Slower and less efficient than a mage, especially since you're adopting the mage play style and losing a lot of your dps to do so. Beasts where not designed to sit back and cast while the pet tanks. Beasts where designed to fight along side the warder. Your way works that's for sure. But you are playing your beast like a mage. Get a staff with staff block aas and get your butt in there and tank with a healer merc. Unless you're poorly geared or have low aa you should be able to top a caster merc on balanced. The thread us what class solo/molo the best and frankly beasts are not even top 5 unless geared to the teeth with a boatload of aas.
Beast is not top 5? you're flat out wrong there and have no clue what your talking about. And i can play my Beast ( the correct way ) as you say it by tanking alongside my pet, but in most situations where i can pull a single mob, its just easier to let merc do most of dps and me play healer\slower\dps instead Seriously if you don't play a bst than dont just assume we suck at solo.
Same with every class. You won't be moloing RoF loot dropping mobs without a butt load of AAs and up to date gear on your mage, because while pet AAs allow you to tank, they don't allow you to DPS, and your healer merc IS going to run oom against RoF loot dropping mobs with their 6.5 million+ hps eons before you're able to take it down with pet DPS alone. Moloing loot dropping mobs is a challenge no matter the class, and requires a character geared to the teeth and with tons of AAs.
In realty it boils down to the individuals. Most classes can molo very effectivly, if you know your limitations and your strenghts.Most folk tend to play to their strenghts obviously so they think that they can "do it better" . Figure out what you like to play and learn how. Experiment , its fun.
Yeah, i get it. You REALLY like your class... Unfortunately what i said is still true. Beast solo/molo leaves a lot to be desired until you have a ton of AA. Other classes can do very well with much less. Mages for example can molo/solo more content than beasts ever could with lesser gear and far less AA than it takes a beastlord.
Which ones? There are named mobs in RoF that are so gimpy my level 95 SK is able to farm them. Look up Banescale Serpent and Pincerpest. Both mobs are about the same difficulty as a trash mob with higher hps. Besides which, the difference between group gear and raid gear today is less than 20k mana - out of a 90k mana pool. The difference between 4k AA and 8K is even less provided you aren't spending your AAs on Pottery Mastery. A player with full group gear + 4k AA is already well geared by today's standards. Going up further doesn't make a whole lot of difference for classes that use their spells instead of their fists, and this has been the case in EQ for ages.
I for one can attest to how godlike beastlords are, their pets are virtually identical to mages. Mages are suprisingly behind the powercurve due to this and need boosts so that we re-attain our lead in pet power over mighty beastlords whom are LITERALLY neck and neck with mage pets in power.
Mages can solo big things. However when exp gained comes into question on a pure killing scale we are not even top 5. A lot of classes kill for a longer period then us because of our mana pool limitations. We are the kings of named killing, but not solo.
Can't comment on just the pets, but when looking at the parses I have seen, BST and mages are doing quite well in 4 to 6 minutes parses..
I dunno. I see mages killing a lot of stuff. I see necros killing a lot of stuff. Beastlords may be able to do it, but they definitely don't seem to be the 'flavor of the month.' I don't see beastlords moloing often at all
Heard that pets are getting nerfed some in the future due to some guilds preferring to use pets as tanks over PCs, lol. Enjoy your BST bashing while you can!