Is the Beast Master Broken? Examining D&D’s Most Misunderstood Archetype
One of Dungeons & Dragons archetypes has been the subject of more internet debates and angry Facebook posts than any other. It seems as though almost everyone who has laid eyes on the Beast Master, the second archetype for the ranger class in the fifth edition Player’s Handbook, has some sort of problem with it. Ever since the Player’s Handbook release in 2014, social media has echoed with the outcry of “The Beast Master is broken!” It’s one of the most polarizing topics of this edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and the debate needs to be settled. Is the Beast Master broken?
The answer is yes, the Beast Master is broken.
But perhaps that’s a misleading statement. The Beast Master may be broken, yet that word may not mean what you think it means. Gamers use the word “broken” as a catchall for a litany of disparate complaints, which is great for discovering that a problem exists, but terrible for actually addressing that problem. If you’re a Dungeon Master and you want to try and fix the broken Beast Master’s at your table, you need to know exactly what you’re fixing. And if you’re a player who thinks the Beast Master is broken, you’d better figure out exactly what’s wrong so you can work with your DM to make your experience more fun.
What's Wrong with the Beast Master?
In D&D, we call a part of the game broken because it’s one of three things: not fun to play (or literally unplayable), not fun to play with, or not fun to adjudicate as a Dungeon Master. Of all these complaints, it is the first that dominates this discussion; people just don’t like playing Beast Masters. These three qualities are completely subjective, of course, but they have been so pervasive (and even extending to the ranger class as a whole) that even Wizards of the Coast has taken note of them and released several new visions for the ranger and the Beast Master for public playtesting through Unearthed Arcana.
One common complaint is that the Beast Master isn’t fun to play because it isn’t as powerful in combat as other classes, or even other ranger archetypes. The reasons cited are usually that the animal companion is too weak numerically, it can’t act in combat unless the ranger spends an action to command it, and (now that Xanathar’s Guide to Everything has been released) it doesn’t get any bonus ranger spells. Since so many of Dungeons & Dragons’ rules and player options are geared towards combat, concerns of being underpowered in combat are of primary concern for most players.
So what is a player (or a player-conscious Dungeon Master) to do?
When I ran Princes of the Apocalypse around its release in 2015, one of my players decided to play an air genasi Beast Master with a hawk companion (reskinned as an osprey, but that’s neither here nor there). Even then, I had caught wind of the foul press surrounding the Beast Master, and wanted to make sure my ranger player wasn’t walking into a trap option. We talked it over and eventually decide to give her hawk companion a few buffs to make it more powerful in combat. We decided on two things: first, it could attack independently after being directed to attack a creature. Second, we opted to give it one fighter level for every four levels she had in ranger. These changes seemed perfectly reasonable.
By 20th level, this bird had probably killed more creatures than anyone else in the party, and my players had taken to calling her companion “Murder Bird.” It became a badass animal companion, but I emerged from that campaign feeling that maybe I had put my thumb on the scale a little too hard.
Dan Dillon on Fixing What's Broken and Learning What Isn't
That campaign has been over for about a year now, but I’ve been thinking about how I could have made my ranger player’s experience smoother. I decided to speak with Dan Dillon, a game designer who has created Fifth Edition-compatible adventures and player content for Kobold Press, an excellent adventure for the D&D Adventurer’s League, and has even contributed to an undisclosed project with Wizards of the Coast. He’s also a moderator of a Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition Facebook group boasting over 100,000 members, and is a battle-scarred veteran of the Beast Master arguments there. He’s seen every viewpoint imaginable on this issue, he's played a Beast Master ranger from 1st to 20th level, and judging by his headshot, he's probably a Beast Master himself! He’s the perfect person to ask for insight.
One of the first things I asked Dan about was if we could separate signal from noise on this argument. What criticism of the Beast Master are valid, and what criticisms are simply off-base? The first thing he told me was he played his ranger without any house rules and was incredibly effective. He suggests that people who have had “awful experiences with the Beast Master” might need to reread the Beast Companion feature in the Player’s Handbook and be sure they aren’t missing any of the myriad little buffs the animal companion gets. Most of the perceived mechanical weaknesses of the Beast Master come from an incomplete understanding of the Fifth Edition rules.
