I'm having the same problem. Beast form shots just appear on your face if you don't use the mouse to aim.
Hmm 2 years and this still hasn't been fixed....waddup that?
I don't really know for certain, but I'd speculate the reason it hasn't been fixed is that it's not a bug, nor broken. It's the intended functionality for beast shot.
Warning: Extremely minor
SPOILERS are in the next two paragraphs.
If you're swimming in a direction, beast shot fires in that direction. If you stand still, most shots sit in front of your face like a mine. I don't think all of them do that, either, if I'm remembering how it works if you eat a pistol-shrimp and fire while standing still. (Could be wrong, on that, I've only munched a pistol-shrimp a couple times, and I'm always kind of surprised when it fires) Also, IIRC, the way the firing and targeting works is different depending on whether you're free-floating in the water or clinging to a wall. Shooting while swimming makes the shot go the direction you're swimming, but shooting while wall-hugging makes the shot go towards your cursor. Sometimes, on complicated curvy walls the game doesn't quite handle that right either though, such as dropping the shot on your face like a mine because a spur of rock obstructs your line-of-sight to the cursor. That
could be a bug, but again it might be the way it was intentionally designed. Play around with it more, and you'll get a stronger understanding of the limitations.
As I said, I believe those limitations are intentional. The main shooty form in the game is energy form, which targets very well. Beast shot seems mainly designed so that you have a back-up blasting ability for areas where you need to be in the fastest current-resisting form. Like they didn't want to completely disable shooting for areas with rapid currents, but they also didn't want to duplicate or overshadow energy form. In that regards, Beast Shot is a compromise. It may also be viewed as the higher-skill option, because you have to control the aiming yourself, and manage your ammo, plus when it does connect it's usually for more damage.
Just a thought. Idle speculation on my part, really. Until I read this thread, I never even considered that it might be a bug or considered broken. I just assumed this was part of how they distinguish beast form and energy form mechanically.