROUP FERO! NO GROUP FERO! NO GROUP FERO! NO GROUP FERO!

I don't know how many times i will have to say this but for the love of god stop asking for useless buffs! We don't need pieces of crap like group fero taking the place of something else that could actually be useful.

1-2% increase in dps for a large amount of mana is useless, no matter how you try to rationalize it. For less mana we can increase our own dps by 10% or more using Growl of the Panther. So if you imagine a group fero costing at least 3x single cost, your talking about increasing one groups dps by the same amount as you would increase your own dps with one cast of Growl for an incredibly large amount of mana. It's just plain stupid to want a group fero in the current form.

Ask for Fero to be upgraded with increased chance to crit/proc/double attack/etc .... before asking for a useless buff to be made groupable.