Most of my woes in my Princes of the Apocalypse campaign, Dan assures me, came from my player selecting a CR 0 animal companion. Of course a CR 0 hawk isn’t going to fight very well, it only does a few points of damage! I didn’t need to give it fighter levels in order to give it more hit points, it gets more hit points naturally as the ranger levels up. It even gets to attack and take aiding actions without consuming the ranger’s action as the ranger gets more class features! Rather than haphazardly throwing buffs on this weak animal, it would have been simpler to just insist that my ranger player use a CR 1/4 beast instead.
But some of these mechanical woes were not without precedent. A quick reading of the Beast Master archetype shows that the Beast Companion class feature suggests taking a hawk (or a mastiff or a panther) as an animal companion! Dan says that it’s “setting [a player] up for failure…you should not take challenge rating 0 beasts. But if you do want to do that, work with your DM and ask if you can just have a falcon companion that you’ve trained,” and choose a ranger archetype like Hunter instead.
That said, this option isn’t available to people with rules-adherent DMs or those who are a part of Organized Play. That is a flaw of the Beast Master; it’s inflexible. If you want its combat ability to be on par with similar characters, you need to know what the good options are and optimize your build (yuck). This may be a fun puzzle for veteran gamers, but poses a discouraging barrier to entry for new players. Not only do you need to know how disastrously poor at fighting a CR 0 beast is compared to a CR ¼ creature, but you have to know what books to look in (including asking the DM to let you use the Monster Manual or even the monster appendix for Tomb of Annihilation), and then you need to do a bunch of calculations to improve its stats. It’s not impossible, but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, either.
Dan’s recommended animal companions are flying snakes for flight without sacrificing much damage, wolves for pack tactics and their keen senses, giant poisonous snakes for swimming and truly incredible damage and accuracy, and pteranodons if you’re playing in Tomb of Annihilation. If you’re playing a halfling or a gnome, you can use this flying dinosaur as a mount. That’s incredible!
If you want a second opinion, the gentlemen at Nerdarchy have a video on their 5 favorite Beast Master companions.
Also note, according to admins the D&D Adventurer’s League, where character builds are limited to the Player’s Handbook plus one other book, monster stat blocks do not count as your +1. So, if you really want to optimize your Beast Master, you can use the beasts in Volo’s Guide to Monsters or Tomb of Annihilation while still using another book.
Taking all that into consideration, the Beast Master is in a strong place mechanically. Dan says one underappreciated aspect of the Beast Master is that its animal companion simply adds another body to the players’ side, allowing rogues in the party to Sneak Attack more often, other players to get advantage more often (through the Help action and possibly Pack Tactics), and by allowing the ranger seriously improved battlefield control, as the animal companion can attack enemies on the other side of cover the ranger can’t shoot behind, get on top of elevated terrain if it can fly, and even serve as a mount if your ranger is Small and the companion is Medium.
But don’t think for a moment that the Beast Master is perfect. While it's possible that the incredible outcry over this archetype is all due to people not reading the Player’s Handbook closely enough or the archetype requiring too much system mastery, it's more likely that there are some problems with the archetype that a close reading of the rules can't solve. One of Dan’s chief concerns is that, unlike the trio of new ranger subclasses presented in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, the Beast Master (and the Hunter) lack bonus spells to supplement their “very tiny number of spells known [as compared to paladins who prepare spells like a cleric].”
Maybe in a future article on D&D Beyond, Dan could show us the bonus spell lists for Beast Masters and Hunters that he's house ruled to improve their power level in games he runs.
Final Verdict
I never directly asked Dan if the Beast Master was “broken” or not. That’s not what I wanted to learn from him, because I knew from the word go that the Beast Master was broken, I just needed to learn how it was... and how it wasn't. As it turns out, the Beast Master is not broken mechanically; it’s broken in a subtler, more insidious way. A way that’s harder to fix than changing a few calculations and printing errata.
