Expressing absolute discontent toward Haste Aura nerf

Board Meeting Transcript Excerpt
'So we add this interesting and flavorful skill gem to the game called "Tame Beast" and then we immediately turn around and nerf it because low level players struggle with speed... and we don't want low level players to move quickly, so of course the best course of action is to completely crap on the new skill. '

All trolling aside (and I went easy), I think this was a very bad and poorly thought-out change. Or maybe just a lazy one. The Tame Beast skill makes these absurdly hard to kill/manage rares appealing to have as a companion. I can fully understand the need to make the campaign more accessible without begrudgingly giving players Flame dash or Phasse run to solve the problem. However hitting end game content with a nerf simply to help players get to end game feels like it was a mistake. Like I have to believe that the intent was to only nerf the campaign and somehow maps were unintentionally affected. The patch notes kind of indicated only the campaign would be affected but I have thoughrougly confirmed that every haste aura pet is garbo now. Slow moving drakes, beetles and generally things that can barely keep up with player movement speed even with haste aura.

I run 2 companions and my haste aura pet is a Vile Vulture that I captured before the nerf. I have never seen a Haste aura Quad, Vile vulture, or Hulk once since the nerf. I spend a lot of time beast hunting and have seen some awesome combinations of affixes, which is why I leaned into 2 companions cuz I have a kind of roster now. I am very disappointed that I have no real way of upgrading my Vile vulture with a more interesting combination of affixes on a gap closing, high health, fast moving beast.


Suggestion: Either make the haste aura nerf only affect campaign so beast hunting in maps can be fun again; or normalize companion base movement speed so that stupid drakes and beetles can simply keep up with the player after being tamed... so that there are more viable options to use in general. Or remove beasts specifically from the affective nerf, giving the beast type monster category potential to actually be scary. The last thing I can think of to fix this while keeping the nerf is to allow companions movement speed to scale with players (rather than normalize the speed, you just give them whatever speed boosts the player has on their sheet)