Ranger Conclave: Beast Master 5e

Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold

The Beast Master ranger subclass was an infamously terrible ranger subclass that set up this tag team fantasy of warrior and beast fighting in tandem, claw and sword. Mechanically, the main issue with it was how it failed to meaningfully empower you, instead often asking you waste your actions early giving your beast an opportunity to attack (which nearly always was worse than your normal attack), and then scaling with extra attack to make one normal attack, and one worse attack with your beast.

On top of that, when your beast died (which it would frequently), you’d have to spend eight hours to get it back, which is a massive deal. Some adventures would see the beast die in the first of three or four encounters, and now your entire subclass was offline. It was… bad. Quite bad. It promised turning you into a pack leader, and felt more like you were an incompetent trainer who couldn’t ever get best in show.

Wizards saw these problems and as opposed to printing a revised option errata in future PHBs and designating a new, official, “patched” beast master ranger, they made an “optional” new feature in a supplemental book that majorly changed how the option played for the better. I’m not a big fan of this decision, but the newer version definitely solves a lot of the problems PHB Beast Master ranger has.

3rd Level: Primal Companion

Primal Companion does a lot to improve on its predecessor, Ranger’s Companion, namely by offering the action command to be made with a bonus action in place of a full action while stilling allowing you to forgo one of your own attacks to give it an attack action command if you want your bonus action for something else. This design is carried over to the Drakewarden, which is almost a reskinned version of this feature that comes with another 3rd level feature in place of getting the flexibility of choosing between a beast of the land, sea, or sky each with its own upside to trade off for your inability to get any beast ability from a CR ¼ or lower beast.
Land beasts get a climb speed and charge which deals some bonus damage and can knock a creature hit prone after moving 20 feet. Sea beasts get a swim speed, darkvision, and binding strike, which grapples on hit, and sky beasts are a bit smaller, have less HP, but have a 60 ft. fly speed and the flyby trait.
Being able to still make two attacks and command your beast to make a third is big game. On top of that, you get the option to revive your beast to full HP over a minute for a single 1st level or higher spell slot, which lets the 12-15 starting HP not feel nearly as punishing to play with.
This solves fairly cleanly the two main problems presented in Ranger’s Companion: action economy and death. Forgoing pick any beast does take away from the freedom tabletop RPGs tend to feel like they can offer over other forms of games, which is a bummer, and I feel like you could keep most of the base Ranger’s Companion flexibility with a few quality of life updates and achieve a similar result. As is, though, a companion you can readily get back over and over that gives you bonus action attacks, diverse speeds, and flexibility between environments is excellent.

7th Level: Exceptional Training

Exceptional Training didn’t get any revisions, which is baffling to me. Primal Companion gives you full bonus action control over your beast; you can already use your bonus action to command it to dash, disengage, or help. You don’t need this feature to do that with Primal Companion. All this offers is magical weapons for your beasts, and that isn’t a 7th level feature I can ever get excited about. Before, when your beast literally couldn’t be given anything to do without you spending actions to do it, this was a meaningful upgrade. With Primal Companion, there needs to be more here, because as is, this is almost meaningless text.

11th Level: Bestial Fury

Bestial Fury with the updated Primal Companion is pretty sweet, though. While Exceptional Training didn’t get any improvements from the upgrade, Bestial Fury takes what was three attacks a round (one from you, two from your beast) and upgrades it to four (two from you, two from your beast). If you still want your bonus action, you can still just take the three attacks and set up a Hunter's Mark or fire off a Cordon of Arrows should you desire, which is gravy. An extra attack is big game, and needed for scaling towards the upper tiers. Losing out on the multiattack options is a bit sad, but ultimately not a huge deal based on the d8+PB +2 slashing damage each hit is dealing.

15th Level: Share Spells

Share Spells has so much potential, but the reality of it Share Spells is there just aren’t a lot of spells you’re readily going to be casting on yourself you can get that excited about to share with your companion. If it shared any spell effects, like Hunter’s Mark, we’d have a different conversation here, but your options are Barkskin, Darkvision, Freedom of Movement, Longstrider, Protection from Energy, Protection from Poison, and Stoneskin, none of which I’m thrilled to get the benefits on both me and my animal buddy.
If you’re shooting with a bow, and the beast is engaging the frontline, you can already cast most of these effects on them and get the bulk of the effectiveness. If you’re both up in the thick of it it gets marginally better, but I still can’t get particularly excited for this effect. Guardian of Nature is a bit of a standout option, as it has a mode that adds a d6 damage to melee weapon attacks, which works with your beast, but adding a d6 two your beasts attacks in addition to your own for a minute with a 4th level spell slot that eats your bonus action is a higher cost than it may initially seem, especially given that you’ll often want that concentration getting you another animal companion with Summon Beast.

All Together

Primal Companion does the majority of the heavy lifting for this subclass as you’d expect, with Beastial Fury at 11th level coming in with your other major upgrade. Getting access to 4th level spells for access to a 2nd multi-attacking companion through Summon Beast can lead to the beast master fantasy flourishing, getting to make six attacks a round between you and your two summoned allies. Summoned based characters are hard to screw up when you’re getting action advantage like this, and even with Exceptional Training being a somewhat dud of a feature, the bulk of the subclass works much better now than before, and can be a perfectly fine route to take a ranger who wants to run around with a wolf friend. I think a fully revised subclass would have been far preferable, and again, it should have been in a revised PHB, but this is a fine enough patch that I can’t be that upset.

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Ranger 5e