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Soulbeast - too much to give up for it


ZhouX.8742

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In PvE this is fine as you're going for pure straight up damage.

In PvP, honestly I'm disappointed in the specialization overall. When you need to sacrifice so much defensives for next to nothing really (especially with the fix to maul's dmg) then you really lose the point of traiting into it in the 1st place, from a PvP perspective. Soulbeast at this moment provides nothing worth going into because of the sacrifices.

The way our traits are setup means we need to sacrifice either too much power output, or sacrifice too much defensive to even consider going into Soulbeast.

At this point right now, core ranger is better because of the ability to have trait synergy and druid as well offers such unique viability that it will probably still be the top spec in PvP far after PoF.

Pets: You will not top smokescale or even bristleback (maybe iboga in a condi spec) vs PoF pets. They are lackluster and aside from LULing with the bugged gazelle dmg then I don't see a point to even bother going into them.

My last issue is the testing period between the weekend of testing vs launch date:

You guys know what you're capable of doing in terms of releasing updates. I'm not sure the logic/mindset aside from being desperate to provide SOMETHING in regards to the beta weekend test for PoF specs a month prior to PoF release. This seemed like desperation on your end to provide something without realizing how buggy the class would be. I get it, there are going to be bugs, but my issue isn't necessarily with that it's with the window of opportunity to squash bugs before the release. We all know, and you as a dev team knew you would not be able to fulfill this end of the bargain in fixing the class. This is why you still have bugs and issues on the class that make it not even worth playing.

I AM glad you fixed Dolyak stance, but honestly stances on ranger (like many other things like traps as well and spirits) are terrible compared to warrior stances because the playstyle of ranger doesn't mesh well with stances at all like warrior meshes with stances. Warrior is by nature a bursty brawler class, the reward from stances in this regard are massive over going against ranger shouts / ranger survival skills. The only one , dolyak stance is even worth going into but again you sacrifice so many good utilities to even think of slotting it.

I'll still play ranger in PvE and some PvP of course but just outlining general frustrations with the idea of soulbeast, the lack of trait synergy , the idea of stances with regards to ranger style of play and the balance of ranger and it's direction in general.

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I agree for the most part. I just maxed Soulbeast and tried to do some random PvE content with it in HoT. Enemies I never had much difficulty with before just shredded me (since I am geared for condi damage and have little innate tankiness). The new merged abilities in no way made up for the lack of pet to tank some aggro, and even when I didn't die I actually did noticeably less damage than usual. If you try to keep merging and unmerging, it just results in the pet being constantly disoriented (and therefore still doing little damage).

This isn't even just a problem with Soulbeast itself. The ranger class fundamentally was not designed for frontline combat, yet almost all of a ranger's high-damage abilities require them to stay within melee range in order to output maximum damage. Traps? Need to be in melee range (or hope the enemy just runs into it and then stays there). Shortbow? Melee range, due to Poison Volley's shotgun effect. Axe main hand? Same story. Torch offhand? Melee range for Bonfire (skill #5). Spirits having such short range and being immobile also means you kind of need to place them near the front lines, where they are vulnerable to getting bursted down (especially in PvP).

That is without even getting into how clunky the Soulbeast mechanics themselves are. Being unable to swap pets (or even see the cooldown for it) while merged is annoying. Getting kicked out of the merged mode for getting on a mount or stepping into water is infuriating. Not having access to the pet's primary ability while merged just feels unnecessarily vindictive on the developers' part. If you are going to have an entire spec based around merging with your pet, why the hell would you then require players to keep unmerging (with a 10 second cooldown) just to use a single ability?!

I do think that Moa Stance actually has a lot of potential. It has a lot of synergy with some Soulbeast traits, has a low cooldown, and can allow rangers to boon stack in ways they couldn't before. Dolyak Stance has niche utility (especially in PvP). The other Stances are trash, and even when traited their effects don't last long enough on allies to be impactful (oh joy, 3 seconds of might generation, how generous! /s).

I also haven't tried out the dagger yet. Based purely off of tooltips, it might turn out to be a decent condi weapon. I don't see it being viable as a power weapon though, which is rather sad considering that if it was even decent it could easily have been the best ranger power weapon simply by default.