In fact, the Beast Master is quite mechanically sound, if played in a certain way. The rub is that most players have no idea what this specific way of having fun as a Beast Master is! The Beast Master is one of the most complex and choice-dependent archetypes in the entire Player’s Handbook, but the book provides no help on how to navigate its many incredibly important choices. Spellcasters like wizards and clerics face a similar problem, but there’s a significant difference: most of the spells a spellcaster picks aren’t central to their identity. If you’ve ever seen Critical Role, try to imagine Vex’ahlia without her bear Trinket. If Pike, the party cleric, didn’t like a spell she chose, she could switch it out the next morning with no trouble; specific spells aren't part of her identity, but Trinket is essential to Vex’s character.
This highlights another problem of the Beast Master that, while it doesn’t strictly make the archetype weaker in combat, does make it less fun to play: animal companion death. For most Beast Masters, their animal companion is like another character in terms of emotional weight, but the game rules don’t treat it that way. While most player characters in D&D are expected to be resurrected if they die (after a certain point), all the Player’s Handbook has to say if an animal companion dies is: “If the beast dies, you can obtain another one by spending 8 hours magically bonding with another beast that isn’t hostile to you, either the same type of beast or a different one.” It expects you to do the equivalent of rolling up a new character named Bob II after your first character, Bob, was killed by a wandering monster.
For players that invest emotionally in the lives of their animal companions, like Laura Bailey and her ranger Vex’ahlia, this just isn’t fun. If you’re playing at home and not in the Adventurer’s League where strict adherence to the rules is necessary, consider this house rule that Dan and I hashed out about in our conversion: “As a Beast Master, you can spend 8 hours performing a ritual of resurrection that returns your dead animal companion to life if it died of means other than old age.”
Even if you don’t use this house rule, the animal companion should at least be able to roll death saves. The Player’s Handbook says “special nonplayer characters” are supposed to fall unconscious and roll death saving throws when reduced to 0 hit points, just like player characters. You’re just being a jerk if you don’t consider animal companions special NPCs.
If the Beast Master’s problem is one of system mastery and misplaced emotional expectations, what is the best way to “fix” this “broken” archetype in play? If you’re a player, you’re practically there already just because you’ve read this article. Choose a powerful animal companion when you first choose this archetype, and make sure you’re communicating well with your Dungeon Master about little rules interactions like whether or not animal companions get death saving throws.
If you’re a Dungeon Master looking to make life easier for a player who wants to be a Beast Master, then start by talking with your player about what kind of beast they want to choose. If it’s something small like a hawk, a squirrel, or some other inconsequential CR 0 creature, consider letting that player play as a Hunter ranger instead with a minor noncombatant companion instead.
The Beast Master may be broken, but clear communication and a little ingenuity can fix it. Happy hunting!
James Haeck is a D&D fan, frequent paladin player, and a lover of roleplaying and tactical combat in equal measure. He lives in Seattle, Washington with his two animal companions, Mei and Marzipan, and writes as a freelancer for Wizards of the Coast, the D&D Adventurer's League, Kobold Press, and EN Publishing. You can usually find him wasting time on Twitter at @jamesjhaeck.
I don't know. Having only one animal companion with relatively low hit points that your entire subclass is built around still seems pretty weak when you are going up against the likes of dragons or dungeons full of deadly traps. This article inspired me to make a Revised Beast Master in the homebrew subclass section, which is modeled after the eponymous character from a certain legendary 80's movie, that just seems more robust and fun to play. Please do check it out and let me know what you think.
After hearing all the complaints about the R:BM I decided to try to play one myself. Currently he's only level 7 and I don't find the complaints about the sub class to be completely valid, yet.
I did a lot of research before I chose the class and the most useful article I found was a reddit post by Matt Coleville talking about the class and disputing the claims that it was broken.
Matt Coleville countered the complaints against the sub class and found it to be mechanically inline, more or less, with standard combat efficiency. The biggest complaint and only complaint anyone could make at the end was "The class doesn't feel right" which as Matt pointed out is not a game mechanic problem. The UA Ranger he pointed out was far more overpowered.
