[PvE] Things I would like to improve for Ranger and Soulbeast on next balance patches.

They are pretty minor things that mostly focus on separating what the condi and power archetypes of the spec do:

• Poison Master and its pet swap component is completely useless for soulbeast, not being able to swap pets without suffering major drawbacks. Here again many ideas: make it poison duration, make soulbeasts able to swap pet while merged, make the merge bonus linger when separating and swapping and so on.
• Taste for Danger is quite a weak conversion trait. The fact ranger gets very few condition duration traits (none outside Oppressive Superiority that current condition builds won't take) just magnifies the situation and latest rune revamp has uneven condition duration distributions for most rune sets, not quite fixing this. There's also the fact rangers have access to at least three main conditions (bleeds, poison, burning). Ideas here chain together with previous points and distributing traits better.
• Twice as Vicious as a trait only has synergy with a single commonly used skill on condition soulbeasts (Shortbow 5), that along the fact Leader of the Pack and Oppressive Superiority directly compete with each other kills a lot of the diversity we could see for condition builds. Many solutions to this have been posted (separating trait effects better, moving them around,e etc).

There are many more things like updating old mechanics like Opening Strike or unsplitting certain weapon skills like Splitblade but I think we can slowly tackle and polish everything.

I couldn’t agree more with this! You summarized all the small inherent problems with condition Soulbeast in this post. Runes are indeed very problematic for capping right now, as none of the runes really supports everything you need from them on cSlb. Similarly for traits. Oppressive Superiority competing with Leader of the Pack puts you in a unfavorable position. If they moved some things around for a bit, both power and condi could get a trait that directly supports their respective gameplay and both would still get a hybrid trait. If they then buffed Taste of Danger, Ranger finally could get some much needed duration from buildcraft and not rely on overshooting one or undercapping all conditions. As for poison master, maybe make it so that while merged your weaponswap procs it.Opening strike is also really feelsbadman for power soulbeast, as all the minor traits in marksman only really give you this one-off thing. IMO they could merge adept and master minors, move grandmaster minor to master and make the refresh of opening strike on fury the grandmaster minor and create a new grandmaster mayor in its place.

• Poison Master and its pet swap component is completely useless for soulbeast, not being able to swap pets without suffering major drawbacks. Here again many ideas: make it poison duration, make soulbeasts able to swap pet while merged, make the merge bonus linger

It does increases poison damage. Not sure how the pet swap function will work while pet merged(won't it indirectly effect swapping merged beast abilities and new key for swap?). Giving the trait a way to proc while merged sounds promising(there are few traits that requires pet swap to proc aside Poison Master).

@""Bramymond.7689"Sorry for derailing but mind sharing/send me your setup? Curently, I'm using:

Edit : http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vNAQNAofVnE8Cl8i1sAerAs8iFDBLv62dDvMBgRXDopDEsqalI1jA-jBSFQB+6JAAgDBwIVC2rTAQ703sh9Haoyv+p+z6AEgxWsF7YDM2xO2xO2x2AE7YH7YH7YH7YH7YLFAMrBA-e

@Eramonster.2718 said:

• Poison Master and its pet swap component is completely useless for soulbeast, not being able to swap pets without suffering major drawbacks. Here again many ideas: make it poison duration, make soulbeasts able to swap pet while merged, make the merge bonus linger

According to snowcrows.com the best rune is Lich. However I really dislike that set, as it feels very unsatisfying to me to go undercapped. Also the little jagged horror really annoys me. Other then that the Afflicted set you use is the next best choice, followed by nightmare, all within a fraction of a % difference from each other. Afflicted and Krait are best on Sb/Sb, however both do decent on D/T aswell.I‘m trying a bunch of different stuff out right now, but none really convince me.Lich just isn't really „ranger“, Afflicted has a very weak T6 but is kinda ok, Krait I overall like, but it’s way too much bleed now with 50% up from 45% before, which makes it awkward to try and add extra poison or burn. So you end up with earth/geo sigils.Nightmare is an old trusted rune of mine, but the T6 is only really good on necro or mirage and the fear duration is a wasted slot for cSlb.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vNEQNAV4fnE8Cl8i1sAerAs8iFDBrpDEsqa5V3ub4lJAM6aAjIO-jBSAQBeZ/hAqbgCXEApdEAio6P3UJYIV+BgHAApAWUZF-e

This is what I run at the moment.Sadly no infusions. Got to admit though, they really help to round the numbers out. Your setup is likely better than mine, but the deathnova is really meh.