Long story short, the ranger's pet provides roughly 15-30% of overall damage during fights, and Soulbeast replaces it with practically nothing whatsoever. Being in merged form is both a dps decrease AND a survivability decrease, so there is almost no reason whatsoever to even use the new class mechanic at all (especially since many beast skills have also been nerfed to the point of uselessness while in merged form).

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Seems like it really boils down to what I've feared it would be just from watching a showcase vid from woodenpotato.

what do we sacrifice for merging with a pet

  • No pet dps
  • no pet HP to eat some projectiles / tank in pve
  • no pet F2
  • no access to traits that focus on the pet swap mechanic

what are the gains for merging with a pet?

  • 200-300 attribute points
  • dagger as an optional mainhand to - maybe - replace axe for condi builds
  • 2 pet skills as merged F skills which hit for a fraction of the dmg the pets hit with them
  • stances which are balanced around a grandmaster to make them worthwhile / able to compete with core ranger abilities (and even then only in organised groups)
  • an elite skill that is a carbon copy of the renegade's elite skill just with a couple of limitations on it that are not present on soulcleave summit

What are the problems?the attributes & F skills trade for the pet are a net dps loss for both power and condi buildsIt strips durability & sustain without compensating for it(a couple of tooltips and combat text are not properly showing that they actually workex: beastmastery natural healing works but is invisible in the combat log.ex2 invigorating bond works but is not updated on the tooltip of beast abilities while merged)

conclusionMerging has little to no short-term benefits and absolutely no long-term benefitsas such the soulbeast can't compete with a core ranger for both PvE and PvP

For the records. I'm not factoring in the fact that pets have no value on certain PvE world events because they refuse to attack your target. A bug / nonresponsive AI is no excuse to pick this specialization

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It easily competes with core ranger for pve group content, and it's fun enough in open pve aswell. So even with the flaws, it serves a purpose. It's a straight up upgrade from the condi ranger. Boring as that may be. And if it ends up just being a pve spec, I can live with it. All future elite specs can't all excell in all game modes.

That being said, they are way too harsh on effects normaly applying pets in beastmode (and with the Maul nerf, it seems like Anet is pulling it further in that direction (funny thing is, it harms power ranger the most, something that ranger is far from viable of running in pve, and it also harms the potential of a pvp GS build)), the stances are mostly lackluster, petswap in beastmode should be a thing, all the beastmode F1s that don't have an additional effect to damage are worthless in any situation. The list goes on.

They addressed just about none of its problem people gave feedback on aside from dagger tweaks.

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@Davi.4920 said:I believe the intent is to swap in and out of soul beast "mode" so to speak. So if you want a pet to tank, whats stopping you from doing that?

Nothing, but if you aren't going to routinely merge with your pet, why would you take Soulbeast over Druid or a core specialization in the first place? Some of the traits are nice, but I don't know that they are worth it on their own. It would be like if the Weaver's dual attacks were universally worse than the normal #3 skills. Sure, people could still take the spec and just ignore those abilities (by staying attuned to a single element or something), but at that point you still have to acknowledge that the elite spec is fundamentally broken if no one actually wants to use its unique mechanic.

A lot of people suggest swapping in and out of soul beast mode, but even that doesn't work well (particularly for condi builds) because of a long-standing pet glitch that all but eliminates ongoing condition damage from a pet once it has been removed from the game (via swap or merging). Combine this with most merged beast abilities having FAR less duration (and therefore damage) than the pet ones, and you are looking at a situation in which merging with (for example) the Fanged Iboga will allow you to apply an extra 3 stacks of confusion and 1 stack of torment for 3.25 seconds... at the cost of negating those same stacks of conditions with a 10.5 second duration that the pet has presumably already applied (or could apply in the same time period). This sort of thing is common and heavily contributes to Soulbeast's overall reduction in DPS.

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@Lazze.9870 said:It easily competes with core ranger for pve group content, and it's fun enough in open pve aswell. So even with the flaws, it serves a purpose. It's a straight up upgrade from the condi ranger. Boring as that may be. And if it ends up just being a pve spec, I can live with it. All future elite specs can't all excell in all game modes.

