I hope you guys realize humans have been apex predators since at least the stone age.
People arguing that you can't kill bears with bows and arrows have completely lost the plot.
By the level of technology depicted in Nave, humans were hunting & killing apex predators en masse, literally just for sport. Many Bronze Age kings are depicted doing just this, often with lances, but also bows etc... By the Roman period the colosseum would routinely be filled with exotic apex predators to be fought & killed for the enjoyment of onlookers. Lions that once roamed much of Europe & Asia are extinct into the iron age.
None of this should matter since this is, after all, a game... but wow, have you guys shown how ignorant you are using these nonsensical arguments just to further your own bias about a video game. The game should be balanced, regardless of whatever imaginary buffoonery you want to fantasize regarding predators in the wild and early humanity. Besides just being dead wrong, it has nothing to do with whether or not the PvP is balanced lmao
If you want to fantasize about man-killing monsters, you have to leave it in fantasy; the game can also feature monsters/mythical beasts of course... But in the real world, Homo Sapiens Sapiens have never had major issues culling apex predators. On the contrary, the list of large fauna likely to have gone extinct due to human intervention is long... And this, long before the advent of gunpowder.
I do think it's worth noting that humans hunted mammoths to extinction with stone age technology. And that elephants that were domesticated and turned to human use were worth many soldiers / one of the most feared weapons of the ancient battlefield. So there is also considerable evidence that powerful animals controlled by humans on the battlefield are FAR more deadly than wild animals hunted in the wild.
That being said you're precisely right. It isn't about realism. It's about fun.
Beast masters in most games are a two part build where the skills of the pet compliment the player character and the skills of the player character compliment the pet. They aren't that much more powerful than any other build and definitely a well done beastmaster class is never just a set and forget autowin build the way a beastmaster in MO2 is.
At this point I'm kind of convinced if I was running SV I'd actually give in to the demands for rezzable pets (for a price of course, and the currency used to do it would come from tamers/dominators) but I'd nerf the HELL out of their base damage and replace it all with neat skills that set things up for the owner to work with the pet to make the kill.
For instance I might make wolves give a debuff that increases physical damage on the target meaning that they work well in conjunction with a fighter ally but don't do much on their own.
And your new rezzable companions would only be things like wolves, hunter lizards, cougars, maybe a nerfed version of black bears etc. But they'd still need 100 points to control at level 125.
The big pets can stay in and still be terrifying, but I'd make them require a more expensive food that has you hemorrhaging gold the entire time they're out and remove animal care from the game entirely so you have to feed their slow leveling butts massive quantities of this food to get them from young to a dangerous level.
Like I would LOVE to see ridable campadons and would LOVE to see them be appropriately terrifying. And I'd love to only see them used in combat on rare occasions.