Among the stuff I could think of that needs polishing for PvE atm:• Revamp the current Longbow skills to be more interactive, unlike the current. (As a staple weapon for ranger class, I think this deserve such attention like changes made to guardian's staff)• Lower after cast time for sword skills. (For smoother gameplay and less clunky animation. Just me or Sword's auto attack feels like bashing the enemy using a club :lol:)• More reliable hit-on-target for sword#2 recast and GS#5. (Need a miracle for this 2 skill to hit moving targets atm)• More responsive pet, mainly movement skills and aftercast. (More of a PvP thing but still...)

@Bramymond.7689Still thinking for improvement as well :smile: lemme know or send me an ingame mail of any good setups you come across. You can use WvW infusions if it's just for raids. Did test out Lich myself but turned it down. I wasn't able to pull a better dps with it(might be just me, since I was using a different set of sigils compared to SC and I don't trust minnions/pets).

Edit : • Invisible wall obstructions in WvW.

@Eramonster.2718 said:Among the stuff I could think of that needs polishing for PvE atm:• Revamp the current Longbow skills to be more interactive, unlike the current. (As a staple weapon for ranger class, I think this deserve such attention like changes made to guardian's staff)• Lower after cast time for sword skills. (For smoother gameplay and less clunky animation. Just me or Sword's auto attack feels like bashing the enemy using a club :lol:)• More reliable hit-on-target for sword#2 recast and GS#5. (Need a miracle for this 2 skill to hit moving targets atm)• More responsive pet, mainly movement skills and aftercast. (More of a PvP thing but still...)

• Would love to keep longbow's identity though, machinegun 2 can't go away eheh.
• Sword 2 is more about the utility of moving around, so idk what they could do in hit reliability. I think that's the same as saying sword 3 has to change (another utility). I also pvp so i appreciate these 2 skills as they are right now xD
• As to pets, i would love more pets to be brought up to the level of smokescale, as opposed to nerfing down this pet and others such as iboga. Nerfing the few decent pets we have does not solve the issue at all, if the others became better build variety would increase (looking at you Sand Lion, for instance xD) But i absolutely agree with what you say overall!

Another way to buff cSlb aswell is re-evaluate the bonus merging gives you. Currently it´s 200 Condition.Dmg and 100 Precision. If instead of the Precision you´d get Expertise, that would translate to 6,67% condition-duration, which already would help immensely with capping.

@Bramymond.7689 said:Another way to buff cSlb aswell is re-evaluate the bonus merging gives you. Currently it´s 200 Condition.Dmg and 100 Precision. If instead of the Precision you´d get Expertise, that would translate to 6,67% condition-duration, which already would help immensely with capping.

It would not be a meaningful improvement imo, since your main source of damage is bleeding and you tie some of it to a bleed on crit trait.

@"Lunateric.3708" said:

• Twice as Vicious as a trait only has synergy with a single commonly used skill on condition soulbeasts (Shortbow 5), that along the fact Leader of the Pack and Oppressive Superiority directly compete with each other kills a lot of the diversity we could see for condition builds. Many solutions to this have been posted (separating trait effects better, moving them around,e etc).

What I find funny about this is that both the meta power and condi dps sb builds use vulture stance and one wolf pack although the power build uses oppressive superiority while condi uses leader of the pack. It feels weird that there is no other power utility that could replace not traited poison stance with life steal for power SB. Meanwhile, OWP, at least in the previous benchmark was better than entangle condi builds:

OWP is only worth ~2.6% of the damage of the old meta build. This got me thinking, how is entangle not better than owp? At first, I thought it was vulture stance synergy due to owp having a 1/4 strike delay and vulture stance having a 1/4 sec ICD. However, the OWP proc does NOT proc vulture stance although the second strike does count as a crit that can proc bleed on crit. So when it comes to selfish reasons, OWP is 2.6% of the DPS of condi builds and bonus bleed on crit procs. Meanwhile entangle is 5 stacks of 16 sec bleeds with both elites on a 60 second CD. I'll have to test this out but it seems like it could be worth it.

Furthermore, if entangle (and maybe flame trap) was taken over stances, oppressive superiority would be better than leader of the pack. That 10% has to amount for something on both the power and condi side. Like 15% of the old meta build's damage was still power. 10% increase to that is like a bonus 1.5% of the total damage which is not bad compared to the 2.6% of OWP pack. I realize the math on this is bad but I'm just doing napkin math here. Then the real bonus of 10% condition duration with the rune rework kicks in. Especially if Iboga is going to be meta for D/T+SB, 10% condi duration...

I need to farm TA for nightmare runes to try some stuff out. There might be more build diversity here than I initially thought.