Beastlord as a concept is something that Rangers should have been able to do. The implementation of the class was dumb. They summoned a pet instead of going out into the wilds and taming one, and then they magically buffed up the animal such that it would do random magic attacks. Like, what? It makes no sense. A beastlord is not supposed to be He-Man or She-Ra, as fun and pretty as those characters and their animated cartoon transformations are.
The other random "unique" buffs the class got (in order to make them relevant for Raids) also made no sense. EQ designers had already even tried to do that with Rangers in Velious to make them relevant - a stackable attack buff to justify "needing" at least 1 of the class to be present for min/max purposes at a raid. Pay no mind that someone could just cast these buffs and then switch over to a different character...an inherent design flaw in having long-duration buffs with no downside in a game.
The class was basically a big hand-out for the casual player base, and took away from some of the uniqueness of the Mage class. Want a super powerful pet, with very efficient pet heals, some other general healing capability, and some slows, and some buffs, and SoW, and melee capability too? Okay, now you've got it! Pretty much every easy-to-use mechanic in the game, rolled into one class.
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