Rulings on being your own beast-master companion.
It seems like if you take two levels into druid, and three into the old ranger-beastmaster, and then your beast dies, you can become your own companion by turning into a beast and binding to yourself.
Binding to a beast takes 8 hours, so you need recharge your wild shape with short rests so you can sustain your form for the full duration.
"If the beast dies, you can obtain another one by spending 8 hours magically bonding with another beast that isn’t hostile to you, either the same type of beast as before or a different one."
This feels like it works, but the buff bit feels a bit up to interpretation:
"Add your proficiency bonus to the beast’s AC, attack rolls, and damage rolls, as well as to any saving throws and skills it is proficient in. Its hit point maximum equals its normal maximum or four times your ranger level, whichever is higher."
If you are no longer a beast does it still apply? It would be highly situational if it only applied when you are a beast, maybe could build around it not sure.
The most interesting part of the text is:
"On your turn, you can verbally command the beast where to move (no action required by you). You can use your action to verbally command it to take the Attack, Dash, Disengage, or Help action. If you don’t issue a command, the beast takes the Dodge action."
This I feel like has two interpretations if the previous works:
1: RAW, you have to command yourself to move or take A/D/D/H otherwise you have to dodge. This is incredibly powerful, command yourself to move each turn and you get expertise in everything including saves, attack rolls, and AC.
2: A much more balanced funny and thematic interpretation is that you must command yourself to Attack, Dash, Disengage, or Help, otherwise you take the Dodge action, meaning you can either spend your action to command yourself to do an action which you can no longer do, or spend your action to dodge. So you get a ton of buffs, but you lose your entire action... Unless you take the monk's ability to dodge as a bonus action at the cost of a ki point, meaning you have a number of actions equal to your ki points.
Now RAW it looks like the first, incredibly powerful one is how it is written, but it also seems not how it was intended and if that is the ruling that means that with the normal beastmaster If you command your beast to move it does not dodge which kinda sucks and also makes the interaction likely too powerful to play in most settings, though people play coffee lock so that's a bit moot.
Do you think this works RAW? Are there other rules which might affect this?