My R:BM does excellent damage, and hits better then most of the party. The Key I've found to playing the R:BM is versatility, understanding the beast and ranger spell choices.
I use my poisonous snake often, but if there is something I cannot damage with it, then the snake pulls back and my ranger goes into melee. I can fight side by side with my snake and use my sentinel feat to get an extra attack or I can stay at a ranged distance using a bow. When things are going bad, the snake will be sacrificed.
I have found that party backs up the snake often and they rush to it's aid if it's in trouble. I constantly look for new ways to use the snake. I also constantly scout. Nothing seems more foolish to me then to not scout ahead and see what I am facing. I'm playing a ranger. That's what they do. Scouting has allowed our party to get the drop on enemies and help me decide my tactics.
I have a panther for back up. My character looked for extra beasts he could purchase to help him. I also now have a back up trained owl who will take the snakes place if it dies till I get to the panther and my background has given me a small mouse. I don't expect the backups to go head on in combat. They are support till I find something tougher.
The companions low hit points does not bother me. The animals are supposed to be expendable and it doesn't make sense to me that an animal would have as much HP as player character. Your controlling 2 characters so why would your sub class give you the equivalent power of another PC? it doesn't. It gives you another character that's not as strong but gives you alternate ways of Attacking. You get to play with a character who is like the Battle master in that he gets new ways to attack enemies. Knocking enemies down, poisoning them, grappling them, etc. You essentially have d4/level extra hit points.
All my spells are geared to help me and the snake in one way or another. Animal Friendship to find a new beast, Ensnaring strike so my beast or I get advantage on attack rolls. Silence to deal with spell casters to help us get the drop on enemies. Healing spells to heal either me or the snake. The combination of things you can do with your companion and spell casting stacks up to a lot of things that a single character can't do and I'm still experimenting. Toss in a area affect spell like spike growth and have the ranger pull back so he can't be targeted to make a concentration check and have the companion move forward to deal with anything that tries to cross it. It gets low on HP? Pull it back and I take it's place.
This class has been fun to play because I'm learning something new and constantly trying to find new ways to do things. I'm also beating the expectation of "The class sucks".
I have often found, especially when it comes to D&D, in all editions, people say stuff or make claims without trying things out or trying to figure things out. I decided to try for myself to see what works and what doesn't and how it works. I spent time doing a bit of research on it. I plan and consider what's possible. Using my R:BM has shown me that the complaints aren't valid... yet. I recognize the character is only 7th level right now. So I'm eagerly awaiting to see what will happen.
Dear ShadowMind
I appreciate that you took some time to write down your experience. And it certainly does demonstrate that it is perfectly possible to have fun playing the PHB BM. (For what it's worth, I always thought so, but I think it could be so much more fun with a few tweaks) Thanks also for citing the Colville post, although I could not find that one so if you could please post a link it would be appreciated. I like Matt Colville, and respect his takes on the game (a lot). But I absolutely do not agree with the conclusion that when a class doesn't 'feel right', then it's nothing to do with mechanics. In certain cases it might not be, but in the case of the PHB BM, it most certainly is. Innumerable posts on this and other sites demonstrate with clarity how the action economy of the subclass is annoying and restrictive and inflexible, especially at lower levels. So I won't restate those arguments here. It's also very daft that the PHB version does not allow you anyway to revive the companion and this is a problem for many. So, you cannot simply wave aside years of valid criticism on the basis that you've played 7 levels of the subclass and found the damage output is on par or exceeding the rest of your party. Sorry!