Ya but that's basically the antithesis of an "elite spec". Anet could have just given axe bleeds on the auto and we'd have gotten the same thing.

An entire elite spec that does nothing but send us back in time prior to the August 2017 balance patch.

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@Lazze.9870 said:It easily competes with core ranger for pve group content, and it's fun enough in open pve aswell. So even with the flaws, it serves a purpose. It's a straight up upgrade from the condi ranger. Boring as that may be. And if it ends up just being a pve spec, I can live with it. All future elite specs can't all excell in all game modes.

That being said, they are way too harsh on effects normaly applying pets in beastmode (and with the Maul nerf, it seems like Anet is pulling it further in that direction (funny thing is, it harms power ranger the most, something that ranger is far from viable of running in pve, and it also harms the potential of a pvp GS build)), the stances are mostly lackluster, petswap in beastmode should be a thing, all the beastmode F1s that don't have an additional effect to damage are worthless in any situation. The list goes on.

They addressed just about none of its problem people gave feedback on aside from dagger tweaks.

I agree, in PvE it is an upgrade of sorts - I think it's better in PvE because you have an option to run core or soulbeast if you'd like depending on your playstyle. In PvE it is perfectly fine. I guess where I'm coming from with this is strictly PvP/WvW which brings in factors of balance between 3 game modes.

I'll keep tweaking with builds and see some viability but it's really looking like Druid / Core easily overpowers SB in trait synergy, let alone functionality of SB itself.

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the soul beast needs a lot of work on it. in its current state it really does not work well. some of these pet skills we get just seem weak for the long cooldown you get for them. the lack of using a pets special skill kind of kills the diversity in pets since the only difference between the pets is your F3 and some stat points gained in the stance. while i understand not swapping pets in beast mode as well your already merged with a pet a 10 second cooldown seems a bit long.

The issue i find is it is trying hard to encourage people using pets and soul beast at the same time. but the form for soul beast last infinite time .but when you look at it there is no reason to use it when everything is cooling down. they could of done something like death shroud where it maybe changes all your weapon set to the 4 pet attacks and the F3 pet attack on a skill bar when in soul beast using the pets hp giving the user a bigger stat boost but not lasting infinite time and when hp is zero of pet which could go down the longer soul beast is on you revert back and then a longer cooldown and maybe the pet being on low hp would be fine in this situation and would give the ranger more durability, more skill usage and the pets themselves would have more uniqueness again due to the pets auto attack and special attack being taken into consideration . another route could be removing pets in general to the soul beast and just picking the pet you want to have the skills from and having them accessible in the F buttons with 1 to swap (i know i said earlier it would not make sense earlier but i guess they could show a animation and such) . When you compare it to other classes they have completely different styles for their class skills so why does soul beast have to pretty much share this and not be something unique in itself?

Finally we got traits and first the good things. they did change some of these already like Ambidexterity working with the main hand dagger which i was not sure it was going to at first so i was glad to see that, and having some traits like Pack Alpha giving a small stat boost and such. but then others i feel they could of done a bit more with. Pack Alpha should have a cutdown in CD of pets skills or at least boost their damage or something in Soul Beast mode, Loud Whistle could maybe cut down cooldown of Soul Beast or maybe even allow swapping in Soul Beast. Leader Of The Pack while im liking sharing the stances with allies i feel 50% reduction seems like quite a penalty for such support. maybe a 25% reduction?. Zephyr's Speed could work on the player when they go into Soul Beast, While not trait related some skills do not work too mainly Guard and Search and Rescue but i assume they are a bug as the rest of the shouts seem to affect the player in a different way

I really like the concept of this class and i do like the dagger skills and it has some great potential to be a condition user or a more tanky supportive class but it just needs some improvements for me to see that.

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I played the pof story with soulbeast and must say, that soulbeast ist useful, but only if you change a few second into beastmode to activate and then change back.This is just another clunky avatar form. The second for ranger -.-While druid avatar is kicked out after a few seconds, the ranger avatar is permanent, but costs tank and dmg (at least in pve). I would like to see something cool for being in beastmode, not just switch in and out. It seems to me, that everything (traits, petskills, small melting bonus) is just for enter beastmode and leave it after casting all three beastmode skills. This is NOT the petless class that half of rangers wanted.

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