Hello,
Would first like to mention I'm a general fan of the direction the ranger is going for this game for creation, but I'm a bit confused by the companion options for beastmaster subclass though and have a short list of questions/feedback. Some of this I understand may just be due to development still ongoing since this is early access, but given it's an available class currently I figured I'd supply the feedback now.
1. It doesn't look like there's much balance between the different companions, I get that a few of them may have niche uses over the others but I see no reason to ever pick anything other than spider 95% of the time given that the spider jump covers so much ground, and it does poison damage which is resisted less also potentially cause the poison status. This damage along with having a ton more health than any of the others (32 over the next highest of 19 for bear, then 11 or 1 for the others) make it a pretty clear pick for just about everything that I've seen. Even if the damage and utility was a lot less, the amount of health for the spider makes it seem pretty far and beyond any of the others. This makes the spider feel very impactful and the others a lot less so.
2. Scaling for the companions on level-up seems non-existent. To clarify this is for both the character level up, and the individual experience bar that's on the companion itself (unsure if that's meant to be there, as it seems to reset on each summon but I've gotten one to level 3 individually with no change). On character level up it doesn't appear that any of the summons receive any more health than they had at level 3, and given the low hp pool of some of them these would very quickly fall off in power at any later levels of the game. I confirmed the HP scaling was also not affected by increased CON modified on level-up increasing ability score.
3. It looks like sending summons in general (more so the spider) can be used to break combat encounters without much consequence. If you stealth your main party and send out the companion, you can attack a group of enemies without it pulling your main group into combat. While this isn't necessarily a problem on it's own, considering at early game at 32 health the spider can also live a few rounds, it can do some okay damage or even pick off an enemy before dying, then it can immediately be re-summoned and sent back to rinse and repeat this problem. Unsure if it was just the combat encounter I did this with or all encounters, but the enemies wouldn't heal up inbetween this so it could essentially be done indefinitely until the combat counter is cleared or significantly weakened to where it's not any kind of threat to the main party. While I wouldn't want to do this for the game since it kills a lot of the fun of combat encounters for me, it looks like currently this could be used to cheese any combat in the game if this isn't changed in some way. I've tested this with two different encounters, both times the encounters (normally neutral and not aggressive) were still not aggressive with the main group after re-sending in the companion, and any kills the companion got on it's missions did give experience to the entire group. Commando spider can likely clear all of early access by itself after level 3, and while I haven't tested it, it's highly likely that find familiar can accomplish the same thing, although taking much longer from the lower damage.
Thanks
