The Beastmaster Update

The Beastmaster Update (0.4.2)

Welcome to the next major content update in Early Access! This one focuses on the weakest class, the Beastmaster. Additionally, I added some new features and QoL improvements based on community requests. Note that there is no ladder reset for this patch, and there won't be for 0.5 either.

A Note from the Developer (Dan):

This patch took about 2 weeks longer than I'd like. Apologies for the delay! The Beastmaster relied on some very old code. It took longer than planned for me to work through all of the bugs and other issues. Major thanks to the community on Discord for helping test all of this! The good news is that this patch also fixed a number of underlying issues with the game, and should make future content easier to develop

The next update, 0.5, will feature Uber Bosses and a new type of unique item! Please look forward to it.

The Beastmaster Rework

While fun and a niche favorite, the Beastmaster lacks the scaling power to really engage with some of Don't Die, Collect Loot's endgame systems. This patch focuses on fixing this through the following changes:

Lord of the Wilds (Beastmaster Passive): This passive, frankly, stunk. It's been entirely replaced by the Wilds meter. This meter scales as you summon or tame minions, and decays at one point per 3 seconds. It scales the damage you and your minions deal by default, but the passive tree is full of additional scaling options. This serves as your late game multiplicative scaling vector, so pay close attention to it!

Taming Tree: The Taming Tree has undergone an extensive rework. Many of Taming Swipe's nodes have been retuned to add more scaling and damage instead of just utility. Call of Erebus has been reworked to take significant advantage of Lord of the Wilds, and the later nodes in the tree offer a variety of scaling functions they did not used to. Some nodes, like the ones that only granted Minion Block/Evade penetration, have been retooled to provide more useful stats. The Cavalry Ultimate has also been buffed!

Hunting Tree: This tree has been almost entirely overhauled. Hunting Shuriken has been revamped to become an ailment scaling machine, inflicting Shock, Freeze, and Ignite aggressively. It also unlocks Bleed, a new special Physical ailment! Hunting Spear has received similar treatment, really leaning into its critical hit theming, along with scaling Shock in order to multiply the damage enemies take. The rest of the nodes have been reworked to focus on critical hits and Lord of the Wilds scaling, and some new nodes have been added as well

Avatars Tree: Most notably, Avatar of the Night has had almost every node reworked. More than half the nodes only provided utility instead of power, and this was not acceptable. The Lunar Cry path on the Avatar of the Hunt skill has also been reworked to actually be useful. Avatar of Vengeance did not scale enough, and has had a number of massive scaling improvements as well. Avatar of Inevitability has also been reworked. It no longer sacrifices your minions, but instead provides strong scaling bonuses to your Avatar skills

Minion Scaling: Minions were not scaling well enough. Some of this was caused by bugs, some of it by poor design decisions on my part. Additionally, the Stats panel was not showing minion damage properly, which has been fixed! Here are the notable fixes:

• Minions now inherit all damage stats from the player. They still have their own unique