It seems what you are saying is that by optimising your character by selecting a poisonous snake as your companion, and foregoing ASI for the Sentinel feat (itself an optional rule and not a Ranger or BM feature) you are experiencing satisfying play. You go onto say that you have a stable of multiple animal companions, none of whom you mind sacrificing or putting in harms way, and you regard them as 'expendable' (I certainly do not!). Fine, if that's how you want to roll, and if your DM uses some sort of 'dial-a-companion' alternate rule allowing you to select the right companion for the right job like the Batman with his utility belt, then please knock yourself out. I'm afraid that those of us (and we are legion) seeking an altogether different, non-'MinMax' playing experience that centres around role-playing a ranger with a lifelong bond with a living creature will not be swayed by your arguments. On the other hand, and as I said before, well done for confirming that it is in fact possible to have fun with the subclass. Doing so does not mean there is not significant room (and dire need) for improvement.
All the same, I wish you all the fun in the world at your gaming table. That's the great thing about D&D and games like it, there's something for everybody!
I’m hoping you can elaborate on the way you are playing the ranger/animal companion interaction. In particular, how are you interpreting “It takes its turn on your initiative...”.
When I first started reading complaints about the Beast Master on the internet, I was a little perplexed. It wasn’t until I realized I was interpreting the archetype description quite differently than others that their complaints started to make sense.
I’m still not sure exactly how the Beast Master should be played as intended, but I have an interpretation that works for me and fulfills the archetypes statement that ranger and animal companion are “United in focus, beast and ranger work as one to fight the monstrous foes that threaten civilization and the wilderness alike.”
In order to have a useful discussion about the Beast Master, we first have to establish that we are talking about the same thing.
btw, saying that the ranger is stuck with a CR 1/4 creature is inaccurate.
I recalculated my beasts CR based on the guidelines in the DMG for making new creatures.
While my snake started as a CR 1/4 creature it is now a CR 2 creature.
You post doesn't counter my comments on the effectiveness of the Beast Master. You cherry picks some points I made and presume other things. It doesn't seem as though you have played the Beast Master subclass.
I'll leave Matt's Reddit post here as a counter for all those complaints about BM action economy.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mattcolville/comments/7a6wnx/vanilla_beastmaster_rangerwhats_wrong/
I see nothing wrong with giving up a PC's actions so that the beast can take actions. It's very obvious that if both the Ranger and the Beast were able to attack right away then the class would be overpowered but since you're not going to repeat any of the posts from others I won't delve into it any further, either. I'll simply state that they are wrong.
So you looked at my post, and the only thing you noticed was that my creature does more damage than others in the party?
Why can't you revive it? The PHB clearly states that death saves can be applied to special NPC's. If no Death save is given then it seems to be that's how your DM chooses to play at his table. Also, if you are playing a game where story is more important then why isn't your DM giving that option?
What you call years of valid criticism I call un-validated, un-tested un-contextual criticism from a mass of people. I've seen tonnes of comments from people who have not played the class and only crunch numbers or make presumptions. Yes, I can wave away years of valid criticism by playing my character and being successful at it. That's how criticism is challenged.
To summarize your last paragraph... "You optimized and used optional rules for your character... but many of us want to play a different way that keeps our animal companion around long term " What??????
1. I didn't min/max. If I did that would still be an invalid point.
2. Yes, I don't mind putting them in harm's way...because this is a combat based game. I reasonably consider the danger to my companion then take the smartest course of action. If an enemy cannot be harmed by it, I don't send it in. I wrote that above.
3. Yes, I may choose to sacrifice my companion because our party has dealt with situations where it was a dangerous encounter and I had to choose between sacrificing my companion to save the party or sacrificing my PC. I have weighed and experienced the pros and cons of both choices and the pros of sacrificing the companion if needed far exceeds the cons. That's called role-playing. If you choose to sacrifice the Ranger instead, that's up to you.
4. Yes, I agree that animals are expendable. It doesn't mean its and easy choice.
5. I role-played to get the extra companions. It was MY decision to do that not a DM alternate rule. What is un-role-play about that? It's called using my brains. Yes, I choose to play Newt Scamader instead of Drizzt Do'Urden by having extra animal companions around. What is wrong with that?
6. The only optional rule the DM is using is feats. The only consideration the DM allowed is that companions get death saves. The only other thing I have been able to do with my companion is save a teammate PC's life when my companion dragged his downed body away from an enemy. Hardly rule breaking and all of this is hardly beyond the basic rules.
