Wolf kinship is, in most cases, an almost ridiculously stronger and more dangerous mob than beast call makes.

Having seen that just the autoassist round from wolf kinship at the right time the moment it's called. Four MANGLES on a resisting rager is nothing to sneeze at.

Still, unless you intended beastmasters to have as little versatility as they have now, I think it would go a long way toward making them more interesting. We'll probably disagree on the usefulness of wasps after you made it far easier to save against, but bears are just a free ticket to having another vulnerability, serpentkin is hard to use and takes quite a bit of experimentation on non-mobs in a variety of terrain to justify the 2 round lag and easy to resist when almost anything else will be more useful especially against foes with damage reduction.

And at any rate, there's very little difference in the kinds of people beastcall would tear up and wolf kinship can tear up. If you can tank one you can probably tank the other including the autoassist round, I can't really think of any situation you'd want wolf kinship over the beastcall, and trying to set it up so you can use both is just a one-way ticket to flee;q return in the lag from either.

Bard Repertoire Clarifications:
http://forums.carrionfields.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=6&topic_id=23735&mesg_id=23735&page=

>Having seen that just the autoassist round from wolf kinship
>at the right time the moment it's called. Four MANGLES on a
>resisting rager is nothing to sneeze at.
>
>Still, unless you intended beastmasters to have as little
>versatility as they have now, I think it would go a long way
>toward making them more interesting. We'll probably disagree
>on the usefulness of wasps after you made it far easier to
>save against,

Pretty sure that didn't change.

>And at any rate, there's very little difference in the kinds
>of people beastcall would tear up and wolf kinship can tear
>up.

I really don't agree with that.

>If you can tank one you can probably tank the other
>including the autoassist round, I can't really think of any
>situation you'd want wolf kinship over the beastcall, and
>trying to set it up so you can use both is just a one-way
>ticket to flee;q return in the lag from either.

You can't think of any situation in which you'd want a skill that summons a mob that has more hit points and often does over twice the damage? Seriously? Beast call mostly ends up being a poor man's tank -- wolf kinship is a skill I've seen blow through people in 1-2 rounds on a good day.

>You can't think of any situation in which you'd want a skill that >summons a mob that has more hit points and often does over twice the >damage? Seriously? Beast call mostly ends up being a poor man's tank >-- wolf kinship is a skill I've seen blow through people in 1-2 rounds >on a good day.

The hitpoints don't matter if they aren't forced to kill it or word.

In my experience the people you really want/need to use it on, short of some clever timing, can sneeze at it and ignore it, or kill it very quickly. This usually amounts to someone with a large pile of damage reduction or a large pile of damroll, or both, if they didn't have either you usually didn't need to use it unless you wanted to lose your kill.

Hence it always struck me as extremely odd that you had to flee to use this as a tank in PK. It's very nice if there's one specific extremely tough mob you need to kill, and it outmelees most offense shifter forms, but doesn't do anything special and you can't order it to attack for you like the Outlanders can.

In short, beastmasters are sorely lacking in versatility and I'd trade some of their immense power for more options in my experience, which was also why I suggested letting them order the bears to rake like the shifter/druid forms, since they wouldn't do any damage or tank any better and it'd still lag the beastmaster.

Bard Repertoire Clarifications:
http://forums.carrionfields.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=6&topic_id=23735&mesg_id=23735&page=

And I would still like serpentcall to not be random. Let the various strikes be selectable.