I personally haven't encountered any threat issues either except against Warriors, but I'm very curious about this statement. Wondering if you could elaborate more on this, perhaps just to compare rotations.
Can't tell much about 'high-end' beastmasters, but AFAICT, knights can have an insane threat level (thanks to BT of course) and even monks can outthreat me if their G-Fist isn't a miss. I might catch up over time and I wouldn't call it "threat issues", but it still feels like the BM has the lowest threat level of all four tanking classes... but with all the seeds & hones out there, who knows that exactly.
How about the beast points generation on wild impact suggestion? I really think this holds merit because when you compare it to the obvious battle leap: it's aimable, does (a lot) of damage, generates rage, and knocks down.. BM just knocks down around him, it's very bad for a final tier skill. I also thought party SP regeneration on survival would fix all BM SP problems and be a nice "party SP buff" that nobody has yet rather than going through the trouble of adding stats to gears which likely takes more work.
I don't really like 1:1 skill comparisons. Why not nerf Battle Leap instead? And generally spoken, I don't like charge-points on any 10 target AoE skill. If that would be the case, the Rangers and Wizards will be next to demand Concentration / Pyro stack generation on Arrow Shower or Meteor Storm.
And from what I can tell by the ML grinding, the Beastmaster doesn't have significantly higher SP issues than my whirling Warrior had. And even if he did, it doesn't make the Beastmaster the ideal source for an SP party buff.
IMO, it would make more sense, if the Soulmaker (or maybe the Priest) would get the SP // WIS buff and the Beastmaster some sort of HP or HP regeneration buff.
I think feral defense is actually a good skill, but the game itself doesn't make it wanted. I didn't play BM back in the CoA/AoD days but if I did, 5/5 feral defense sounds like a godsend against ratmaster and other hard bosses. I agree that it's just useless now though, and likely will be for the rest of this game's raiding life. Maybe BM could finally get an actual non-gimmicky party buff? Maybe a 1/2/3/4/5% damage decrease buff (game needs more damage mitigation buffs considering the 1 shotting going around).
I liked Feral Defense (not just for the visual >_>), but never maxed it. And even right now, I'm not so sure how that skill works in combination with armor seed runes, jehoon runes or other kinds of damage reduction (f.e. Soulmaker links).
It also felt a bit off-placed, since the Beastmaster was still the tanking class with the highest hitpoints and the best healing skills. So the typical 40~50% while being able to act would have made more sense IMO. But as soon as the pets were introduced, the drawback of being unable to act was rendered irrelevant. A mermaid, Vador, etc. would still do the job for you.
In addition, keep in mind that the devs have chosen to give the Beastmaster a debuff rather than a party buff. So your armor rip is your contribution to the group actually.
While there are no “Popular” suggestions since not many people play beastmaster the way it was intended,...
WTF? What's the 'intended' or 'legimate' type to play a BM in your opinion?
To start, having tiger form take 5 skill points to max out is very wasteful. The popular suggestion for this is to make it a 1 skill point item, I suggest 3 skill points with benefit being 20/40/60% movement speed increase.
Although the 3 skill points would be my favorite as well, keep in mind that there's still the 'new' Tiger form out there called Ymir Form. That's why I suggested to remove that skill or integrate it into the other shapes/forms.
My personal suggestion would be changing Feral Defense skill into either the Iron Hide or Armored Fur skill, The change would be to still have the 5 tiers of damage reduction but add damage reflection per rank. I leave the reflection percentage to the devs choice but i think rank 5 should be somewhere near 20% damage inflicted is reflected back to the attacker. My reason for this is that the defense skill lasts for 13 seconds and the player is unable to do ANYTHING else while it is active, which causes the player to lose threat in raids and lets other players bash away on you and build free combo points in PvP.
What the point behind all these damage reflections lately?
Rather than introducing such an effect that could either end up too bad or too good, it would be simplier to remove the 'inability to act' completely or replace it with an ATK/damage drawback or a "no offensive skill" restriction instead.
More than anything else, I would like to remove the Armor Rip // DoT // 100-beast-point triggers and add more pet-like skills instead. Since a pet that hits every 2sec isn't that different from a DoT, the beastmaster would still be able to dish out quite a lot of damage even if he would be stunned or be otherwise unable to act. And you could support that, if you would give the BM the Mass Provoke.
Another favorite would be, if the beastmaster would get the Water Emblem skill (renamed). Rather than healing 30% every 30sec with survival, he would heal 2% every 2sec... and would get an SP regeneration & permanental damage reduction on top of that. So screw the party heal part! You're not a priest, but a Wolverine-like Beast.