You're not proving the subclass doesn't work. You're stating the subclass doesn't work the way YOU want it to work or (if you played it) you couldn't get it to work the way you want it to work. If you want the companion to survive longer then all you need is to apply Death save rules to the companion, have ways to heal it and if needed, resurrect it. That's it. But if you only want an animal pet for your character that will never be threatened then you can take a different class and buy a trained dog for 10gp or whatever and leave it at your PC's home while your PC goes adventuring.
Just because legions of people say something it doesn't mean it's correct or true. That's not an argument of any kind.
You're right. Having fun with the class doesn't prove that it doesn't need improvement. but playing it, keeping my companion alive and succeeding on quests with my companion does prove there is no dire need to improve the sub-class.
You're post isn't about the in-effectiveness of the subclass. It's an argument about Role-play vs min/maxing or optimizing.
For some context, The group is playing by the basic rules but are allowed to use other 5e books for spells, feats and sub-classes. The DM lets the companion get death saves. No extra house rules. Currently going through Mad Mage campaign. Point buy for stats.
On our turn, the beast or my PC can move/attack interchangeably. We can either both move, then either one of us takes our action; or Ranger moves then attacks and companion moves and attacks after or vice versa. Exp; I might move my ranger forward, then move my companion close by. Then my ranger would attack with his extra attack and the snake would be commanded to attack after.
I didn't have any interpretation of the class. I looked at it and decided to experiment with it to see what it could do. To me it's a class that gets some special abilities when working with an animal companion. How they work together is up to the player.
I’m glad to hear you are playing that the ranger and beast take their turns together and you can move/attack interchangeably. It appears to me that this is one of the biggest differences of opinion. I can see how players that believe the ranger must finish his/her turn before the beast can begin its turn find the beast master awkward to play.
When I first read a post that claimed the beast shouldn’t get death saves, I thought it had to be a joke. I’m hoping everyone has got the memo and all DM’s give the beast death saves now but if there are still some out there that say the beast is dead when it has 0 hp, I can see why those players have complaints.
The addition of the UA Revised Ranger, in my opinion, complicated things because it improves so many of the ranger’s other abilities. Even if you interpret the PHB beast master the best way possible, the UA beast master will still out shine it.
The thing is, that you are thinking that an Hawk is useless just cause it can't attack as well as a wolf. I agree that in 5e the Hawk should be defined as "Paraplegic" since a normal Hawk wouldn't be so easy to hit especially if it is in the air, but there are many things in and out of combat that a Hawk can do.
Circle in the sky over enemies while scouting, in order to avoid or even lay ambushes (hits are easy to land cause enemies are Flat footed and you have a surprise turn), steal objects, signal enemies in combat granting you a bonus to hit or negating disadvantages against invisible foes; if you are fighting Drows and they drop darkness on you(if you are an archer) you can say a word and the disadvantage disappears since you just hear sounds just above your enemy. There are so many things people are not searching for... and the cause of it is the "combat" mentality of most players.
Not everything is about combat... ah right... 5e.
I agree with you, birds of prey are great companions. As an aside, I do find it bothersome to see so many taking a 'min-max' approach with beasts, selecting oddball (creepy) companions for their ranger simply because of a perceived combat advantage. (I've seen loads of people wax poetically on the virtues of stirges, giant spiders, rot grubs and flying snakes as the optimal choice for a beast master's companion- maybe I'm old school but that's not really the way I see the archetype). But hey, to each their own.
One thing they got right with the new Artificer on UA is to allow for a standardised homunculus companion. If they went down this route with the beast master companion, it would allow each of us to 'live' our fantasy with the archetype and not be bothered about combat mechanics. A standardised beast master companion along these lines would ensure a degree of parity between companions.
Until (when and very big if) we get the fixes on ranger and beast master some of us are craving, I think hawks, blood hawks, owls etc can be lots of fun when played in the way you suggest!
D&D is not a combat-based game. 5e might as well be heavily combat based and deep as a pond, but this doesn't mean the only way of progressing in the game is combat.
