Suggestions for Changes to Beast Companions

[(PSN)Gameguy24]

After seeing the stat sheet of the 20 Companions in the last Dev Stream, I got to thinking about what sorts of changes might help the Kubrow and Kavat Companions with their popularity and usability. I'm not going to weigh in on the Beast vs. Machines debate, but I will point out a few ways in which I think a lot of people can agree that Beasts are gimped. Lastly, I know DE made vague mention of pet changes they have planned. These are just some suggestions that I thought I'd share for people to weigh in on and for DE to maybe see. I also apologise if some of these thoughts have been brought up by someone else. I don't read the forums very often.

The first issue they have is slotting. Beasts have the unique situation of equipping damage, survivability, and utility mods all in the same place. This causes a couple of problems:

• Expensive builds: I have a Raksa Kubrow that uses all fully ranked mods, and the sum total of all the survival and damage mods requires all 10 of his slots to be Polarized and has 0 points left over. It's a very inflexible build.
• Forma sink: While not a problem in and of itself, I just want to point out that there are a lot of resources going in to maximising Beasts and they're not really returning that investment the way they could be.
• "Mandatory Mods": Having both the damage and survivability mods going in the same place really decreases potential for variety in use of Precepts and other utilites.

My proposed fix for these issues is to give the Beasts a weapon. I think it would be as simple as splitting these companions into two pieces, the creature and a moddable pair of claws. In my eyes, this would present a number of opportunities and solutions:

• This would bring Beasts in line with Sentinels, giving us a moddable creature (10 slots) and weapon (8 slots).
• Moving damage/status/crit related mods onto the Claws weapon would allow more space on the animal for utility mods.
• With a distinct weapon, it would be a good opportunity to create Beast versions of the 11 drain and 7 drain element mods. The existence of these serve a two-fold purpose:
  • Creating them would breathe new life into the Beast mod farm and/or provide a good mod pack for a future event.
  • The ability to do elemental damage would allow Beasts to be geared towards specific factions or enemy types like all other Machines and weapons are able to.

The separation of the claws as a weapon would help to alleviate Beasts' damage fall off at high level and against certain enemies, but that's not quite all they need. As it stands, all Beasts do only Slash damage for a physical type. While there is a Mod Set that emphasises Slash, and Slash procs are very powerful, it still means that Beasts are ultimately geared towards Flesh, especially without Elements as they are now. I'll admit that this makes sense from a physical standpoint, but it's not really in keeping with Warframe's idea of customization. And while, yes, it is impossible to alter the physical damage types on weapons, both Frames and Sentinels have the luxury of picking the appropriate one for a situation. What I propose is that Beasts be given a slot, like a Stance or Aura, but this one wouldn't have ranks or increase mod capacity. I'll call it a Paradigm for this explanation, and here's how I envision it working:

• Upon creation of your first Beast, you are given the Slash Paradigm and it is equipped automatically.
• One Paradigm must be equipped at all times.
• What this does is convert all of the base damage (for example, 304 on a Raksa) into Slash.
• This would allow all the currently extant stats to remain the same, as if the Beast had just been created.
• Through some sort of means, other Paradigms would be acquired. Just as a simple example, I envision Impact, Puncture, and Balance.
• Each Paradigm would convert 100% of the Companion's damage into the respective type; with the Balance Paradigm converting 33% into each of the 3 Physical damage types.
• It might even be nice to give them some sort of visual armor pieces added to the feet to represent the damage types. Drills for Puncture, Sparring gear for Impact; or something of the like.

Ultimately, I think the difference between Sentinels and Beasts (or at least the intended difference) is that Sentinels fight a lot like another gun at your side, whereas the Beast Companions are meant to pick 1 or 2 targets and obliterate them with ease. At least, that seems to be the idea behind them having so much more base damage. Right now though, I'm just not sure they're doing that, and these are just a few ideas I had that might help bring them back into relevance. Let me know your thoughts.