The thing you said about sacrificing your animal is both metagaming and out of character(except for a **** without feelings. Even evil characters grow some kind of affection for animal companions). A Ranger has a bond with his animal companion, it isn't just a pet or a pawn, for the Ranger, losing it would mean the "equivalent" of losing a familiar for a magic user, but instead of maluses to his body he would have emotional repercussions. Just that, obviously with "you are allowed to create a bond with another creature even just a second after your companion dies" people don't even think about that.
Last thing: saying that both attacks would be too strong when other classes get that or even more(since magic is a thing) is really moronic.
Amen! Fully agree.
HOW TO MAKE A BEASTMASTER RANGER
At second level:
For Spells Known choose Cure Wounds and Goodberry
At third level:
1) For Spells Known choose Animal Friendship
2) Buy yourself an elephant
3) For Archetype choose Hunter
Keep the elephant fed with Goodberry. Keep the elephant alive with Cure Wounds. Keep the elephant friendly with Animal Friendship. Keep the elephant between you and your enemies.
Someone alluded to it earlier, and may have mentioned it before, but a bear is not a CR 1/4 or lower beast. If you are going to follow the PHB R:BM, then you *have* to imagine Vex without Trinket.
You've really narrowed the problem down. When you criticize you should be precise.
This is very true, but then it ultimately limits the animals a player wants to play, down to a very few beasts, which as d&d goes is railroading the ranger to have to pick those few, meaning you won't see at tables a ranger with a frog, or a badger or even a Penguin because they just don't work as beasts but more as pets that you have to lumber around the campaign with you. He even said, dint pick a 0 creature make sure you take a 1/4 character making it considerably more forced animal which the player might not care enough about.
It needs revisiting and worked into a new book much better. Considering in unearthed arcana, anyone can get a sidekick, which could be the same animal as the rangers and yet the random PC will have a much better animal sidekick than the Ranger who is a beast master. An has a heart to heart bond with the animal.
I don't particular like this article.
It feels condescending. This article ends up being get good scrub , and pick a stronger beast.
Not picking up on, or talking about the fact that the ranger is weaker as a base compared to other classes, and the beastmaster forces you stay with the weak base or even that beastmaster companion can be extremely weak if you don't be powergame.
Why as a player should I spend extra time with the dm to ask him of plot details so I can have a class feature active.
Why should the player have to do something extra that other classes wouldn't need just to play this class.
I've been roleplaying since I was ten, forty years ago, and this is one of the worst articles I've ever seen.
"There's nothing wrong with this class! Look at how great it is with all my unique magic items, house rules and GM bonuses! There's nothing wrong with it at all!"
The concept is great and the idea of adventuring with a loyal animal companion is very popular. But in 5E it's completely underwhelming, and rather than try to fix it, WotC cover their ears and deny it.
It's funny how most other games manage to get this one right, but the grand-daddy of them all hasn't managed that for two editions.
Well it was good in 1e, and 2e I believe, but since then it has fell off significantly. Ending up a worse fighter, or mechanically odd. This article is pretty bad. Seem like more subjective opinion than objective fact. I am just glad others hold my opinion as well.
Druid pets were fine in 3E too, and Pathfinder, and most other games.
In the last year or two, my group has played other games with pet classes - a Woodman in One Ring that has a hound, two Shadows of Brimstone characters with a monkey and a dog. In Torg, one character has a raptor, sabretooth and pteranodon, while another rides a small dragon and has a spirit wolf. In all of these cases, the animals feel balanced. They don't overpower the rest of the group or feel useless. The opportunity cost of getting them via feats etc is on par with what other characters gave up for their powers. The player doesn't feel underpowered, and other players don't feel the beastmaster is either useless baggage or overpowered.
Quite why 4E and 5E don't even want to acknowledge this is pretty bizarre, really, considering how popular the concept is and how much playtesting they supposedly did. You would have thought that when the answer is always specialist magic items, house rules and liberal GM handwaves, that just maybe there's something wrong with the actual rules...